You didn't wake up from a noise. Your eyes just opened, your heart was already going, and nothing had happened. Then you looked at the clock and did the math.

This one is about the nights you did everything right and woke at three anyway.

Sleep is built in two halves that do completely different jobs, and that structure alone explains why 3 a.m. feels the way it does. The cortisol claim you've read online is wrong in a way that makes people feel broken — cortisol climbing in the early hours is supposed to happen. And if stress or discomfort started the waking, shouldn't fixing it end the waking? It's been tested, and the answer surprises most people: the thing that starts a sleep problem and the thing that keeps it going are often not the same thing.

Then why the same thought is manageable at noon and unbearable at three — when you wake in the night, the part of you that worries wakes up first, and the part that puts things in proportion is still asleep.

The practical half starts by taking something away. Cool room, dark curtains, no caffeine after two. That's sleep hygiene, and the clinical guidance is that on its own it doesn't do what people think. The tools that actually work are in this episode, free, whether or not you ever speak to me. It ends with a two-minute reset.

WORK WITH ME

Free 20-minute consultation, in person in Portsmouth, New Hampshire or over Zoom.

https://calmopshypnosis.com — (207) 606-8745

PLEASE LISTEN SAFELY

The reset at the end of this episode is a relaxation and guided-imagery exercise. Never listen while driving, operating machinery, or doing anything that needs your attention to stay safe. If you have a history of seizures, or have dealt with dissociation or a serious mental health condition, listen along rather than following the exercise, or check with your provider first. This show is educational and is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for care from a doctor or therapist.

Calm-Ops Hypnosis provides hypnotherapy services and is not a substitute for medical or mental health treatment. Andrew Azevedo is a Certified Hypnotherapist and Professional Member of the American Hypnosis Association, member no. 008081. Hypnotherapy services are not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any medical or psychological condition.

Calm-Ops Hypnosis LLC is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the U.S. Navy or the Department of Defense.

You have the power. We set it in motion.

To the one who woke up at three or four. Again.

Not from a noise. Not from a dream that you can remember.

Your eyes just opened.

And your heart was already going like something just happened.

And nothing had. You looked at the clock. Everybody looks at the clock.

And then you did the math because everybody does the math.

Four hours and twenty minutes. If I fall asleep right now.

And then your brain does the most helpful thing.

It starts unleashing thoughts, memories, feelings.

A to-do list at the best possible time.

Well, here's what I want you to know before we go anywhere else with this.

You are not the only one awake at this time right now.

More than a third of adults wake up at least three nights a week.

Almost a quarter wake up every single night.

And when researchers ask how long it had been going on,

more than nine and ten said longer than six months.

So this is not a small, strange thing happening to you.

It's the majority being lived by a lot of people

who each think they are the only ones.

This is Unpacked. I'm Andra Acevedo.

And today we're going to be talking about three in the morning. Why it happens.

Why it keeps happening long after.

Even though there are no reasons or the reasons for it are gone.

And what you can actually do tonight.

If you listen to the last one, you know what happens when there's alcohol

in your system.

The five o'clock drink, the rebound, the bill coming due at two or three

in the morning. Well, this one is about the other nights.

The ones where you did everything right.

Nothing is in your system, you have a reasonable bedtime, no reason at all,

and you're still awake at three.

Now, one housekeeping note before we continue,

than just saying it, I want you to understand that I mean this.

This is an educational podcast.

It is not medical advice, it is not therapy, and I am not diagnosing anybody.

Hypnotherapy is a vocational and avocational self-improvement.

Sleep, stress, focus, habits.

If something in your life needs a doctor, it needs a doctor,

and I'll say so again later when we get to the part where that matters.

So, don't listen to the last section of this episode while you're driving.

I'll tell you before it starts.

Homopsipnosis LLC is not affiliated with, endorsed by,

or sponsored by the US Navy or the Department of Defense.

Alright, now that we got that out of the way, let's get into it.

Let's start with the thing almost nobody tells you.

Because it reframes the whole experience.

Sleep is built in two halves that do completely different jobs.

The first half is heavy.

It's dense with what's called a slow wave of sleep.

And that deep physical repair work, that's kind of what's happening.

That's the part that's hard to wake somebody out of.

And that's the part where if the phone rings, you might genuinely not hear it.

Then after about three or four hours, it changes.

Now the second half tilts towards the dreaming and the lighter stages.

Less repair, more processing.

So, sorting through your day, filing things away,

and is much easier to interrupt.

So, by three in the morning, you are physiologically closer to being awake

than you were at one in the morning.

