Overthinking at Night
It’s 2.17am. You are awake. You haven’t slept yet. There is no emergency, but you find yourself running through the same conversation on a loop. Thinking about decisions you have made and worrying whether you made the right choice. Rehearsing tomorrow’s difficult conversation.
Your alarm is set for a few hours from now. You are exhausted and lonely.
Nothing dramatic has happened, and yet your body feels as if something is wrong.
And then you start worrying about not sleeping and how tired you are going to be the following day. You try harder to sleep. And the more you try, the more awake you feel.
How Can I Stop Overthinking? How Can I Switch Off?
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Why Do I Overthink at Night?
Cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, peaks in the morning, enabling increased concentration and alertness. It’s part of your natural rhythm. Under chronic stress the nervous system can remain on alert into the evening. When that happens, your mind stays in problem-solving mode rather than slowing down.
Sometimes minds don’t switch off, and with the night removing distraction, they can go into overdrive. The mind believes thinking equals protection. If we can just think around the problem a bit more, we can fix it. In the middle of the night, it rarely works.
How to Stop Overthinking at Night?
Paradoxically, the more we try not to think about something, the more our minds think about it. If I say, “Don’t think about a tiger with pink and purple stripes,” you will probably only think about the tiger, unless you distract yourself and forget about it. There are ways we can direct our minds elsewhere. One of the ways is to give our mind a task.
Counting backwards from 2,000 at a brisk pace, starting again from 2,000 if you lose count, can give your mind something to focus on. Additionally, if you practise this, your mind eventually begins to associate the exercise with winding down.
If you are familiar with meditation techniques, you can concentrate on your breathing and then imagine placing your thoughts onto clouds in the sky that gently float away as the thoughts appear.
Feeling anxious in the middle of the night can result in somatic tension. Progressive muscle relaxation can help discharge physical tension. Starting at your feet, gently tense all the muscles for a few seconds and release them, then move up to your calves and thighs, letting go after a few seconds. Continue working through each muscle group in turn all the way up to the top of your head. You may need to go through each muscle group a few times if you are very tense. Breathe out slowly as you release.
Overthinking at night doesn’t have to be part of the job. The nervous system is not a fixed state. It is a trainable system. You didn’t choose this pattern consciously. But you can retrain it.