Singing the Nighttime Blues

Audio By Carbonatix

Why do people tend to get sicker at night? As a parent, have you seen a child’s fever spike at night after it was steady all day? Earaches hurt worse at night. Noses are stuffier at night. There are actually medical reasons for all of those situations. Our body temperature naturally rises at night. When you lay down, fluid in your ear tends to collect in one place and puts more pressure on your ear drum. Nasal passages also swell at night. Mystery solved!

Something similar can happen with our thoughts at night. We start singing the nighttime blues. At the end of a long day, when we are tired, we look around and all we see is everything that isn’t done. In the quiet of the evening, as we prepare to go to sleep, our thoughts tend to go south. Perhaps we start thinking about our children and all of the things we haven’t said or haven’t done or won’t be able to do.

Part of why we might think more negatively at night is because we’ve just been too busy all day. And that’s a good thing to an extent. But when life slows down, we can begin to think of all of the ways we don’t measure up as a husband, an employee, a dad, a sibling, or a friend. I think that type of worry and anxiety can cause people to lose sleep at night.  

What if, just before going to bed, we decide to watch a little Netflix? Let’s imagine it’s a show with a plot that involves murder, adultery, crimes against children, rape, abuse, or a medical emergency. And if it is, do our minds simply forget what we saw, or are we affected by those images and that dialogue? I think that our bodies and minds absorb that negativity whether we realize it or not.

So, what can we do? I think it’s appropriate to look at our nighttime routines and consider how they can be altered and turned toward the positive. For example, how often is our last activity of the day looking at an electronic screen? According to Mark Rosekind, former director of the Fatigue Countermeasures Program at the NASA Ames Research Center, engaging in technology causes our brain to rev up as electrical activity increases and neurons start to race. It’s the exact opposite of what should be happening before sleep. He also claims that responding to an email or playing a video game will cause your body to tense and make it less conducive to sleep. 

Another hot spot for negativity at night is participation on social media. We see tweets or posts on social media that either make us feel bad because we aren’t doing something we think we should be, or posts that frustrate us because somebody else is or isn’t doing something. 

Instead of engaging in any of those activities, why not take a few minutes in the evening to sit alone and be grateful for whatever positive events happened that day? Or read from a book that contains loving and kind thoughts. Consider sipping a soothing non-caffeinated tea and just listening to some soft music. 

When we are overtired or are carrying a lot of negative thoughts, that will spill over into the interactions we have with our families. We need to look at how we can turn things around and win more often at home.