Strategies to Manage An Active Mind at Night

How to Manage An Active Mind at Night

By Michelle Jonelis, MD

(Last updated 4/20/23)

Even when you do all the right things to optimize your sleep, there will still be times when you find you cannot fall asleep or cannot get back to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night. When this happens, remind yourself that you cannot control when sleep comes or how much total sleep time you get on a given night. All you can control is whether you spend your time awake in a state of stress (hyperarousal) or in a calm, relaxed state. If you spend the night in a state of stress, whether you are asleep or awake, you will likely feel poorly the next day. If you can, instead, figure out a way to pass the time in a relaxing, pleasant manner, you will find you actually feel pretty good the following day, regardless of how much time you actually spent asleep. Below is a list of strategies that can be helpful in allowing you to achieve a restful state at night and reduce hyperarousal.

Review the list of techniques below and choose a few which you think might work for you. Apart from the “get out of bed” technique, the concept behind the other techniques is to “change the channel” on your brain away from the unwanted thought pattern to a more calming thought pattern. Do not think of these as techniques to put you to sleep, rather as a way to reduce nighttime hyperarousal due to anxiety. When your brain is in a more relaxed, distracted state it will often end up eventually falling asleep. Practice each technique once or twice during the day or just before bed so you are ready to use it when the moment arises. It usually takes a bit of practice to make a given technique work for you, so don’t necessarily abandon it if it doesn’t work immediately. With any of these techniques you will find that you eventually lose focus and fall back into the initial or a new unproductive thought pattern. This wandering of thoughts is normal and expected and not a sign of failure. In fact, it may mean that your mind drifted back to sleep for a moment. Simply redirect your thoughts to whatever technique you were using and try again. Eventually you will wake up, realizing that you did, indeed fall back to sleep.

Notice what is missing from this list: your phone. While browsing on your phone may feel calming and distracting during the night, the light from the phone suppresses melatonin and the content and scrolling eye movements are overly stimulating to the brain. Listening to audio content on your phone can be useful for some people (such as bedtime stories through Calm and other apps), but try to be as quick and direct as possible when accessing audio content and make sure your screen is as dim and warm-tinted as possible.

Techniques to stop unwanted thought patterns at night:

