Awake at 3am? Here’s how to do it mindfully.

A common experience of insomnia or sleep disturbance is the “early morning awakening”.

If you often find yourself waking up at 2am or 3am, try these sequential steps to mindfully work with wakefulness and to naturally and effortlessly fall back asleep.

1.    Acceptance and Letting Go

Or put another way, the “so what” factor

If you’ve experienced ongoing sleep disturbance or insomnia, the mere act of waking up in the middle of the night can immediately trigger anxiety. Especially when your previous experience tells you, that you’re possibly going to be awake for hours now.

How you respond to the reality of being awake (when you want to be asleep) is crucial. It’s important to immediately adopt a genuine attitude of

“So what? I’m awake. No problem”

Rather than the anxious thinking that can accompany ongoing sleep disturbance such as

“Oh no I’m awake. How long am I going to be awake for? What if I can’t get back to sleep? If I don’t fall asleep by ……… (time), I’ll only get so many hours of sleep and then I’ll feel terrible tomorrow” etc etc.

This type of thinking only increases reactivity and the stress response in your body.

When you become aware that you’re awake in the very early hours of the morning, see if you can pay it no mind.

Have a “So what?“ attitude. Acknowledge and accept you’re awake, but also make peace with it.

Go with “I’m awake at the moment and that’s ok”

2.    Noticing sleepy sensations

Having immediately made peace with being awake, tune into the physical sensations of sleepiness. Notice how heavy your eyelids are. How heavy your body is. Notice the stillness of your body.

3.    Breathe

Gently shift your attention to your breath in your belly. Noticing how your belly gently expands as you breathe in and the belly softens as you breathe out.

Belly breathing is known to help engage your parasympathetic nervous system, aka your rest and digest nervous system.

4.    Thoughts and breathing

When thoughts come, notice they’re there, and return your awareness to the sleepy sensations of your body and the gentle movement of breath in your belly. If you notice the content of thinking is becoming more compelling, you might even say to yourself “not now, I’ll think about that during the day” and with a lightness, return attention the sensations of your body and breathing

5.    Cultivate gratitude

Practising gratitude right before sleep has been shown to enable people to fall asleep faster, have better quality sleep and sleep for longer. When you wake up in the middle of the night or if you’re having trouble falling asleep, remember a few things that you’re grateful for. Stay with the good feeling, allowing yourself to really soak it up. (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/application_uploads/Wood-GratitudeSleep.pdf)

6.     After 25 minutes of wakefulness – get up

If you’ve done the above steps and you sense that more than 25 minutes have passed, it’s best to get out of bed. Even if you feel tired or even if it’s winter and your bed is cosy and warm.

The rationale for getting out of bed.

i)              If you’re going to fall asleep it’s going to happen in a 30 minute window.

ii)             Lying there for longer than 30 minutes is likely to trigger anxiety about not sleeping

iii)           When there has been a period of sleep disturbance it’s very important to work toward conditioning the brain to associate your bed as a place of sleep and nothing else. If you stay in bed awake, for long periods, this can reinforce the brains association with the bed as a place of wakefulness, which we don’t want.

7.     Quiet, gentle, soothing activity

When you get up, keep the lighting as low as possible. Bright lights will signal to your brain that it’s day time and wake you up further.

Adaptive early morning activities include journaling, reading, colouring in, writing a to-do list, (particularly if your thoughts were leaning towards everything you have to do the next day), stretching, walking meditation or sitting meditation. Avoid turning on any sort of screen.

It’s important once you’re up to continue with your “so what” attitude. Getting upset about not sleeping only makes it worse, don’t worry about it.

8.    Go back to bed

Only when you notice the undeniable sensations of sleepiness have returned.

The most important part in handling an unwanted early morning awakening, is our attitude. Trying to force ourselves back to sleep doesn’t work and only creates tension. Acknowledging and accepting being awake is what will allow sleep to happen again. Training in mindfulness helps you to become less reactive in general and therefore less reactive when you’re having trouble sleeping. Mindfulness training also works with attitude, so when you do wake up at 2am you’re more likely to adopt an “acknowledge, accept and let go” attitude. Rather than being hijacked by unhelpful thinking which exacerbates the anxiety of not sleeping, mindfulness can help you to calmly be with your wakefulness and let go of your desire to sleep. Interestingly the letting go is exactly what will allow you to fall asleep again.