Not because something went wrong, but because that's the design.

Here's the way I want you to hold that concept.

When you first fall asleep, you're deep,

like at the bottom of a swimming pool.

Somebody could say your name and you would not hear a thing.

But later on, you start floating up to the top.

Still asleep, but now you're just under the top, like close to the top level.

So, at three in the morning, somebody says your name and this time you hear it.

Your eyes open and you think, wow, what was that? Something must have happened.

But nothing happened. They said it exactly the same way.

They said it three hours ago. You were just close enough to hear it this time.

And it's the same with whatever is on your mind. It's there all evening.

It was there while you were asleep.

It didn't get bigger at three in the morning.

You just came up near enough to be able to hear it.

And there's a second thing stacking in the same window.

Your core body temperature usually bottoms out somewhere between two and four

in the morning. It's lowest point of the entire 24 hour period.

So, the architecture is thinning and the thermostat is at the floor

in the same stretch of the night. So, one thing I want you to try this week.

When you wake, notice the time and write it down.

Just the number, like on a pad on your phone.

Do that for a week before you decide it's random.

But I think you'll find, and most people find, that it isn't random at all.

Now, let me correct something you probably have read on the internet

because it's everywhere.

And it's wrong in the way that it makes people feel like they're broken.

You'll be told cortisol spikes at three in the morning is your problem.

Cortisol rising in small amounts is supposed to happen.

It starts climbing in the early hour and peaks shortly after you get up.

It is the thing that gets you out of bed at all.

A body that didn't do that couldn't start its day.

And it's a gradual climb, not a spike, so the rise isn't the fault.

What changes is what the rise gets interpreted as.

When a system has been running hot for long enough, and I mean months to years,

not to be confused for a bad week, that ordinary overnight climb stops registering

as a usual morning and eventually starts registering as something is off

in your body. Same hormone, same schedule, different reading.

And this is where I want to give you the image that I think does the most work

in this whole entire episode. It's an alarm that can't tell the time.

Now, most people would tell you it's a false alarm, that nothing's on fire,

you're overreacting, it's just anxiety, calm down.

I'm not going to tell you that because my experience, it isn't true.

Usually the thing that's keeping you awake is worth thinking about.

It's a real problem, something you're responsible for,

something with an outcome that matters that isn't fully in your hands.

I'll give you my experience.

There was a stretch of time where I was responsible

for somebody's medical situation, and I did everything I knew how to do.

And it wasn't presenting the way the textbook said it would present as.

We got them where they needed to go, and it turned out I had been right all along.

And for weeks afterwards, I laid awake at night going back through it.

Did I miss something? Was there something I overlooked?

The alarm in my brain wasn't wrong that it mattered, because it mattered enormously.

It was brought up as the timing being wrong.

And when there was nothing that I can do, like actually do about it,

because at three in the morning, you cannot call anyone.

You can't look anything up that will help.

You can't fix it, resolve it, apologize for it,

or find out if it turned out OK. There's no action.

And especially at three in the morning, there's no available action for you, none.

And your nervous system is standing there ringing a bell

because it doesn't have a clock. And that's the whole thing.

The alarm is doing its job. It just can't tell what time it is.

And notice what list that you make in your body.

Nobody lies awake about a problem they can solve.

You don't wake up at three about an email you can send.

It's always the unresolved things,

the outcome that matters that you know isn't within your control.

For me, it's almost always performance that I'll get something wrong

that I won't do it well enough.

And it will cost me something I work very hard for. And yours will be different.

But I bet the shape is the same thing.

Now one thing to notice when you wake at three,

before any thought arrives in like the first couple of seconds,

what is your body already doing? Your heart, your chest, your jaw.

Most people find that the body is up before the thought is.

And that's the order it actually happens in.

So this is the part that nobody tells you.

And it's the reason people end up thinking there's something wrong with them.

Here's the question I keep coming back to.

If the thing keeping you awake is stress or the pain

or whatever happened, then surely if you fix

that the sleep comes back pretty much on its own, right?

Now, take away the cause. You take away the problem.

It's a reasonable idea. And it's been tested.

And sadly, it doesn't hold.

There's research where people were given two strongest available treatments

for serious trauma. Their daytime symptoms approved substantially.

And not one person's sleep came back to normal. Not some of them, none.

The daytime got better, but the nights didn't.

So the sleep is not simply a symptom of the other thing.

It becomes its own thing.

And once you understand why, you stop blaming yourself.

So stay with me for this. Think about spraining your ankle.

You sprain it and it hurts. So you start walking around with the pain.

