How do I stop racing thoughts at night?

Racing thoughts at night may ease when you do your worrying earlier in the evening, on paper, with a first step written beside each worry. Once you're in bed, picturing something engaging in detail has more research behind it than trying to push the thoughts away.

Why does my mind race when I go to bed?

Bedtime is often the first quiet moment of the day. Work and messages have kept your thoughts busy since morning, and once the light goes off nothing is left to compete with them. Unfinished problems come back up.

People with insomnia describe this differently from good sleepers. Psychologist Allison Harvey interviewed 30 people with insomnia who struggled to fall asleep and 30 who slept well. The poor sleepers' thoughts at bedtime were more focused on worries and on noises around them, and more often about not sleeping. Their thoughts felt less deliberate, took up more of their attention and went on longer. Good sleepers more often said they were thinking about nothing in particular.

Some kinds of thought seem to matter more than others. A Glasgow study had 21 people speak their thoughts into a voice-activated recorder for three nights while a wrist monitor tracked their sleep. Taking longer to fall asleep went most with thinking about sleep itself, about what a bad night would cost them the next day, and about working through problems.

Harvey later proposed a model of how this keeps insomnia going, and it has some early support. By that account, worry about sleep and the next day winds the body up, you start scanning for signs that sleep isn't coming, and every sign you find feeds the worry.

Why doesn't trying to stop thinking work?

Trying to shut a thought out tends to bring it back. In a 1987 experiment, people told not to think of a white bear for five minutes kept thinking of it. Afterwards, once they were allowed to, they thought about the bear more than people who'd been asked to think about it from the start. People given one specific thing to think about instead were less caught up in the bear later.

A survey of 385 good and poor sleepers at Oxford found something similar at night. People with insomnia used almost every way of controlling their thoughts more often than good sleepers did. Two of those ways, shoving unwanted thoughts away hard and switching to a different worry instead, went with poorer sleep and with more anxiety and depression. Distracting themselves with other thoughts went with better sleep.

Forcing yourself to fall asleep can backfire too, at least when your mind is busy. One lab study told good sleepers either to fall asleep as fast as they could or to fall asleep whenever they liked. Some listened to Sousa marches, which the researchers picked to keep their minds busy, and the rest to soft new age music. With the marches on, the people trying hard took longer to fall asleep. With the soft music, trying hard sped them up. The researchers' reading is that effort turns against you when your mind is already loaded, though it was tested only in people who slept normally.

Give your worries a slot after dinner

A worry slot is ten minutes or so in the early evening, set aside for writing your worries down along with a next step for each. Psychologist Colleen Carney and a colleague tested a version of this with 33 college students who reported insomnia. For five nights, one group wrote down possible solutions to their worries. The other group wrote their worries down and filled in worry questionnaires. The group writing solutions reported a calmer mind before sleep than the other group, and than on their own first two nights. It was a small study in students, and it reports how they felt at bedtime, which isn't the same as sleeping better.

We'd do it after dinner, a couple of hours or more before bed, at a desk or the kitchen table. Sit down with a sheet of paper and give it ten minutes. Draw a line down the middle. On the left, write whatever is on your mind, big or small. On the right, write the first step you could take on each one, like "email Sam on Monday" or "ask the bank which form." Some worries won't have a step yet, so write "not tonight" next to those, or the day you'll come back to them. Then fold the paper and put it in a drawer.

A worry that turns up in bed later has already been written down, and you can remind yourself of that. Anything new can go on a scrap of paper by the bed, just a word or two, for tomorrow.

Keep the list itself out of the bedroom. Once it's in the drawer, spend the rest of the evening on something easy. Our wind-down guide has ideas.

What to think about in bed instead

Picturing something in detail can give a busy mind something to hold onto. Harvey's team tested this in 2002, giving 41 people with insomnia one of three sets of instructions for a single night. The group trained to picture something interesting and engaging in detail fell asleep sooner, and had fewer and less upsetting thoughts, than a group given no instructions. The researchers think it worked because the task was specific and took up enough room in the mind to keep the worries out. Walk through a place you know well, room by room, noticing the colors and the sounds, or wander a favorite garden one bed at a time.

Letting thoughts pass is the other approach with some evidence. In a trial of 54 adults with long-term insomnia, two eight-week mindfulness courses, taught in weekly group classes, cut time awake at night by about 44 minutes, going by people's own sleep diaries. A group that only kept a diary saw almost no change. One course was standard mindfulness training. The other was built for insomnia and added behavioral steps from CBT-I, sleep restriction among them, taught by a clinician trained in both. At eight weeks the two weren't clearly different. Mindfulness here means noticing a thought and letting it go, then coming back to your breathing, without arguing with the thought. It takes regular practice, and in this trial people were asked to meditate at home for half an hour or more on most days. It was also a single small trial.

Our 3am guide covers thoughts that wake you in the small hours.

When lying there turns into a struggle

Getting up for a while can help when your mind won't settle and you're getting frustrated. Move to another room with a low lamp on, and read something you've read before or fold some laundry. Go back to bed once you're drowsy. There's more in the get-up guide.

Stay in bed if you're unsteady in the dark or you've taken something for sleep. Prop yourself up on the pillows under a low light with a book or some quiet audio.

When should you talk to someone?

See a doctor or a psychologist about racing thoughts at night if any of these fit:

• you've struggled to sleep three or more nights a week for three months. Bring up CBT-I, which the American and European sleep guidelines both recommend once insomnia has lasted months. Part of it works on bedtime thinking.
• you're anxious through the day as well, most days, and can't put it down.
• you wake with your heart pounding and a sudden sense of dread. Panic attacks can happen at night. With chest pain, or if you can't get your breath, call 911 or your local emergency number.
• your thoughts at night are mostly low or hopeless, or you wake very early and can't face the day.
• you snore loudly or wake gasping, or you doze off in the daytime without meaning to.

If you take something for sleep, take it only as prescribed and talk to your doctor before changing it. If you're drowsy the next day, don't drive. With bipolar disorder or epilepsy, talk to your doctor before trying anything that could cut your sleep short.

If you're having thoughts of suicide or harming yourself, call or text 988 in the US, or your local emergency number.

How Goodmorrow helps with it

The worry list is one of our habits. Its name in the app is "Write worries and first steps, after dinner," and it's ten minutes of writing down each worry with a first step beside it. For its first week there's a nudge each evening at 7:30, along the lines of "Ten minutes with the worry list after dinner?" The lesson that goes with it, "Give worries a time that isn't bedtime," comes within the first few days. Each morning we ask whether yesterday's list happened.

A morning note that says your head wouldn't switch off is tagged as racing thoughts. When that tag keeps showing up, the next lessons tend to turn to bedtime thinking, and the worry list moves up as a pick for your next habit. Goodmorrow is a habit coach with no therapist behind it, and nothing in it treats anxiety or insomnia.