Calm · 3 min
Awake at three
What to do in the small hours when sleep has gone and the ceiling is not helping.
You are awake. It is dark, the house is quiet, and the clock says a number you did not want to see. Here is what helps, and what does not.
The steps
Two small steps,in your own time.
Tonight, before bed, turn your clock to face the wall and put your phone across the room.
If you wake, do not check the time; count twenty slow out-breaths, and if you are still awake after what feels like twenty minutes, get up and sit somewhere dim until you are sleepy.
Do not check the time again
The first look was enough. Every look after that is arithmetic: how many hours until the alarm, how bad tomorrow will be. The arithmetic is what keeps you awake, not the waking. Turn the clock to the wall, or put the phone face down across the room. If you need an alarm, set it and then trust it.
Give it twenty minutes, then get up
Lying in bed trying to sleep teaches your body that bed is a place for trying. After about twenty minutes awake, which you can estimate rather than measure, get up. Go to another room if you can. Keep the lights low, a lamp rather than the ceiling. Sit under a blanket. Read something dull on paper, or listen to something quiet, or just sit.
Go back to bed when you feel sleepy, not when you think you should. Sleepy means heavy eyes, a yawn, the thought drifting. If you get back in and twenty minutes pass again, get up again. This feels wrong the first few nights and works over a few weeks, because the bed stops being a place where you lie awake.
Nothing bright, nothing useful
No phone, no laptop, no sorting the kitchen. Light tells your body it is morning. Usefulness tells it the day has started. Boredom is your friend at three in the morning, which is why the dull book beats the good one.
If you are listening for someone
When you are caring for someone and half of you is awake on purpose, the rules bend. You cannot leave the room, perhaps, and you do not want to be deeply asleep. Then the practice is rest, not sleep: lie still, breathe slowly, out longer than in, and let yourself doze without demanding sleep. See the page on sleeping when you are on call for more of this.
In the morning
Get up at the usual time anyway. It will be a rough day, and a lie-in makes tonight worse. Get outside for ten minutes of daylight early. Do not nap for more than twenty minutes, and not after three in the afternoon. Tonight will likely be better, and if it is not, the night after usually is.
If this is most nights for more than a few weeks, the sleep course here goes further, and your doctor should know.
WE · TRIBE
Try itwith someone.
Tell one person you are trying this today, and ask if they would like to do it with you. Small things done side by side are easier to keep.
Try it today
Tonight, try: if you wake and cannot settle, twenty minutes then up, low light, dull book, back when sleepy.
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