Overthinking at night? What's happening in your brain, and what helps

Overthinking at night? What's happening in your brain, and what helps

Everyone else is asleep. The fan is turning. You were so tired an hour ago.

And then your mind starts. Something you said at work today. The EMI due on the 5th. Your father's blood pressure, which he says is fine but you're not sure. One thought leads to another, you check the time, and it's 1:40.

We hear some version of this from a lot of the people who come to us. Many think it's just who they are, that they're "the worrying type". Some of it may be. But a good part of it comes from how the brain behaves at night, and that part you can do something about.

World Mental Health Day is on 10 October, and this year's theme is about listening to people's own experiences. This is one we hear all the time, so it felt like the right place to start.

Two kinds of overthinking

Most night-time overthinking is one of two kinds.

The first is worry, which looks ahead: What if the scan shows something? What if they don't renew my visa?

The second is rumination, which goes back over the past: Why did I say that to her? Why does this always happen to me?

Sleep researchers treat these as two separate habits, and either one can keep you awake by itself. It's worth noticing which one you slip into more, because they respond to slightly different things.

Why it gets worse at night

During the day, your mind wanders more than you'd think. A Harvard study of 2,250 people found their minds were wandering in 47% of their waking moments. In the daytime, something always pulls you back: a phone call, the office, the pressure cooker whistle. At night nothing does, so your mind keeps going over the same thoughts.

Worry also keeps your body on alert. In experiments, when researchers made good sleepers worry more, they took longer to fall asleep. When people with insomnia were helped to worry less, they fell asleep sooner. It's a clear sign that this isn't "just in your head". Your body is involved too.

Tiredness makes all of it stronger. At the University of California, Berkeley, researchers kept healthy volunteers awake for about 35 hours and then showed them upsetting pictures. The brain's emotional centre, the amygdala, reacted over 60% more strongly than in people who had slept. The part of the brain that usually calms it down, the prefrontal cortex, was less connected to it.

To be fair, 35 hours awake is more extreme than a bad night. But it explains a lot. The same problem that feels huge at 1 AM often looks ordinary by the time you've had your morning tea.

Put these together and you get a loop. You overthink, so you sleep badly. You sleep badly, so your brain reacts more strongly the next day. The next night, the overthinking is louder. That's how a stressful week can turn into three bad months.

What you can try

Don't try all of these at once. Pick one or two, give them a week, and see what changes.

1. Do your worrying in the evening, not in bed

This exercise comes from sleep research, where it's called "constructive worry". In the early evening, at least two hours before bed, sit down with a sheet of paper for about 15 minutes. Draw a line down the middle. On the left, write whatever is bothering you. On the right, write the next small step for each one. The step can be tiny, like "call the bank on Monday" or "ask Chettan what he thinks". It can even be "nothing I can do about this tonight". That still counts.

Fold the paper and keep it by your bed. When the thought comes back at 11 PM, you can tell yourself honestly that you've already dealt with it today.

In a study of college students with insomnia, doing this in the evening reduced racing thoughts at bedtime and cut down the total time they lay awake.

2. Write tomorrow's to-do list before you sleep

This one is for the "I mustn't forget" kind of worry. In a sleep-lab study at Baylor University, 57 adults spent five minutes writing a to-do list for the coming days, and they fell asleep about nine minutes faster than people who wrote about what they'd already finished. The more detailed the list, the better it worked.

Nine minutes may not sound like much. But if you usually lie awake for half an hour, it's a real difference.

3. Slow your breathing down

Breathe in for five seconds and out for five seconds. That works out to six breaths a minute, the pace used in slow-breathing studies, where it's linked to more activity in the vagus nerve, a nerve that helps the body settle.

You can try it now with our one-minute breathing guide. You don't need to count perfectly. Just breathe out slower than you normally would.

4. Try yoga nidra

Yoga nidra is a guided practice you do lying down, slowly moving your attention through your body while staying awake. In a randomised trial of people with long-term insomnia, it improved deep sleep. In another trial, an online version lowered cortisol, one of the body's stress hormones.

It works well for people who overthink, because it gives the mind something to follow. Instead of going back to the same worries, your attention goes to the voice guiding you.

5. Dim the lights after dinner

About two hours before your usual bedtime, your body starts making melatonin, the hormone that makes you sleepy. Bright light holds it back, and that includes your phone.

So turn the lights down after dinner, and keep your phone out of reach in bed. It helps to wake up at the same time every day too, Sundays included. None of this stops the thoughts. It just gives sleep a better chance against them.

When it's more than a bad week

For some people this isn't a bad month. It's the same thoughts, the same pattern, for years. You know it isn't helping, and it happens anyway.

Much of this runs on autopilot: automatic thoughts, beliefs you picked up long ago, reactions that fire before you can stop them. The tips above can quieten things down. Changing the pattern underneath takes longer.

That's what Rewire Mindfully, our NeuroYoga pathway, works on. Its first stage, Sattva, is about spotting those automatic thoughts and habits clearly before trying to change them. It's online, one to one, and in Malayalam.

Sometimes it's the other way round. Your mind is fairly calm, but you still wake at 3 AM, tired but wired. Then the cause may be in the body: your body clock, blood sugar or hormones. That's what Reset Naturally looks at. Some people need both.