Have you ever gotten into bed and felt the weight of life crush down on you? Charlie Elizabeth Culverhouse explores why we feel depressed and anxious at nighttime, and how to deal with it. 

Summer has brought us her delightful long days, heralding in plans for picnics and banishing my seasonal depression - thank god! But in the absence of the winter blues, a new problem has reared its head; what I call the ‘late night lonelies’. 

The term encapsulates that sinking feeling you get in your stomach as the light begins to fade; you remember that thing you did or said all those years ago and still wish you hadn’t. You feel the pricking of tears behind your eyes as you compare your career to those of your friends.

The tears spill over as you look at your Hinge ‘most compatible’ and reckon with the fact you’ll never again feel the touch of another human being. You try to sleep it off but the thoughts keep you awake, no matter how hard you mash your face into the pillow. 

To distract yourself, you watch Blue Valentine on a loop for six hours, eat an entire pack of yum yums despite being gluten-intolerant, and scroll through Tumblr as you lick icing off your fingers - or is that just me? You lie there knowing that, in the morning, you’ll feel like death and cancel your plans to wallow in this ache. But the alarm goes off and you feel…fine?!

Understanding the 'late night lonelies'

When I tell Dr Sophie Mort, a clinical psychologist and mental health expert at Headspace, about my late night lonelies, she promises it’s very normal. In fact, Headspace’s research has shown 56% of Brits often have the same rush of negative thoughts when they lay in bed to sleep too. 

“When we get into bed and we are no longer distracted, the negative feelings and worries we have about ourselves may feel like they get louder,” she explains.

“There is no longer any activity to buffer these thoughts and unfortunately, this is where a vicious cycle can start. We lie down to relax, anxious thoughts flood in, the body responds to the thoughts and tension builds, worries increase – this time potentially including worries about why we are so worried and whether we are ever going to sleep.”

So it seems my cycle of night-time questioning is pretty universal. But why are we all so sad at night? There’s a few theories posed by psychological science but the most common cause is ‘cognitive distortions’ or what Mort more simply calls ‘unhelpful thinking styles’. 

The psychology behind nighttime anxiety

These are patterns of thinking that stop us seeing a situation, or more generally our lives, clearly. Using my own thinking as an example, comparing my career to my friends’ is an example of ‘black-and-white-thinking’.

It makes me believe that because my friends have better, more stable jobs than me, mine must be on the complete other end of the spectrum and be awful when in fact it can be just a little worse but still good.

And my Hinge despair doesn’t mean I’ll be alone forever, that’s just another cognitive distortion called ‘jumping to conclusions’ showing up. These conclusions are based on, Mort says, hopefully ‘very little evidence’.

“When we are tired our defences are down, and our anxious thoughts ramp up, there is often a deluge of distorted thoughts that are not only incorrect but make us feel like nothing good is going to happen and that everything is our fault,” Mort explains. 

Read more: Your hormones impact how you feel about your partner – here’s how

Another possible cause for the late night lonelies is nighttime light exposure. A 2023 study of over 85,000 people found that excessive exposure to artificial light during the nighttime from bulbs or screens can be linked to an increased risk of disorders including anxiety and depression.

In fact, light exposure increased the risk of depression by 30%, leading researchers to recommend a complete avoidance of artificial light at night for those wanting to better their mental health. 

But for all we can blame the nighttime silence and blue-light of our screens for the late night lonelies, we’re not helping ourselves with the coping mechanisms we rely on to get through them.

Strategies to cope with nighttime anxiety

“Night-time can be a period where we slip into habits that make us feel bad about ourselves,” Eloise Skinner, an author and psychotherapist, told me, hinting not so subtly at my Blue Valentine and yum-yum obsession.

We do this particularly at night because, as Eloise points out, “nighttime can emphasise that another day has passed without the resolution to our worries we might have hoped for”. This makes justifying negative behaviours easier.  

So it’s clear that I feel bad, often for little reason, simply because it’s nighttime and that I should definitely not trust how I feel about my life after 9pm. But, at the same time, I’m not really helping the situation with my reaction to that sadness. 

So I ask Dr Mort for some advice and she shares two simple tips:

1. Build a mindfulness practice. “Mindfulness teaches you the skills to notice, and most importantly let go of, the thoughts and feelings that pop into your mind and try to drag you into the kinds of worry-filled rabbit holes that keep you up at night,” she says. 

2. Schedule in ‘worry time’. Practice worrying in that specific time and place to delay worry outside of that time and place.

And they work. I started a journal to combine the two (I’m a busy person) and spend the time it takes for my dinner to cook, writing down, rationalising, and figuring out solutions to my worries from that day. I get to leave behind the catastrophising, and have even laughed at my thoughts when they’re on paper as they seem so far-fetched and outlandish. Apparently it’s easy to see your ‘black-and-white-thinking’ in actual black and white. 

In addition to stopping the late night lonelies, her tips have saved me a fortune in yum-yums.