The 3am to-do list

You wake up and it’s dark. You check the time, which is a mistake, and it’s just after three. Within a minute you’re going through tomorrow. The email you haven’t answered. The conversation you’ve been putting off. Whether you actually locked the car. By half three you’re planning next week.

I hear about this one a lot. The people who tell me about it are usually fine in the day. They’re busy and they get things done. Then the house goes quiet and there’s nothing left to hold the list back.

I don’t think the 3am list is a planning problem. You can’t solve any of it at that hour, and part of you knows that. It’s a nervous system that’s still switched on. Your body’s been running at a pace all day, and lying down doesn’t turn that off, so your mind does what it does all day. It goes looking for the next problem.

That’s why I don’t try to think my way out of it. Thinking harder is more of the same. I start with the breath, and with the out-breath in particular, for the reasons I wrote about in why I start with the out-breath.

Try this tonight

Keep a pencil and a bit of paper by the bed. Not your phone. When you wake up with the list running, write it down. Don’t organise it. Just get it out of your head and onto the paper. It’ll still be there in the morning.

Then lie on your back with one hand on your belly. Breathe in gently through your nose for a count of 4, and out for a count of 6 or 8. Let your belly rise under your hand on the way in. Do ten rounds. If your mind goes back to the list, that’s fine. Go back to counting. If you lose count, start again at one. Nobody’s marking you.

Keep it gentle. No breath holds, and if you start to feel woozy, let your breathing go back to its own pace.

It won’t work every night. Some nights you’ll still be awake at four. But it gives you something to do with that hour that isn’t scrolling or arguing with yourself, and done most nights it usually gets easier.

If the 3am list is a sign of how switched on you are the rest of the time, that’s the kind of thing I work on in one-to-one breathwork sessions.

If you’re waking like this most nights for more than a couple of weeks, or it’s coming with low mood, please see your GP. Broken sleep is worth taking seriously, and breathwork isn’t a treatment for it.