When you wake anyway

The handover will make wakings less loaded. It won't stop them, since waking in the night is normal, as chapter 3 said. So you need to know what to do at seven minutes past three. None of what follows involves solving anything.

Don't look at the clock. It's facing the wall, and your phone is in another room. It's night, and you don't need to know any more than that.

Name it. When the first problem arrives, and it will, label what's happening. "That's the three o'clock mind." It's a plain and accurate description, and saying it puts a little distance between you and the thought. The thought will insist that it's different tonight, and important. You can expect it to say that every time.

Answer it once, truthfully. "It's on the list. I'm ringing the roofer on Thursday." Because of the handover, that's a fact. Say it once. Don't get drawn into defending the plan, because that's the first stage of a night shift. If the thought returns, give it the same sentence again.

If it's new, give it one line on the pad. Sometimes what comes up really wasn't in the handover. You've remembered that the car's MOT is due, or you've had an idea about the presentation. Reach for the pad, write one line without turning on the main light, and put the pencil down. "MOT." It's been captured and you won't lose it. That takes away the mind's best argument for keeping you awake, which is that you'll forget it otherwise. One line is the limit. Don't add notes, and don't plan anything.

Give your mind something harmless to do. Chapter 8 described Harvey and Payne's finding that a rich, specific piece of imagery helped people with insomnia fall asleep faster, where an instruction to stop thinking didn't. Choose yours in daylight, so that you're not hunting for one at three. It should be absorbing, pleasant and unconnected to your life. Some people walk in detail through a house they knew as a child, room by room, noticing the furniture. Others replay a favourite walk, stile by stile. You might plan a garden that you'll never plant, or go through the plot of a film scene by scene. The detail matters more than the subject. You want enough texture to occupy the space that the roof would otherwise fill. When you notice you've drifted off it and back to your problems, which you will, go back to the hallway of the house without any fuss. Drifting is normal, and it's often how sleep arrives.

Let your body rest, and leave sleep alone. Get comfortable. Let your shoulders and jaw go slack. Breathe a little more slowly than usual. Then stop trying to sleep. Tell yourself that you're resting, which is true and is worth having. Remember from chapter 8 that sleep comes when effort is absent. Your only job is to lie there comfortably with your mind in the hallway of that house.

If it isn't working, get up. The NHS guidance says that if you're still awake after around twenty minutes, you should get up and sit somewhere comfortable, do something relaxing, and go back to bed when you feel sleepy. Since you're not looking at a clock, "around twenty minutes" means "when it's clear this isn't working and I'm getting frustrated". Go to another room. Keep the light low. Do something quiet and dull, such as a few pages of a book you don't care much about, a jigsaw or some gentle stretching. Don't pick up the phone or the laptop. Leave the post alone, and don't touch the handover notebook. Go back to bed when your eyelids are heavy, and not before then. If you're unsteady on your feet at night, put on a light you can reach from the bed and take your time. Not falling matters more than any of this. If you're awake again after a while, get up again.

This is the instruction people resist most, because getting out of a warm bed feels like giving up on the night. It's the most effective single thing in the list. It breaks the link between bed and wrestling that chapter 10 described. It also interrupts the shift, which finds it hard to continue once you're upright in a chair reading about nineteenth-century canals.

If you share a bed. Tell the other person what you're doing and why, in daylight. Otherwise your getting up at night may worry them, or they may feel they ought to get up with you. Most partners are relieved. They've usually known about the night shift for a long time from the sighing and turning. If they're a night thinker too, don't start talking the problems over together at three. It feels companionable, but it means two three o'clock minds are reaching verdicts together. Agree to save it for the evening.

In the morning, deal with the pad. Whatever you wrote in the night goes into that evening's handover, or gets done. This matters. The pad only works if your mind learns that what's written on it really does get dealt with.

This routine won't produce a perfect night, and you shouldn't judge it by whether you fell asleep quickly on any given occasion. You can judge it by whether a night shift happened. If you were awake for forty minutes and spent them resting with your mind in a childhood kitchen, that's a success, even though you were awake. You lost forty minutes of sleep where you'd otherwise have lost two hours. You also got through them without a single verdict being passed on your life.