The thing I never thought I would keep in my nightstand
My 3 a.m. monkey mind has been on overdrive recently.
The other night I woke up replaying a conversation with an old boss from six years ago. Last night, I was in a rowboat with colleagues from my Obama days, and my brain wanted to start pulling up maps to see if the distance in my dream was even possible in one day, since I didn’t remember sleeping on the boat.
Not exactly thrilling plots. Call it the stress of September, the shit show that is 2025, or eclipse season — my middle-of-the-night brain has been active.
People always ask me: how do I make the wake-ups go away? The truth is, you don’t. Back in cave times, waking up in the dark was a survival feature. Someone needed to check for lions. Fast forward to today, the lions are work stress, family drama, or parsing every scene of The Summer I Turned Pretty finale (Team Conrad over here).
Here’s the biology twist: around 2–4 a.m., your body temperature starts to rise and cortisol (your stress hormone) ramps up to get you ready for morning. That’s normal. But if your stress baseline is already high, that cortisol surge can tip you awake — and once you’re up, your brain starts scanning for danger before it lets you relax again.
Which is why you can’t just “think” your way back to sleep. Your logical brain (the prefrontal cortex) is mostly offline, while your fight-or-flight system is wide awake.
So what you need isn’t positive thinking. You need to flip your nervous system back into rest mode.
Here’s what happened the other night. I went to my toolkit and tried cognitive shuffling (picking a letter and naming words). It generally works well for me — active enough to distract without overstimulating. But my brain was not having it. “A is for apple, B is for… but that’s not what I meant when I said…”
Then I got up to clean. I hate cleaning, and generally just walking into the kitchen is enough for my brain to say, “Anything but this, please let me go back to bed.” But walking past the fridge, I remembered my favorite daytime tool for emotional spirals: an ice pack.
Ice on the back of your neck instantly stimulates the vagus nerve — the highway between brain and body. That triggers the parasympathetic nervous system (a.k.a. rest-and-digest). I grabbed the ice pack, held it to my neck, and the spiral stopped. I went back to bed, rolled over, and fell asleep.
The next morning, I tossed a few disposable shake-’em-up ice packs in my nightstand to have for future spirals.
Do I tell you this because I think ice packs will be the magic cure for you? Maybe, but probably not. The point is knowing how your sleep works — and having a toolbox ready — so you don’t panic when the lions (or Instagram drama about Dancing with the Stars) show up at 3 a.m. And giving yourself permission to experiment.
You will wake up in the middle of the night. That’s normal. What matters is figuring out what’s going to make you feel safe — and stop the spiral.