• GET OUT OF BED. This most commonly recommended method to stop unwanted thoughts in their tracks when they occur. If you find you are feeling anxious in the bed and feel that you will be unable to sleep, get out of the bed, go to another room and do something distracting for 30–60 minutes such as reading a good book, writing in a journal, planning a grocery list or meals for the week, taking care of monotonous chores (such as laundry or dishes). If a particular task you can accomplish at home is on your mind, it is ok to go ahead and work on that task. When you start to feel sleepy again (or in 60 minutes, whichever comes first), return to the bed. (Some people end up deciding that sleeping in 2 stretches, separated by 60–120 minutes during which they are fully awake and productive, actually works best for them as a primary sleep pattern. This pattern is called “biphasic” sleep and is how Europeans slept in medieval times: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783).
• RE-LIVE AN ENJOYABLE MOMENT FROM YOUR DAY. Remember and re-live a happy moment from your day. Go back to that moment and re-imagine it in as vivid detail as possible, paying attention in particular to the positive emotion you felt during the experience. Some examples: the moment you took a bite of a delicious meal or dessert; the moment your significant other arrived at home after work; the moment when you were petting your dog on the couch. Take yourself back to that moment and relish it.
• COGNITIVE SWITCHING. In this technique you will think intensely about unrelated things in fairly rapid sequence, causing your brain to constantly shift what it is doing, distracting it from your unwanted thought pattern and allowing it to relax. There are many different methods to accomplish cognitive switching, each involves focusing on a particular item for 2–30 seconds, imagining it during that time period in as vivid detail as possible, then switching to the next item. Try going through the alphabet from A to Z, thinking about an object that starts with each letter (such as a juicy red apple, a bumble bee, a car, etc.); try thinking of places you have visited in the past; pretend you are walking through an imaginary zoo, visiting each type of animal. (There is also a smartphone app called “MySleepButton” which can teach you this technique.)
• TRY TO STAY AWAKE. Keep your eyes wide open and tell yourself “I’m going to stay awake, do not sleep”. Another version of this is to focus on following your consciousness as long as possible, trying to follow it into sleep.
• LOCK UP YOUR WORRIES. In your mind, imagine a large, old fashioned trunk or treasure chest with a lock. Unlock the trunk, open the top, and put your worries inside. (Some people will name the worries before putting them in, some people will imagine writing the worry on a piece of paper and folding it up to put in the trunk, other people will simply imagine a glowing red ball or other image which represents their worries and putting that into the trunk). Shut the trunk, lock it, and tell yourself that tomorrow you will reopen the trunk to look inside and address the worries. You can pair this method with a “constructive worry” exercise to help you work through the worries during the day (https://michelle-jonelis.medium.com/constructive-worry-exercise-6a27356b448d)
• GET CREATIVE. Take the characters from a book, movie, or TV show you recently watched and create additional stories for them. You can also try planning your dream vacation, “building” your dream house, playing a virtual sports game, creating musical tunes, paintings or any other creative project you find it enjoyable to think about. An alternative version of this technique is to visualize yourself doing something you would like to do in the future, such as running a half-marathon, becoming a manager at work, etc.
• EXPLORE. Visualize in vivid detail a happy place from your past such as a beach, a hotel or campsite, an old house you lived in, a friend’s house, a park. Re-visit that location in as vivid detail as you can, for instance for a beach scene you would feel your feet in the sand, hear the ocean waves and seagulls, feel the breeze on your skin, smell and taste the salty sea air. Try to use all 5 senses when exploring. An alternate version of this technique uses an imaginary space that you have not been to such as a generic beach, or forest scene. There are “guided meditation” scripts you can find online which can help you create a virtual scene to explore. You can keep changing to new places when you start to lose interest in the first place.
• VISUALIZE YOURSELF SLEEPING: This time the thing you visualize is yourself, in your bed, deeply asleep. Watch your breathing and how regular it is, try to match your own breathing to that of the person sleeping. Look at your position in the bed and how comfortable it appears. Go back to focusing on matching your breathing to the regular, deep breathing of the person you are watching.
• DEEP BREATHING. Spend some time practicing slow, deep breathing to activate your parasympathetic nervous system (which calms you down). Here are 2 of the most commonly recommended patterns to try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz4G31LGyog AND https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJJazKtH_9I.
• MEDITATE: Meditation is a fantastic thing to do when you are awake at night, particularly when you realize you have awoken close to your habitual wake-up time but do not yet feel ready to get out of bed. While it may not be quite as good as sleeping, meditation has clear health benefits and is likely the next best thing to sleep from a restorative perspective. As a bonus, you may find that you have actually drifted off to sleep by the end of the meditation session. (See https://www.nytimes.com/guides/well/how-to-meditate or try the apps “Calm”, “Headspace”, or “10% Happier” for guidance).
• REPEAT A SOUND: Sometimes saying a sound over and over again, really trying to focus on how it sounds, can help your brain to relax. Try saying “ohm, ohm”, “the, the”, “sleep, sleep”, “rest, rest”. Alternatively, some people will visualize a single color such as blue or black.
• COUNT BACKWARDS: either in english or another language.
• HUM: Some people find the act of humming very relaxing.
• TRY TAPPING: Tapping involves focusing on a negative emotion, such as fear of not sleeping, while using your fingers to tap on specific points of the body. Tapping on these meridian points activates calming pathways in the brain and body, allowing you to relax and let go of the negative thoughts. See https://www.thetappingsolution.com/
• LISTEN: Try listening to music, an audiobook, “bedtime stories” for adults, guided meditation exercises or other distracting and relaxing audio content (the app “Calm” has a variety of options you can explore).
• WRITE IT DOWN: If a “to-do” for the following day (or another thought you want to remember) pops into your mind at night, it can be helpful to write it down so you don’t keep yourself awake trying to remember it. In an ideal world you would have made a “to-do” list BEFORE going to bed to avoid this phenomenon, but it is ok to occasionally add to the list if needed in the middle of the night.
• GIVE IT TIME: Reassure yourself that it is normal to take up to 30 minutes to fall asleep and fall back to sleep at night. Let your mind wander and enjoy having the time to think about things you are not able to think about during the day when you are busy doing other things.