How to Stop Overthinking at Night: 5 Things That Actually Work

It’s 2 AM. Your body is begging for sleep, but your brain has other plans. It’s replaying that awkward thing you said at lunch three days ago. It’s rehearsing tomorrow’s meeting for the seventh time. It’s reminding you of everything that is not going according to your plan.

Fun.

I know this feeling intimately. Not because I read about it in some psychology textbook, but because I lived in it. Every single night. For years.

My first real bout of anxiety showed up in 2020, uninvited, during a depressive episode that I didn’t see coming. And it never really left. For the last six years, I have been living with Generalised Anxiety Disorder.

What does it feel like?

Zoning out, a strange churning in the stomach, restlessness, fatigue, twitching and insomnia.

I tried everything. Meditation apps. Deep breathing. Telling myself to “just relax” (spoiler: that never works). Scrolling through Instagram until my eyes burned, hoping the numbness would knock me out.

Some of it worked, but not in the long run.

But over time, through therapy, through reading, through a lot of trial and error, I found things that actually did. Not magic tricks. Not “10 steps to blissful sleep” nonsense. Just five practical shifts that, over time, made the nights a little quieter.

Here they are.

1. Dump Your Brain Before You Hit the Bed

Here’s what I noticed about nighttime anxiety: the thoughts that haunt you at 2 AM are rarely new. They’ve been sitting in the back of your mind all day, patiently waiting for the moment you have nothing else to focus on. And the moment your head touches the pillow — they pounce.

I started this habit of writing a journal before I go to sleep. DM me if you want to know how to build this habit.

I write whatever’s floating in my head. No structure, no grammar, no filtering. Just a brain dump.

“I’m worried about the deadline on Friday.” “I said something dumb to my colleague today.” “Am I even doing the right thing with my career?” “I need to buy groceries.”

All of it. On paper.

It won’t silence every thought. But when you write it on paper, these thoughts lose their power and act as a reminder for things that you have to work on.

2. Name the Thought. Don’t Fight It.

This one changed everything for me.

When anxiety hits at night, the instinct is to fight it. Push the thought away. Argue with it. Tell yourself it’s irrational. But here’s what I’ve learned from years of living with this.

First, rationalise it, ask yourself where this is coming from and try to figure out what you can do about it. After contemplating the thought and rationalising it, if it still occurs, then do this. That’s what I did.

So instead of fighting the thought, I started naming it. This comes from a therapeutic approach called ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — and it’s deceptively powerful.

Here’s how it works. When a thought shows up — say, “I’m not good enough” or “I’m going to mess everything up” — instead of believing it as absolute truth, you add a small line before it:

“I’m having the thought that I’m not good enough.”

That’s it. That one sentence. Sounds almost silly, right?

But that tiny linguistic shift creates a distance between you and the thought. You go from being fused with the anxiety — drowning in it — to observing it from the outside. You’re no longer the thought. You’re the person noticing the thought.

I use this almost every day. Sometimes the thought is so absurd that just naming it makes me chuckle. “Ah, here comes the ‘you’re not worthy’ story again. My mind’s all-time favourite.”

The thought doesn’t vanish. But it loses its grip. And that’s the whole game — not elimination, but defusion.

3. Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Body

When your mind is spiralling, it’s essentially time-travelling. It’s either replaying the past or rehearsing the future. It is seldom in the present moment.

So the trick is to yank it back.

There’s a grounding technique called 5-4-3-2-1 that does exactly this. When the overthinking kicks in, pause and notice:

5 things you can see — the shadow on the wall, the streetlight through the curtain, the shape of the ceiling fan

4 things you can hear — the hum of the AC, a dog barking somewhere, the faint buzz of silence itself

3 things you can touch — the texture of your bedsheet, the weight of the blanket on your chest, the coolness of the pillow

2 things you can smell — maybe the faint trace of your shampoo, or the night air from the window

1 thing you can taste — the residue of toothpaste, or just the dryness of your mouth

This isn’t some mystical practice. It’s neuroscience. You’re literally redirecting your brain’s attention from abstract rumination to concrete sensory input. You’re pulling it out of the anxiety loop and anchoring it in the here and now.

I won’t pretend it works like a switch. But it interrupts the spiral. And sometimes, interrupting the spiral is all you need for the mind to settle.

4. Stop Trying to Fall Asleep

This sounds counterintuitive, I know. But hear me out.

The harder you try to sleep, the more awake you become. It’s called the paradox of sleep effort, and it’s well-documented. The moment you start thinking, “I need to fall asleep,” you’ve turned sleep into a task. And your brain, being the overachiever it is, starts monitoring your progress. “Am I asleep yet? What about now? How about now?”

Congratulations, you’ve just activated the exact opposite of what sleep requires.

So here’s what I started doing. Instead of “trying to fall asleep,” I gave myself permission to just rest. Eyes closed. Body still. No expectation of sleep. Just lying there. That’s the only goal — to rest.

Ironically, the moment you take the pressure off sleeping, sleep tends to find you. Your body knows how to do this. It’s been doing it since you were born. The problem was never your body — it was your mind trying to supervise the process.

Let it go. Just rest. Sleep will come when it’s ready.

5. Do Something. Anything.

Okay, this one is the least glamorous but probably the most important.

When the thoughts are relentless, and nothing seems to work, here’s my honest advice: get up.

I know, I know. Every sleep expert says stay in bed, keep the lights off, blah blah blah. But when your mind is running a marathon at midnight, lying in bed and “trying” is just marinating in anxiety.

Get up. Walk to the kitchen. Drink some water. Step outside for five minutes and feel the night air on your skin.

Or better yet, do something that engages your hands and your mind just enough to interrupt the loop. For me, that’s playing the piano. Even at odd hours. Something about the physical act of pressing keys, following a melody, engaging a different part of my brain — it breaks the cycle. It’s not escapism. It’s redirection.

If you don’t play an instrument, go for a short walk. Even ten minutes around your building. The point isn’t to exhaust yourself into sleep. The point is to break the pattern. Your mind is stuck in a groove — like a record player needle caught in a scratch. Sometimes you need to physically lift the needle and place it somewhere else.

And yes, this requires effort. It requires you to throw the blanket off and actually move. But if you’re serious about working on this, that effort is non-negotiable.

Lying in bed, hoping the anxiety will magically dissolve, is like staring at a flat tyre and hoping it’ll inflate itself. It won’t.

The Bigger Question

If the same thoughts keep circling your mind night after night — about your career, your relationships, your self-worth, your direction — that’s not insomnia. That’s your mind trying to tell you something.

And no amount of grounding techniques or brain dumps will solve it unless you actually look at what’s underneath.

I spent years treating the symptom. Trying to silence the thoughts without ever asking why they were so loud in the first place. It wasn’t until I started working with someone who asked the right questions — not “how do we make the anxiety go away?” but “what is the anxiety trying to protect you from?” — that things genuinely started to shift.

Sometimes we need someone outside our own head to help us untangle what’s going on inside it. Not because we’re broken. But because some knots are just easier to undo with a second pair of hands.

If your overthinking feels bigger than a bedtime habit — if it’s been following you for months, maybe years, and it’s starting to bleed into your days — I’d genuinely love to talk. Book a free discovery call, and let’s figure out what’s really going on. No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation.

Because the goal was never to just fall asleep faster. The goal was to build a mind that doesn’t need to scream at you the moment the world goes quiet.

And that, my friend, is very much possible.

You might also like this article: Why is it so difficult to be happy?

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Question Everything,

Sarthak Mirchandani