What to do when you wake up with your mind racing
Night waking happens to everyone. In point of fact, prior to the widespread use of candles and, later, gas and electric lighting, the idea of “two sleeps” in a night was quite common. It’s one of those facts that makes me feel less defective for waking in the middle of the night, since it is, apparently, hard-wired into humans.
I find it’s extremely common for me to wake due to stress dreams. They arise in times of crisis (coronavirus and/or job loss anyone?), and can be caused by things like perimenopause as well. When I was still working as an attorney, and in the first couple of years of staying home due to disability (thanks to rheumatoid arthritis), I found myself waking quite frequently with stress dreams and feelings of anxiousness.
What to do when you wake up with your mind racing. My own technique works like a charm for those who have tried it.
I invented my own technique for dealing with it.
I’m not a medical doctor or any sort of trained healer, so this isn’t a prescription, and it doesn’t constitute medical advice, okay? It’s just a tool that might help when you shoot awake due to a stress dream (no pants, haven’t studied for the exam, have a big work meeting and can’t find the room—all common work-related anxiety dreams). Or for those nights when your body is resting, but your mind hasn’t turned off, so you spend time thinking that you aren’t sleeping.
Often at those times, your brain is racing. Or, more appropriately, spinning, as we often engage in cyclical thinking at that time of night. We feel the stress, start to try to work it out, then feel more stress, then keep going over and over the same thoughts or thought patterns.
We ramp up, but rarely get up, and even if we “solve” a problem in our thoughts, we rarely remember the solution once we get up. Our emotions are fully engaged, our logic is largely out the window . . . and it’s upsetting. Plus we typically start to get upset that we are awake and WHY ARE WE AWAKE? (Hopefully that article I linked to above will convince you that the answer is “millennia of human experience” and you can let go of the idea that there’s something “wrong” about night-waking.)
What I discovered for myself when I was still a practicing attorney and having stress dreams related to work is that my brain was awake, and wanting to solve a problem. So I decided to give it something to do. Something useful, but non-threatening.
I’ve shared this idea with friends and family who have tried it and found that it helps.
Give your brain a useful task to do, but make it something non-threatening.
My favorite non-threatening assignment is to pick a room in your house that needs some help. Maybe it needs a complete renovation, maybe you just want to spruce it up. Just pick a room, and start planning.
This is both a worthwhile thing to do, so your brain won’t balk at it, and a non-threatening thing to do, so your brain will calm down and eventually realize it’s tired and go to sleep.
Give yourself free rein here. In your ideal world, where you don’t need to consult others, what would you do in that space? What wall color do you want? Or do you want wallpaper? Do you want curtains or blinds or what? What might you want to put on the floor?
Or maybe you just want to imagine what sort of furniture you want. What style of bed frame? What color of linens? What kind of fabric? How many pillows?
Don't follow rabbit holes like "what if the floor is rotten?" If they crop up, and they might at the start, just steer yourself back to the decorating task. What colors, what furniture, what sort of faucet in the bath, etc.
The same goes for if actual work stress (or homeschooling stress) pops in: Just tell it that you will get to it tomorrow, you are working on redoing the master bath just now. Or turning the spare bedroom into a craft room. Or whatever. It may take a few reminders, but your brain will eventually stop pestering you.
As you plan your remodeling/renovation/spruce-up, the part of your brain that was all ALERT ALERT DANGER WILL ROBINSON will find it all a bit boring. The chemicals it was pumping into your system will stop, and you will find that you are more calm, and possibly able to fall back to sleep.
This exercise is a win-win. If you succeed at falling all the way back to sleep, you get real sleep. If you don't, you will at least have gotten some rest while you worked out what you might want to do with that room. Even if all you know for sure is what ideas you've already rejected.
Why this works: It is quite similar to meditation. Only instead of focusing on your breath or a word, you are fixed on a particular mental task.
However, you are dealing with your mind-body connection at a time when your brain is flooding you with stress chemicals. So what you are doing is trying to switch from your emotional brain to your logic brain. Giving yourself a task to do, but one with low stakes, helps.
When your mind starts to wander or tries to distract you with scary thoughts (about health, finances, mistakes, risks, and such), it is looking to justify creating more of the stress hormones (such as cortisol). If you keep steering it back to a less stressful task, like planning to redecorate, the logical part of your brain gets involved, and the amygdala calms down. Logic brain for the win.
I hope you will give this a try, if night-waking is an issue for you, and then let me know if it helps.
12 Tips to Help You Sleep
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