Awake at 2 am again? What's actually going on

There's a particular flavour of horrid to being wide awake at 2am. The house is dead silent, everyone else is fast asleep, and there you are staring at the ceiling with your brain buzzing about everything and nothing. You were exhausted when you went up. Now you're somehow bolt awake and half convinced your life's falling apart.

First thing to know, and it does help. Waking in the night is very common. Everyone does it. We all come up close to the surface several times a night, between sleep cycles, and most of the time we turn over and drift straight back without even remembering. The waking isn't the problem. What your brain does when it catches you awake is the problem.

Why does your head go straight to the worst-case scenario?

Your sleep runs in roughly 90-minute cycles, and you naturally surface near the end of each one. In the early hours, your body also starts gently raising the hormone that gets you ready to wake up for the day. If you've got a lot on your mind, your stress bucket is full, and your system's already running high, that little nudge towards waking is enough to tip you fully awake instead of letting you settle back down.

Unfortunately, at 2am the calm, sensible bit of your brain is still half asleep. The emotional bit is wide awake and running the show. Every worry it hands you arrives blown up to about ten times its real size. The money thing feels like financial ruin. The awkward conversation that feels like the end of a friendship. None of it is true, but at that hour your brain has no sense of proportion left. The 2am version of a problem is never the actual size of it.

What helps in the moment

The biggest one is to stop fighting it. Lying there, gritting your teeth, willing yourself back to sleep, teaches your brain that bed is where you do battle, and that makes the whole thing worse over time. If you've been properly awake for twenty minutes or so, get up. Keep the lights low, do something quiet, and go back when you actually feel sleepy.

Don't check the clock either. The second you see the time and work out how few hours you've got left, you're wide awake and annoyed, and that's the night gone. You can also try keeping a notepad by the bed. When a worry won't leave you be, write the one line down, and tell yourself you'll deal with it in the morning when the rational, logical, positive part of your brain is back on shift. Parking a thought works far better than trying to wrestle it to the ground at 2am.

Where the night is really won

Good nights are mostly built during the day. If your stress levels are running high while you're awake, your brain stays primed to grab you the moment you surface. Getting that daytime stress down is what prevents the 2am ambushes. Breathing helps too, a nice long slow out-breath, longer than the breath in, it has a physiological impact because that's the quickest way to tell your nervous system there's no actual emergency.

If 2am has become a regular occurrence and the sleep debt is adding up, it is fixable. The solution-focused hypnotherapy I practice is all about getting the brain back to proper rest, and for a lot of people, sleep is one of the very first things they notice shifting.

For now, remember, the you that's awake at 2am is not a reliable narrator. Whatever feels enormous in the dark will look a good deal smaller in the morning. It nearly always does.

Suzanne Teale, Mental Fitness Practitioner, accredited Solution Focused Hypnotherapist. Unlock Potential, Bury.