You put your weight on the other side. You take the stairs differently.

And that's not weakness. It's intelligent and it's the intelligent thing to do.

And your body does it automatically without asking you.

Then eventually your ankle heals. But you're still walking wrong.

Nobody told you to stop. The limp got learned.

And now the limp is what's wrecking your hip.

And your hip has nothing to do with your ankle.

The original injury is completely gone. And the compensation is still running.

And the compensation has become now the problem. Well, sleep does exactly this.

Something happens. A stressful year. A loss. Pain.

A stretch of work you couldn't put down. And your sleep breaks.

And you do the sensible thing. You start protecting it.

You go to bed earlier to get more out of it. You lie there longer. Trying.

You cut things out of your everyday life or evening.

And what happens is you're trying to take it as seriously as you can

because it's important to you. Every one of those is a form of a limp.

And each one quietly makes it worse.

Going to bed earlier when you're not tired. That means lying awake longer.

And lying awake in bed night after night teaches your body something.

It teaches your body that the bed is where you stay alert.

And here's how I know you'll believe me. Because you probably already do.

You probably heard that you shouldn't meditate while lying in bed.

Because you'll just fall asleep. And that's true.

Isn't it that everybody who's tried it knows that it's true?

Nobody argues with it. And why is it true?

Because your body has learned over thousands of nights

that the specific place means sleep.

It doesn't decide it. It just goes with it. It does it. Okay.

So if your body can learn that and specifically learns that bed equals sleep,

then what do you think it's been learning for the last six months?

Same mechanism. Same body. Running the other direction.

And that's the part that matters.

At some point the thing that started this stops being the thing that's

keeping it going.

The stressor can be completely resolved

and the years over the situation is now fixed and you're fine.

But the sleep problem carries on under its own power.

If you've been lying there wondering why you still can't sleep

when your life is objectively okay now. And I think that's your answer.

It isn't that you're ungrateful or that there's some hidden thing wrong with you.

It's a limp and a limp is the thing that you can retrain.

There's one more piece, and it explains why the same thought is manageable at noon

and unbearable at three. Two things are happening.

When you wake up at three in the morning, not all of you wakes up at once.

The part that worries wakes up first. It's already up before your eyes are even open.

The part that says hang on, it's actually not that bad. That part is slow.

That part is still asleep.

So for a while, you've got the worry and nobody there to argue with it.

That's why the same thing feels enormous at three and completely manageable

at breakfast. Nothing changed about the problem overnight.

The part that usually you keep things in proportion just hadn't turned up

yet. Your thoughts aren't smarter at three in the morning.

They're just less supervised.

Which means the three in the morning version of a problem is not the true

version of it.

It's the version with the adult out of the room.

So here's the other half of it.

All day, your brain has a hundred things pulling at it.

Work, traffic, the conversation you're half in, the ache in your back.

It can't listen to all of this. So it turns most of that volume down.

And that's not a flaw. You just never get through a whole Tuesday otherwise.

But at three in the morning, all of that is gone. There's nothing to turn down.

So whatever's left gets all of you. That's why pain is worse at night.

And the researchers are blunt about it. The pain didn't get worse.

There's just nothing else left to drown it out. And you already know this one.

There's a tap dripping somewhere in your house.

It's been dripping all day and you haven't heard it once.

But at two in the morning, it's the loudest thing in the building.

Nothing changed about the tap. Everything else just got quiet.

Now I'm going to nerd out for just a second.

And this isn't your thing necessarily.

It's more me, but I hope you can just write it out for a little bit.

But some of you are going to know exactly what it means when I talk about this.

It's about Cerebro. In the X-Men, there's a machine called Cerebro.

Professor X goes into this big sealed empty room, puts on a helmet,

and suddenly he can hear every mind on the planet.

And the thing about Cerebro is that it doesn't create anything.

It just amplifies what's already out there. And there's no volume knob.

He doesn't get to hear one mind at a comfortable level.

He gets all of it at full strength. And in that moment, it isn't a gift.

It's overwhelming and it takes great skill to control.

That's your bedroom at 3 in the morning. The lights are off. The world's shut down.

And nothing's coming in.

But everything already in your head comes back at a thousand times

of the volume with no way to turn it down.

You don't get to think about the thing a normal amount.

That's not a character flaw.

That's just what happens when a quiet room gets really loud,

specifically in your mind.

And that's also why the bed can carry things that have nothing to do with sleep.

If you're in pain, 3 in the morning is when there's nothing to distract you

from it.

If you had an argument with your partner and you didn't get to resolve it,

you're now lying 18 inches away from them in the dark,

in the place you're supposed to be resting.

