When Worry Wakes You in the Night
For the small hours, when one thought has you wide awake and everything looks unfixable. It gets the worry out of your head, decides nothing until daylight, and stops the night turning into a second problem.
Worry · Worry · Sleep · 8 items · whenever you need it
The checklist
- Blame the hour, not yourself — At three in the morning everything looks unsolvable; that is the hour talking.
- Write the worry on paper by the bed — On the page it stops needing to be held in your head.
- Ask whether anything can be done now — If the answer is no, this is rumination rather than problem-solving.
- Promise it a hearing in daylight — The worry will keep until morning, when you will be better equipped for it.
- Get up if twenty minutes pass — Lying there awake teaches your body that bed is a place for worrying.
- Keep the lights low and the screen off — Bright light tells your body it is morning when it is not.
- Do something dull on purpose — A boring book or a slow stretch beats lying still and thinking.
- Skip the clock arithmetic — Working out how little sleep is left only adds a second worry to the first.
Use this checklist Free account: tick items off and keep each day's record.
How to use it
Run through it whenever you need it, honestly and without scoring yourself. A checklist is a way of noticing, not a test: an item you cannot tick is information about the day, not a verdict on you. Over a few weeks the pattern of what gets ticked and what does not says more than any single pass.
With a free Theraglee account the checklist remembers each pass, so you can look back. Without one, you can still read it here and keep your own copy.