Imotara

Why do I feel so anxious at night?

Because the distractions are gone. Anxiety is not worse at night so much as it is finally audible — there is no work, no noise and no one to talk to, so what was humming underneath all day becomes the only thing in the room. Tiredness also lowers your ability to argue back at it.

What is actually happening

During the day you are busy, and being busy is a very effective way of not noticing how you feel. At night the noise stops. Nothing new has arrived — you have simply run out of things drowning it out.

Tiredness matters too. The part of you that says 'this is not as bad as it feels' is the first thing to go when you are exhausted, which is why a worry at midnight has a weight it will not have at nine the next morning.

And lying still with your eyes closed is, unhelpfully, the ideal condition for thinking.

Why 'just stop thinking about it' fails

Trying not to think about something keeps it in the room, because checking whether you have stopped is itself thinking about it. The way out is usually sideways: give your attention something else to hold rather than ordering it to let go.

This is also why the worry at 2am feels urgent and unanswerable. It is not that the problem is worse; it is that you cannot act on it at 2am, so there is nowhere for the thought to go.

Things you could try now

• • Write the worry down, in one line, on paper or on a phone. Externalising it reliably takes some weight out of it, partly because you stop holding it in place to avoid forgetting it.
• • Breathe out for longer than you breathe in — four in, six or eight out, for about a minute. The long exhale is the part that matters.
• • If you have been lying awake more than about twenty minutes, get up and sit somewhere dim for a while. Staying in bed trains your brain to treat the bed as the place where you worry.
• • Name five things you can see in the room. Deliberately dull, and that is the point.