The unresolved thing is physically in the bed with you. That's not your imagination.

That's the room doing what a quiet room does.

Now I need to be straight with you about something.

And I'd rather do it here in the middle than tack it on

at the end like a fine print.

For some people, this is more than a stress pattern.

If you're waking up at 3 because of something specific that happened to you,

something like trauma, that's a different conversation and it belongs with a doctor

or a licensed clinician and not with me.

I'm not being coy about that specifically.

I'm telling you where kind of my lane ends.

And I'll tell you why I'm confident in saying that.

The research I mentioned where people got real treatment for serious trauma

and their sleep didn't come back cuts both ways.

It means the sleep is worth working on in its own right.

And it means if there's something bigger underneath,

working on the sleep alone was never going to be enough. You might need both.

That's not me passing you off.

That's me telling you what the evidence actually says. Okay, so back to it.

So let's talk about what to do and I'm going to start by taking something away

from you.

Most of the sleep advice you have ever been given is a placebo arm

of the study.

I want to be precise about that because it sounds like a cheap shot

and it isn't.

Pool room, dark curtains, no caffeine after two, no screens before bed.

That's called sleep hygiene.

And the clinical guidance is that sleep hygiene on its own has not been shown

to work for chronic sleep problems.

It's so reliably weak that when researchers want

to test the real treatment, they use sleep hygiene as the control condition.

It's the sugar pill that they compare the medicine against.

That's like washing a car when the engine won't start.

And nothing's wrong with the clean car, but it's not the repair.

So here's what's actually part of the medicine and the good news is

that you can start tonight and it costs nothing.

So let's do number one as the step

and that's stop doing the math.

The clock is the first thing that turns being awake into a problem.

So that calculation, you know,

four hours and 20 minutes if I fall asleep right now is what recruits the alarm.

So before the math, you're a person who's awake.

After the math, you're a person who's failing.

So turn the clock around, put the phone across the room

so you cannot do any arithmetic about a number you can't see now

to give the body the signal instead of the argument.

You cannot talk your nervous system down. You've tried.

Everybody's tried laying there trying to explain

to yourself that this is fine and has never once worked because the part

of you that's activated doesn't process arguments.

It processes signals at that moment.

So give it one really good signal, a long, slow breath out,

longer going out than coming in four or five of those.

And that's it.

And I want to be careful about what I'm claiming here because this is

where people get sold a lie and you are not trying to fall asleep.

Trying to fall asleep is the thing that keeps you awake.

You're trying to stop being on high alert.

Those are two different jobs and only one of them is available to you at three

in the morning.

Now three, put that thought somewhere.

Grab like a pad and a pen and put it by your bed,

not your phone because the phone is a door into everything else.

And one line, no elaboration, no solving it, just the fact of it written down.

The point isn't the note.

The point is that the mind stops rehearsing something once it knows it's

been recorded somewhere else.

It's going to keep circling because it doesn't trust you to remember and a piece

of paper is enough to satisfy that.

And one more, which is the one thing that people usually try

to resist.

If you've been awake for 20 minutes, then get up, leave the room, low light,

no screen, something boring, and then go back when you start to feel heavy again.

I know that's the opposite of what you would want to do,

but remember that limp that we were talking about previously.

Lying there, fighting it is the exact behavior that teaches your body

that the bed is where the fight happens.

So getting up is how you stop teaching at that.

That's the last one. And turning the clock away aren't hygiene, by the way.

They're actual real ingredients to actual medicine that will work.

So if you take nothing else from this episode, take at least those two things.

So, where does what I do come into all this?

Those tools that I taught you retrain where you sleep and what you do

when you're awake. They're good. They work.

And I just gave them to you for free because you should have them.

Whether or not you ever speak to me.

What they don't do is the changing of the setting itself.

The feeling of being on alert.

The threshold that's been creeping down for years.

You can retrain the bed and still be the person whose alarm goes off

at a whisper.

And that's the piece I work on and the argument for is in one sentence.

What's keeping this going is a learned response.

And a learned response are what hypnotherapy work is for.

You can't reason a threshold back up.

People know perfectly, well, they're three in the morning.

Thoughts are definitely out of proportion.

Knowing it has never once helped all three thoughts

or like the things that are passing through you in

that timeframe in the morning. They just compile.

So, what changes a setting is repetition delivered in a state

where the system is actually receptive.

And that's the whole modality in a single line.

Now, let me tell you what the evidence says.

And it's real weight because I'd rather undersell this than have you find out at,

you know, three in the morning that I've oversold it.

