Your body stopped at ten. Your mind is still going at midnight, reviewing a conversation from Tuesday and remembering something you meant to do in March.
The advice you'll usually get for this is some version of try to relax, which is a bit like being told to try to be taller. Here are six things that are actually actions.
1. Write down the open loops, then give each one a time
Your mind keeps raising things because it doesn't trust that they're recorded anywhere. Write them down, all of them, badly, and then, beside each one, put an actual time tomorrow when it gets your attention. Not “soon”. A time.
An unparked thought will keep circling. A parked one with a collection time usually won't.
2. Make the out-breath longer than the in-breath
Not a breathing technique with a name and a philosophy attached. Just in for four, out for six, eight times. There's nothing mystical about it; a long exhale does something to your nervous system that a short one doesn't.
3. Write the message you're not going to send
The one you keep composing. Write it out in full, ungraciously, and then don't send it. The page is the outbox. It works far better than deciding not to think about it.
4. Do something with your hands for five minutes
Wash up one thing in water that's slightly too hot. Fold something. Peel an orange in one piece. The rule is that nothing else happens at the same time, no podcast, no phone propped up.
5. Count backwards from three hundred in sevens
Not sheep. Sheep are too easy, so your mind wanders off and does something more interesting. Sevens are just difficult enough to crowd everything else out and just boring enough to fail at, which is the point.
6. Write the 3am page at 9pm
This is the one that actually changes things. At nine in the evening, when you're tired but reasonable, write down what to do at three in the morning: what helps, what doesn't, and the specific reminder that 3am is a liar with a very convincing manner.
You will not think of any of this at 3am. That's why you write it now.
A note
If sleep has been difficult for a long time, this is a GP conversation rather than an article one. See the wellbeing note.
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