What can I do when worry keeps me awake?

Perhaps this is the second hour of it now. The same track comes round with the same turns, and every so often there’s a jolt, as if you’d nearly forgotten it for a moment and your mind snapped back to check. You know nothing can be done before morning, and knowing it hasn’t helped.

Putting a worry off until tomorrow can feel like turning your back on it, and on the bill or the person you’re frightened for. It moves the worry to the hours when there’s someone to call and something to be done, and at 2am there’s rarely either. If it’s still evening and you can feel the night coming, there’s something you could do before bed in What can I do earlier in the evening?

You may have noticed that the worry is bigger now than it was this afternoon, and that over breakfast it often looks smaller again. Part of that is mood, which follows a daily rhythm. Positive feeling is at its lowest and negative feeling at its peak in the small hours, roughly 1am to 4am¹1 Tubbs et al., 2022. Some researchers go a step further. They propose that in the hours the body expects to be asleep, the reasoning that would put a worry in proportion works less well¹, partly because of the body clockbody clock The timekeeper in your brain that runs on a cycle of about a day, setting when you feel sleepy and when you feel alert. Daylight, especially in the morning, keeps it in step with the clock on the wall. and partly because of lost sleep. It’s an idea they’ve put forward in a review, and they haven’t measured it.

None of this makes your worry untrue. Some worries are every bit as serious as they feel at 2am. At this hour the same problem simply feels bigger than it will over breakfast. If it tends to wake you in the small hours already fully formed, Why do I keep waking up at 3am? is about that waking.

Lying awake turning the problem over feels like working on it, and that feeling is part of what keeps you there. Worry tends to run in broad, general terms: what if it all goes wrong, and what happens then? Going over a problem in that abstract way feels like analysis, but it’s unlikely to arrive at a concrete solution²³2 Stöber, 19983 Watkins, 2008. Thinking helps more when it asks something specific, like what exactly you could do next. In experiments, concrete thinking of that kind improved problem-solving³. In the middle of the night the concrete step is usually out of reach. There’s no one to ring and nothing is open. So the mind goes back round the what-ifs and finds them waiting where it left them.

Falling asleep asks for a different kind of thought altogether. Ordinary drifting off is made of loose sensory images, as reasoning lets go⁷7 Lemyre et al., 2020. Does working at a problem get in the way of that? In one small study, twenty-one people spoke their thoughts aloud in bed at home over three nights, and wore wrist monitors that tracked their sleep. Working through problems was among the thoughts that went most closely with taking longer to fall asleep⁸8 Wicklow & Espie, 2000. When you work the worry over in bed, step by careful step, you’re doing the very kind of thinking that falling asleep needs you to stop.

You may already have tried telling yourself to stop thinking about it, and found it came straight back and left you more awake than before. Researchers who model insomnia count trying to control or push thoughts away among the things that keep a worried mind awake¹⁰10 Harvey, 2002.

Postponing works another way. You give the worry a time, and then you let it go without a fight. In trials, people learn to choose a set time later in the day for the worry, a worry time that lasts no longer than thirty minutes⁵5 Krzikalla et al., 2024. When the worry turns up before then, they acknowledge it with a short sentence and let it go, without getting caught up in it or trying to force it out⁵. The sentence one trial taught was Another worry arises, I acknowledge it, and now I let it go. You could borrow it or make up your own. Those trials were about daytime worry. Using the method at night, with tomorrow’s time as the place the worry waits, is an adaptation, and none of these trials tested it.

What you turn to in the meantime matters as well. In Oxford, forty-one people with insomniainsomnia Trouble falling asleep, staying asleep or waking too early, that keeps happening and affects how you feel or get on during the day. took part in a study that lasted a single night. Those taught to fill their minds with a specific, engaging imagined scene fell asleep sooner, and had less frequent and less distressing thoughts before sleep, than those given no instructions⁶6 Harvey & Payne, 2002. A vaguer think about something else may not be enough against a real worry. In another study, researchers made healthy adults anxious at bedtime, then split them into three groups: some were told to distract themselves, some to push the thoughts away and some got no instructions at all. Distraction went with poorer sleep¹¹11 Čapková et al., 2018. A single scene gives the mind somewhere particular to go: the garden of a house you grew up in, say, or a route you know by heart, walked slowly. If it slips, you can come back to it or pick another. And if you’ve been awake a long while, there’s more on whether to get up when you can’t sleep.

You may already have got up once to check the bank balance or search a symptom, and come back to bed more awake than when you left it. If the urge comes again, it can go on the scrap of paper with the rest, one more thing for the time you’ve given it.

Perhaps the night is still ahead of you and the worry is already there, waiting for the lights to go out. One small trial tested giving it somewhere to go first. Thirty-three US undergraduates who slept poorly spent five nights writing about their worries. Those who wrote down each worry with possible solutions had fewer racing thoughts at bedtime, compared both with their own starting point and with students who wrote the worries down alone⁴4 Carney & Waters, 2006. The two groups differed only in that next step. It fits a large review of repetitive thinking, which found concrete thinking helping more than abstract going-over³3 Watkins, 2008.

A to-do list is for tasks, and writing one at bedtime helped young adults in a sleep lab fall asleep faster¹²12 Scullin et al., 2018. How do I stop my mind racing at night? is about that kind of list. A worry with stakes needs a page of its own, where you name it plainly and write beside it the one small thing you could do about it, and when.

Some worries have no next step to take: a result that comes on Thursday, a choice that belongs to someone else, a call that has to wait. There isn’t much research on worries like these. The researcher behind that review of concrete thinking proposes that when a goal can’t be acted on, thinking about it in concrete terms may make it easier to stop thinking about for now³3 Watkins, 2008. For a hospital appointment, that might mean writing down what you will do when the day comes: go on Thursday at 10am, take the list of questions, and bring someone with you if there’s someone you’d like beside you. The waiting then has a shape and a day of its own, and the time you’ve set aside tomorrow can go on writing those questions. When the choice is someone else’s, a grown son deciding whether to leave his course, the page could list the part that is yours to do: what you might say to him, and when you’ll next call or see him.

You may be wondering whether any of this will work for you. The studies so far are small and short. The people in them were students, people who worry a great deal and people with an anxiety diagnosis. Postponing worry to a set daily time looked promising in earlier studies of children and psychology students, mostly in how long people spent worrying, while one study in people with generalized anxiety disorder found no effect⁵5 Krzikalla et al., 2024. Researchers don’t yet agree on how much it helps. Writing down the next step has had mixed results too. Among 232 Australian teenagers, a fifteen-minute constructive-worry exercise changed neither how long they took to fall asleep nor their bedtime worry¹³13 Bartel et al., 2018.

So where does that leave you, with one real worry tonight? No one knows yet how much any of this helps at night. Still, trying it costs a few minutes and a scrap of paper. A specific scene or a written next step also has more behind it than a general effort to stop thinking. Over a few nights, you can see for yourself whether it gets any easier to let the worry pass when it comes round.

Sometimes worry runs on most days for a long stretch, is hard to control and colors the daytime too. Worry like that over six months or more is part of generalized anxiety disorder, and it’s worth talking to a health care provider about it¹⁵15 National Institute of Mental Health, 2025b. There’s no need to wait six months before you ask. The same is true of low mood or loss of interest most of the day, nearly every day, for two weeks or more¹⁶16 National Institute of Mental Health, 2024.

On most nights, though, the worry is about something real that will still be there in the morning, when there’s a phone to pick up and a next step to take. Until then it can wait on the scrap of paper by your bed, with tomorrow’s time written on it, or by the kettle, folded into a note with its next step beside it.