There's a study where people were given hypnotic suggestion before a full night's

sleep with their brain activity measured on an EEG.

Not how did you sleep, but actually measured.

The people who responded well to suggestion got about 13 extra minutes

of the deep restorative sleep.

So that was like half the night, not a headline number, a real one.

And alongside it, their nervous systems shifted out of that always on state,

which to me is the more interesting finding

because that's the mechanism rather than just the stopwatch.

So three honest caveats and I'm giving you all three.

The first, that worked in people who responded well to suggestion and

that is not everybody.

Some people are highly responsive, some aren't,

and you don't really know until you try.

Now, the second, there's a proper systematic review of hypnotherapy

for sleep and it found that it helps and said plainly that the quality

of the studies is low and you shouldn't generalize too far from them.

That's the review's own conclusion, not mine. This is a small evidence base.

Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.

And the third, I'm not fixing whatever started this.

I'm working on what's keeping the alarm sensitive, reducing, not curing.

If somebody promised you they'll cure you of the sleep, then walk away.

And on the question I get asked the most, does it last?

Where anyone has followed people up, it's held reasonably well.

But the follow ups are small and there's one finding in there

that I think is the most useful thing in this whole entire thing,

specifically this episode. The people who kept practicing at home held on to it.

The ones who stopped when the sessions stopped,

they didn't hold on to any of the stuff as well,

which makes complete sense when you think about the limp that I was talking

about earlier. Practice is like a worn down shortcut across the field.

Nobody built that. It's there because people just kept walking on it.

The first time you walked on it, it was like still grass. Same the second time.

It only turns into a path after you've done it a lot.

And that's what practice between sessions is for. I can show you where to walk.

I can't wear the path down for you.

That's why this is a course of work with practice in between is specific

because that's where you do your own kind of like reinforcements

and not one dramatic session where somebody fixes you

and everything is solved. It's physical therapy, not surgery.

Nobody does three reps and has a strong back.

And if any of that sounds like your situation,

there's a free 20 minute consult and the links in the show notes, no pitch on it.

You tell me what's going on. I tell you honestly whether I think I can help.

And sometimes the answer is that you need to speak to someone else,

but at least you'll hear it from me and it will be honest.

I don't know if you're driving. This is where you stop and come back later.

I know the one somewhere around

three said,

"Just a wake list." He said,

"The thing you didn't say. The thing on Thursday.

Nothing you can do about any of it at

that hour."

And you're doing it.

We're going to do something, something different for the last couple of minutes.

It's not sleep. It's not a trick. It takes about two minutes.

You don't have to close your eyes or lie down or be anywhere in particular.

If you're walking, you can keep walking.

So let's start.

"Let the

breath,

the shoulders

of

your

head,

the

room is doing."

It

doesn't have to be your

traffic fan, somebody

in the next place,

somebody

else's.

Here's the thing I wanted to show you.

Somewhere in you,

there's a setting that's burned up.

Been

doing a job,

being

Dane

for

one.

Think it.

Just if you

never stop,

got you through something.

Still on shift because nobody ever told it

that the shift ended.

Doesn't need

to be argued with.

Doesn't need to be fixed.

Just needs to know

that nothing is on fire. Right.

Things

sleep. Going.

Those are

different.

Only once for.

And order yourself to sleep.

And

duty.

Nobody else.

There's

no

session.

Doesn't.

Okay. And we're back. How did that feel?

I hope it was relaxing for you.

And I know it isn't like the past previous episodes where we had kind

of like a full relaxation mode.

one's just kind of like a quick one to kind of help reset.

And that's the end of the episode.

If you take one thing,

that thing that started this and the thing

that keeps going are not the same.

And I want you to understand that about this specific episode.

And the second thing is the one that you can work

on.

So, the show notes have every study I mentioned,

including the 13 minutes and the review that says evidence is thin.

Go and check them out. And I'd rather you did.

And as per usual, please, me if you need to, you know,

send this to someone that really needs to hear it, by all means, share it.

my website, calmopshypnosis.com, you can find my section in the podcast along

with the ability to book a 20-minute session.

Again, not anything that, you know,

is going to force you to commit to a session.

I can just simply tell you, you know, whether we can help you out and

then book a session from there. Again,

this is the real work here.

And if anything else, and you're not ready for a session, by all means,

continue listening, supporting, learning as we grow together and changing some

of our habits and trying to reframe our mindset regarding the things that we can

and cannot change.

So, as per usual, until next week,

you're not alone, not in this. Be good to yourself.

And And until next time.