Nighttime is usually synonymous with sleep, but many it’s common for one’s mind to get so active at night that sleep is impossible. Thoughts of what happened during the day, your to-do list for the next day, something you said that may have been misunderstood, or whatever is worrying you… Whatever the thought, the result is the same—a busy mind that keeps sleep at bay.

Here are some strategies I use when my mind gets loud in the middle of the night. Some work better some nights than others, though it’s hard to predict which one will work on any particular night. I usually start with one and cycle through them until finding one that works.

1. Recite something: Recite (mentally) a poem, prayer, song, mantra, or a monologue you memorized for school ages ago. it doesn’t matter what it is, the point is to busy your mind with something that crowds out the stressful thoughts but doesn’t add more stress. It doesn’t matter if you remember the line exactly, just go with what you have.

2. Play a game: Jump rope rhymes where you have to fill in the blank are perfect for this. At Thanksgiving, a friend told me she uses “A My Name is…” for inducing sleep. (A, my name is Alice and my husband’s name is Art, we come from Alabama and in our bag we carry allspice. B, my name is…). This is great because it makes you think enough to require focus, but not so much you get stressed. There are many alphabet variations: for each letter of the alphabet name an animal, a type of food, a store name, a city name, or whatever you can come up with. Another is to list something in groups, like all the MLB teams or every song or album by your favorite band.

3. Listen to a recording: You can find sleep-specific apps or recording for guided meditation, progressive relaxation, nature sounds, or even hypnosis to help you sleep. Podcasts can also do the trick as long as it doesn’t get you too keyed up to sleep (a friend swears by Planet Money, but anything economy-related is sure to keep me awake).

4. Put your thoughts away: Imagine hanging your thoughts up in the closet at night, preferably in a closet outside of the bedroom with a door you can shut. That way you know you can get them in the morning when you’re ready to deal with them.

5. Write down your to-dos: When a thought is really nagging at you and you’re worried you won’t remember it in the morning, making a note can help quiet your mind. This suggestion makes pretty much every sleep list. I used to find it ineffective because anything I wrote in the dark was illegible the day. I now keep a notepad by the nightlight in the bathroom. This allows for notes that I can understand the next day without being woken up by the strength of an overhead light.

7. Meditation: Although meditation instructors are very clear that meditation isn’t supposed to induce sleep, it’s a great technique to quiet a busy mind for sleep.

8. Progressive relaxation: You can do progressive relaxation many ways, but the basic idea is to start with the muscles in your head or feet and slowly work through your body, tensing and releasing different muscle groups as you go. You can look for an MP3 or CD of guided progressive relaxations or check YouTube.

9. Imagine your thoughts as clouds: Imagine your mind as a clear blue sky and your thoughts are clouds floating through the sky. The blue sky remains the same, but the clouds float on by. If you get stuck on a thought, picture it floating away.

10. Remind yourself that your thinking is not it’s sharpest: Nighttime thoughts rarely lead to breakthroughs because we’re too tired for our minds to work their best. Usually, we’re just ruminating and thinking ourselves in circles. Sleep is the time our minds synthesize everything we’ve learned in a day. That’s why sleeping on an idea can be the best way to make progress on it. So, remind yourself gently that you can better help your thoughts if you get some sleep first. This shouldn’t be harsh or reprimanding, but a gental encouragement to put your thoughts away for the night.

image credit Aweisenfels