It’s 3 a.m., you wake up with a start, the silence is total, but your brain starts working. That late email comes back, a forgotten invoice, your child’s cough, one too many sentences in a meeting. Impossible to get back to sleep, the thoughts go round and round, and the more you struggle, the more they race.
Psychologists talk about middle of the night mental spiralthis interior talk show where you are host, guest and audience all at the same time. American psychologist Jeffrey Bernstein sees these scenes unfold every week in consultation and offers a 4-word sleep tip that has helped many patients calm these nocturnal ruminations. A very simple phrase, but used at the right time.
Why the brain starts to loop at 3 a.m.
For Jeffrey Bernstein, waking up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason is nothing unusual: it’s the moment when an already stressed brain starts looking for problems to ruminate on again. Tired of being silent, it behaves like an internal nighttime talk show, where you question, comment and judge everything you experienced during the day.
Most of the time, these nightly ruminations are not about real emergencies, but about hypothetical scenarios: what if my child got sick, what if I lost my job, what if I made a mistake on this matter? By responding to it at 3 a.m., you activate the adrenaline and alert system, which further delays sleep.
The phrase in 4 words: “This thought can wait”
To break this circle, Jeffrey Bernstein proposes the phrase “”This thought can wait”. He summarizes his interest in two ideas: “This thought can wait works because it is easy to remember”Then “The sentence recognizes the thought without fighting it“, explained Jeffrey Bernstein, psychologist, in an article published on the site
Psychology Today. You don’t deny the thought, you just arrange to meet him later.
At the moment when a concern arises, it is a matter of repeating, mentally but firmly, these four words. The sentence creates a boundary between you and the flow of images. Many try to go back to sleep by thinking over and over to find a solution; this maintains the alert. The idea is to move from resolution to calming: breathe slowly, say the sentence on an inhale and an exhale of about five seconds, then imagine placing the thought in a “thought jar” that you will reopen in the morning, without reaching for your phone.
Breathing, gestures and training to strengthen the sleep trick in 4 words
French sleep specialists advise combining these words with small body rituals. Sophrologist Carole Serrat recommends, when the thought comes back strong, to inhale while clenching your fists, to say “Stop!” internally, then exhale while releasing the hands and shoulders, repeating ten times. At the same time, a few minutes of cardiac coherence-type breathing, with approximately five seconds of inspiration and six seconds of expiration, help the nervous system return to rest mode.