Sleep, the first casualty of worry

During the day, attention is taken up by concrete tasks: replying, moving around, deciding. These tasks occupy the mind and push back, without resolving it, whatever is troubling. In the evening, that occupation disappears all at once. Whatever had been waiting all day comes back in a rush, exactly when the body is trying to settle down to sleep — two strictly opposite movements.

A sleepless night makes the mind more sensitive the next day: ordinary setbacks weigh more heavily, get handled less well, and leave more things unresolved. Those unresolved things then feed the following evening's worry, which again gets in the way of sleep. Lack of sleep is therefore not just a consequence of worry: it becomes one of its drivers.

Get the worry out of your head before bed. Write down, even in three lines, whatever is going round in circles — not to solve it, but to stop having to hold it in mind. The mind lets go more easily of what has been set down somewhere than of what exists only in memory.

Set aside a time in the day to worry, not the evening. Ten minutes, in the late afternoon, to go through what is weighing on you. Paradoxically, allowing yourself to worry at a fixed time reduces worry at other times — including at bedtime.

Do not stay in bed waiting for sleep. After twenty minutes without sleeping, get up, do something calm under dim light, then go back to bed. Lying there struggling unintentionally strengthens the link between the bed and anxious wakefulness.

Look at regularity more than duration. Going to bed and waking up at stable times, weekends included, helps more than trying to "make up" for a sleepless night with a long lie-in, which simply shifts the problem.

If this cycle has lasted several weeks, if it wears down the whole day and not just bedtime, it is no longer a simple matter of adjusting habits. Talking to a support professional is not reserved for nights that have already become unbearable: the sooner the cycle is named, the sooner it loosens.