An Overzealous Guard: Why Anxiety is Worse at Night

If you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of getting through your entire day — the work, the school drop-offs, the pick-ups, the meetings, the errands, the hundreds of tiny responsibilities and decisions that make up modern life — only to crawl into bed and suddenly feel like your mind has flipped on an alarm, you’re not alone.

I’ve met so many clients who tell me some version of the same story: “I’m fine all day. Then I turn off the lights and my anxiety just swoops in.” Not gently, obviously – anxiety is rarely that thoughtful – but like a sudden, uninvited guest with a bullhorn.

They describe lying there wanting nothing more than sleep, while their thoughts start racing through every possible worry: things that happened today, things that might happen tomorrow, things that probably won’t happen but could in some alternate universe. One worry bleeds into the next, and before they know it, they’re wide-awake and feeling even more anxious about all the sleep they’re losing. It hardly seems fair.

What’s going on here? What does nighttime seem to amplify anxiety?

During the day, you have endless distractions — emails, conversations, tasks, deadlines, commutes. Even if you’re stressed, you’re doing. You’re engaged. You’re focusing on one thing after another.

At night? Everything stops — except your thoughts.

And for many people, that’s when the unprocessed thoughts and emotions of the day finally catch up, opening the door for anxiety to come in and start telling you everything that could go wrong. And this leads to a vicious cycle. One anxious thought – whether it’s a valid concern or a fabricated worry – leads to another.

An Overzealous Guard

Here’s where polyvagal theory comes in.

It only takes one anxious thought to shift your nervous system into fight-or-flight mode, and once it’s there, it’s wired to scan for danger. It’s not scanning for one threat. It’s scanning for all possible threats. Real, imagined, hypothetical, exaggerated — it doesn’t care. It’s casting a wide net. This is why you may find yourself lying awake overthinking - it’s your nervous system on high alert looking for any sign of danger.

And the more it does this, the more your body ramps up: increased heart rate, shallow breathing, doing whatever it can to get you ready to fight, run, or protect yourself in some way. This is great if you’re being chased by a bear. Not so great if you’re trying to sleep.

Believe it or not, this is your nervous system operating the way it’s supposed to. Its job is to protect us. It’s meant to be on the lookout, detecting threats before our brains can even register what is happening (a process called neuroception). So it’s doing everything right, just at the wrong time.

The good news is, we can communicate to the body it is safe. One of these ways is practicing 3-6 breathing, where we inhale for a count of three, and exhale for a count of six, slowing down our heart rate, and letting the nervous system know it is safe and can stand down.

Similarly, from an Internal Family Systems (IFS) lens, nighttime anxiety often comes from an anxious protector part that is absolutely convinced it’s helping you. Like a well-intentioned but overzealous security guard, it doesn’t understand context or timing. It just kicks into high gear and refuses to step back — even when you’re exhausted, lying in your bed, wishing it would quiet down for five minutes.

Seeing this anxious part as something trying to help — not something wrong with you — can create real breathing room. It can help you relate to the anxiety instead of drown in it. In time, you can learn to show it some gratitude for what it is trying to do, and then ask it to quiet down.

And Don’t Forget: You’re Tired

Here’s an obvious, but important point: by nighttime, your brain is tired.
Your cognitive resources are depleted.
Your ability to challenge or question anxious thoughts is significantly lower.

Your brain just doesn’t have the energy to put things in perspective – what feels trivial at noon, might feel catastrophic at midnight. So everyday worries can feel huge, urgent, and unsolvable.

It can be helpful to remember this next time you’re lying awake with your thoughts racing. Over thinking is often an innate, subconscious attempt to regain control of a situation that feels out of control. We can get tricked into believing that if we just keep thinking, eventually we’ll figure things out, even though we know this rarely works.

And it’s even less likely to work at night. Again, by this point, our cognitive resources are spent, making us more susceptible to anxious thoughts and less likely to stumble on any eureka moments - chances are, you won’t have the capacity to solve all of life’s problems at 3 am.

I’m not about to promise any sort of guaranteed solution - what works perfectly for you may not work for someone else, and vice versa, which is part of why therapy can be helpful - but for many of my clients, remembering this has made a difference. One of the most helpful things they say to themselves is something like:

“I’m not at my best right now.
I’ll figure this out in the morning.”

This is essentially what mindfulness practitioners would call a labelling technique (and if you’re interested, you can find a very helpful labelling technique here). When we stop fighting anxious thoughts and instead acknowledge them with curiosity and even compassion (remember, they’re trying to help) we can let go of them more easily.

This doesn’t dismiss your concerns or minimize your feelings. And it doesn’t argue with the anxious part, which usually makes it louder. It simply acknowledges the truth: the middle of the night is not the best problem-solving time.

If nighttime is when your thoughts get loudest, know this: you’re not the only one staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. wishing your brain came with an off-switch.

There are ways to work with this — gently, compassionately, and with a better understanding of what your mind and body are trying to do.

Remember - You don’t have to fight it.
Just breathe and remind it that you’ll handle everything in the morning.