Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings, preferably in daylight. It's about one habit. You wake in the small hours, and within a minute or two your mind has started work. It goes through the money, the job, the children, the thing you said and the thing you've forgotten to do. You lie there trying to solve them. An hour or two later you've solved nothing and you feel worse about everything. The alarm is closer, and you're wide awake.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the night-time working makes sense from the inside. The problems are real, the house is quiet, and thinking about them feels more responsible than lying there doing nothing. The second is that three in the morning is the worst hour of the twenty-four for this kind of work. Researchers who study the body's daily rhythms find that good mood is at its lowest in the small hours and bad mood at its highest. The parts of the mind that plan and keep things in proportion are also at their weakest. You can't act on anything from bed in any case. The conclusions you reach at that hour are unreliable, and they tend to be grim. The third is practical. You give your problems ten minutes in the evening and your best hour in the day, and you learn a short routine for the night that doesn't involve solving anything. Chapters 12 to 14 cover how.

This book is about what you do with your mind when you're awake in the night. It isn't a treatment for insomnia, though some of what's here overlaps with what sleep clinics teach.

Four cautions.

If you've had trouble sleeping for months, or it's making it hard for you to cope during the day, the NHS advice is to see a GP. There's an effective treatment, and chapter 15 describes it.

Some night waking has a physical cause. If anyone has noticed your breathing stopping and starting while you sleep, or you make gasping or choking noises in your sleep and you're always very tired by day, the NHS says to see a GP, because those are the main symptoms of sleep apnoea. Pain, night sweats, a bladder that wakes you several times and some medicines can all break sleep too, and a doctor can help with those. Don't stop or change a prescribed medicine without talking to whoever prescribed it.

Waking very early and being unable to get back to sleep is listed by the NHS among the symptoms of depression. If that's your pattern, and your mood has been low for weeks, please see a GP.

And if the thoughts that come in the night include thoughts of ending your life, please get help straight away. In England that means NHS 111, or 999 if you're in immediate danger, and you don't need to wait for the morning. The small hours are a bad time to be alone with those thoughts, and chapter 4 explains why they're at their loudest then.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.