Why do I feel more anxious at night?

When your anxiety keeps you awake, you not only miss out on the health benefits of sleep, you might kick off a vicious cycle of poor sleep and increased anxiety that can be hard to break. Photo / Getty Images

A reader is kept awake by night-time worries. The Science Times’ Kiera Carter explains that they’re not alone - and offers some advice.

Q: Whenever I’m trying to fall asleep at night, anxious thoughts and embarrassing memories come racing into my mind, preventing me from drifting off. Why does this happen? And is there anything I can do about it?

A: Whether you’re ticking through tomorrow’s to-do list or dwelling on past regrets, it’s normal for worries and fears to surface at night, experts say.

According to an October 2022 survey of 3192 US adults, 34 per cent of respondents reported feeling anxious or nervous within the past month. And 32 per cent said their stress had led to changes in their sleeping habits, including difficulty falling asleep.

When your anxiety keeps you awake, you not only miss out on the health benefits of sleep, you might kick off a vicious cycle of poor sleep and increased anxiety that can be hard to break.

“Sleep loss is often a precursor for anxiety disorders, and anxiety leads to sleep loss,” said Dr Sarah Chellappa, a neuroscientist at the University of Cologne in Germany.

Anxiety can surface at any time, but it may feel more intense at bedtime, said Candice Alfano, director of the Sleep and Anxiety Center of Houston at the University of Houston.

“Most of us are incredibly busy during the waking hours,” she said. “But at night, while we lie in bed, there are few distractions from the thoughts that make us anxious.”

Worse, sleep loss has been shown to beget more anxious thoughts. In a 2019 survey of 13 studies published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews, researchers concluded that insomnia was a significant predictor of anxiety, among other mental health conditions.

Since better sleep helps decrease anxiety, general good sleep hygiene practices — like going to bed and waking up at the same time every day and avoiding screens before bedtime — can help, Alfano said.

The tips below might help you reduce anxious bedtime thinking.

Establish a caffeine cut-off. Caffeine’s half-life is approximately five hours, meaning if you have a cup of coffee at 4pm, you’ll still have half that cup’s caffeine in your system by 9pm. Consider sipping your last cup of coffee at least 10 hours before your bedtime.

Put your worries on paper. If you’re prone to overthinking at night, both Alfano and Dr Rafael Pelayo, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences in sleep medicine at Stanford Medicine and author of the book How to Sleep, recommend writing in a journal at the end of the day.

Writing down your competing thoughts and tasks can keep the thoughts from creeping up later, Pelayo said.

Look forward to something. “If you lie in bed thinking, ‘I hate my job, I hate my commute,’ then of course you’re not going to sleep well,” Pelayo said. But if you can give yourself something to look forward to in the morning — a nice breakfast, a walk — you have positive thoughts that can replace some of the more negative ones keeping you awake, he explained.

Incorporating a few of these suggestions might help quiet your bedtime thoughts, experts said, but if you’re consistently waking up tired, ask your doctor to refer you to a sleep medicine specialist.

Pelayo had some words of comfort: “I want people to know that they don’t have to feel this way.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Kiera Carter

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