What To Do When You Can't Sleep: 12 Ideas That Aren't Your Phone

It's 3am. You're awake. You're going to be tired tomorrow no matter what you do now, but you can either be tired and rested-ish, or tired and slightly destroyed. The difference comes down to the next half hour.

The single worst thing you can do is what most of us do: reach for the phone. The blue light suppresses melatonin, but more importantly the content (social, news, anything) wakes the brain up by giving it something to chew on. You go from being 70% asleep to 0% in about ninety seconds. Matthew Walker, the sleep researcher at UC Berkeley, has spent two decades documenting exactly this loop in his lab work and in his book Why We Sleep. The fix isn't willpower. The fix is having something else ready before the phone wins.

What follows is 12 things sorted by what kind of can't-sleep it is. Skim until something pulls you in, then close the tab and try it.

If your body is too wired

You're not anxious, you're just buzzing. Caffeine that lasted longer than you thought. A workout too close to bed. Something stimulating you read or watched. The fix is to gently re-burn the energy without making yourself more awake.

1. Sixteen slow breaths into a paper bag, or just into cupped hands. Slows your heart rate and gently raises CO2 in your blood, which is the chemical signal your body uses to feel drowsy. Sounds dramatic, isn't. Sixteen breaths takes about ninety seconds and works far more reliably than "just relax."
2. Get up and do twenty slow squats. Counterintuitive but effective. A small physical burn at low intensity discharges the nervous system. Stay off your phone, stay in low light, sit back down on the bed after.
3. Cold water on your wrists and the back of your neck. Drops your core temperature, which is one of the strongest physiological signals for sleep onset. Walker's research found a core temperature drop of even one degree Celsius significantly increases sleep readiness.

If your mind is racing

The thoughts won't stop. You replay an argument from three days ago, or rehearse a presentation that isn't until Wednesday, or solve a problem that doesn't need solving until next year. The mind has decided that 3am is a productive time. It is not.

4. Write down the loop. Get a pen and paper (not your phone). Write the exact thought that keeps coming back. One sentence. Add: "I will think about this tomorrow at 9am." Put the pen down. This sounds like a trick, and it sort of is, but it gives the worried-bit-of-brain permission to stop guarding the thought, because the thought is now safe on paper.
5. Count backwards from 300 in threes. 300, 297, 294, 291. The trick is the maths is hard enough that your mind can't simultaneously rehearse the worry, but easy enough that you don't actually wake up. Most people don't get below 250 before they fall asleep.
6. Body scan from feet to head. Focus on your right toe. Just that. Then your right foot. Right ankle. Right calf. Move up at the pace of one body part per breath. The brain finds it hard to do this and worry at the same time. By the time you reach your shoulders, you're often gone.

If you woke up at 4am and can't get back

Different problem to the other two. You slept for a few hours, then surfaced. The rule for this one is harsh but real: if you've been awake for more than twenty minutes, get out of bed. The longer you lie there fighting it, the more your brain associates the bed with frustration, which makes future sleep harder. This is called "stimulus control therapy" and is the most-evidenced behavioural intervention for insomnia.

7. Move to a different room with the lights low. Read a paperback (not a screen). Boring is good. The point is to do something physically dull until you feel drowsy again, then return to bed.
8. Drink a glass of water and eat one small thing. Sometimes 4am wakings are blood sugar dips, especially if you ate late and ate sugary. A small piece of cheese, a half-slice of toast, a few nuts. Doesn't need to be much.
9. Accept it. Genuinely. Decide you're going to be awake for an hour, and stop arguing with that fact. The pressure to fall back asleep is itself one of the main things keeping you awake. Setting a mental timer ("OK, an hour") often results in you falling back asleep within ten minutes, because the pressure goes away.

If it's anxiety-shaped

You're not racing on a single thought, you're just generally tense. Chest a bit tight, jaw clenched, low-grade dread without an obvious source. This is different to "mind racing" and needs a different fix.

10. The 4-7-8 breath. Inhale through your nose for 4 counts, hold for 7, exhale through your mouth for 8. Repeat 4 times. Created by Dr Andrew Weil based on pranayama practice. It directly activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the "rest and digest" branch of the autonomic system. The exhale being longer than the inhale is what does the work.
11. Name five things you can hear. Eyes closed, no movement, just listen. The boiler. A car outside. Your own heartbeat. Light traffic. Pipes in the wall. Naming sensory things grounds you back into the room and out of the worry.
12. Place a hand on your chest and one on your belly. Feel the rise and fall. Don't try to change the breathing, just notice it. The physical contact (your own hand) reliably triggers a mild oxytocin response. It's the same neurochemistry as being held, except you're the one doing it.

What not to do

The list of things that actively make sleep worse is short and worth knowing:

• Don't reach for your phone. Already covered. Worst single choice you can make in this moment.
• Don't have wine to "help you sleep." Alcohol sedates you initially but blocks REM sleep for hours afterwards. You'll feel worse at 7am than if you'd just stayed awake.
• Don't check the time repeatedly. The maths of "if I fall asleep now I'll get 4 hours 23 minutes" is itself a form of anxiety. Turn the clock around or put your phone face down.
• Don't catastrophise about tomorrow. One night of bad sleep won't ruin your life. You're more resilient than your 3am brain thinks. Tomorrow will be tired, and then it will be over, and then you'll sleep.

How to actually pick one

Reading a list of options at 3am can itself be a way of staying awake. The faster you can pick something and try it, the faster you can stop reading and start sleeping. If you can't pick, use the random number generator: set it from 1 to 12, hit Generate, do whatever number it picks. Don't think about it. The point is action, not optimisation.

Or, if you want to test which of the four categories your version of can't-sleep actually is, write down which one you'd least want to try. That's usually the one your brain needs. The "I don't want to get out of bed" resistance against item 7 is itself the symptom of being stuck.

Tomorrow's job

Bad nights happen. The most useful thing you can do tomorrow is not chase the lost sleep with a four-hour nap (which will wreck tomorrow night), but instead stick to your normal bedtime and wake time and let your body recover naturally over two or three days. Your sleep system is good at this. Trust it.

If you can't sleep more than twice a week for more than three weeks, see your GP. Chronic insomnia is real, treatable, and not something to white-knuckle through.