A Stoic practice
Can't sleep because your mind won't stop? A Stoic practice for the night
When your mind won't let you sleep, the Stoic approach is to close the day deliberately rather than argue with your thoughts: review briefly what happened, write down what is unfinished so your mind does not have to hold it, and bring your attention back to the present moment, which is almost always bearable. Seneca described reviewing his whole day each night before sleep.
Night magnifies things. In the dark, with nothing else to do, the mind replays a conversation or runs ahead to tomorrow's meeting, and every problem looks bigger and less solvable than it will at breakfast. Trying to force sleep usually makes it worse.
Seneca's answer was an evening routine. In On Anger he describes going over his whole day once the lamp has been taken away, hiding nothing from himself, and he adds that the sleep after this kind of review is calm and deep (On Anger III.36). The point was not to judge himself harshly but to settle accounts, so that nothing was left open. This page is about racing thoughts at night. If sleeplessness is persistent or is affecting your health, it is worth talking to a doctor.
A 5-minute Stoic evening practice for racing thoughts
Keep a notebook and a pen by the bed, and use a dim light rather than your phone if you can.
- 1Get the thoughts out of your head.
Write down the thoughts that are circling, in short lines. You are not solving them, only setting them down somewhere other than your mind.
- 2Review the day briefly.
Answer three questions in a sentence each: What went well? Where did I fall short? What will I do differently? Be as fair to yourself as you would be to a friend.
- 3Park what is unfinished.
For anything still open, write the first small step and when you will take it: tomorrow at ten, call the bank. The mind lets go more easily once the thing has a time.
- 4Ask what is unbearable right now.
Marcus Aurelius told himself not to take on the whole of life at once, only this moment (Meditations VIII.36). Right now you are lying in a bed. That is all that is happening.
- 5Return to the body.
Breathe slowly, letting each out-breath be longer than the in-breath. Notice the weight of your body on the bed. If thoughts come back, let them, and return to the breath. You are allowed to rest even if you do not sleep.
What the Stoics wrote
A soul fixed on what is to come will never settle; in waiting for tomorrow, it forfeits today's joys. Grieving for a loss and fearing one are no different from each other.
A mind leaning into tomorrow cannot settle, which is exactly how it feels at two in the morning. Seneca's remedy is to come back to now, the only place where rest is possible.
More Stoic passages on fear and worry →Do not disturb yourself by thinking of the whole of your life. On every occasion ask: what is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing? You will be ashamed to confess.
At night the whole of life tends to arrive at once: money, health, people, the future. Marcus's advice is to shrink the question to this moment and ask what in it is actually unbearable.
There is no place you can retreat to with more quiet or more freedom from trouble than your own soul — especially when you carry within you thoughts that bring immediate tranquility.
Marcus wrote this after noting how people long for retreats in the country or by the sea, when the quietest place available is the mind itself. On a sleepless night, that retreat is closer than it feels.
More on the mind as a retreat →