Divorce Keeping You Up at Night? How to Stop the 2 A.M. Spiral

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If divorce is keeping you awake at night, you're definitely not alone.

You go to bed exhausted, but the second everything gets quiet, your brain decides it's time to solve your entire divorce.

What if my ex is hiding money? What if something happens with the kids? What does that email from my attorney mean? What if this goes to trial? Did I remember to send that document? Should I respond to that text? What if I can't afford this?

Suddenly it's 2:34 a.m., you're wide awake, and you're trying to solve problems that probably cannot be solved from your bed.

In this episode of How Not to Suck at Divorce, Andrea Rappaport and family law attorney Morgan Stogsdill are talking about divorce anxiety, insomnia and what to do when you can't stop thinking about your divorce at night.

And we're giving you an actual strategy.

Morgan explains how to separate the things that genuinely require action from the things that feel urgent because your anxious brain is filling in the blanks. Andrea shares why losing sleep during divorce can make an already difficult situation worse—and potentially affect the decisions you're making the next day.

The goal isn't to pretend everything is fine.

It's learning to recognize what needs your action—and what needs your inaction.

In This Episode You'll Learn

• Why divorce anxiety can feel so much worse at night
• What to do when you wake up worrying about your divorce
• The pen-and-paper strategy Morgan recommends for getting worries out of your head
• How to determine whether something actually requires action
• Why you should think twice before emailing your divorce attorney late at night
• How to create a running list of questions for your attorney
• Why you should draft—but NOT send—emotional late-night emails
• How late-night texts and emails from your ex can destroy your sleep
• Why setting communication boundaries with your co-parent matters
• How to use OurFamilyWizard notification settings more strategically
• Why sometimes doing absolutely nothing is the smartest action you can take
• What to tell yourself when your brain refuses to shut down
• Why resting can be enough when you can't force yourself to fall asleep
• How changing your environment may help break the cycle when you're lying awake spiraling

The 2 A.M. Divorce Brain Dump

If you wake up in the middle of the night and your brain is racing, Morgan recommends keeping a pen and paper next to your bed.

Write down everything that's occupying your brain—not just the divorce stuff.

Then go through the list and ask yourself:

Can I actually take action on this tonight?

Or:

Do I have any control over the outcome of this tonight?

If the answer is no, cross it out for tonight.

If the answer is yes, decide whether it truly requires action immediately or whether you can make a plan to handle it tomorrow.

Most things can wait until morning.

And if it's something you want to discuss with your divorce attorney, write it down or put the email in your drafts. Do not hit send at 2 a.m.

Your rested morning brain may have a very different—and considerably shorter—email to send.

Stop Letting Your Ex Into Your Bedroom

Not literally. We have an entirely different podcast episode for that problem.

We're talking about your phone.

If your ex tends to send inflammatory texts, emails or co-parenting messages late at night, you do not have to allow those notifications to dictate when your nervous system goes into overdrive.

Morgan recommends setting boundaries around when you receive and read messages. Andrea also points out that if you're using OurFamilyWizard, you can choose when you receive your daily notifications.

Your ex's 10:30 p.m. message does not automatically become your 10:31 p.m. emergency.

And it goes both ways.

Don't send your ex angry late-night messages either. Aside from destroying everyone's sleep, creating a documented pattern of bad communication is probably not something you want your attorneys—or potentially a judge—reading later.

What Needs Action—and What Needs Inaction?

We often divide our problems into two categories:

Things I can control.

Things I can't control.

Andrea offers a different way to think about it during divorce:

What needs my action?

And:

What needs my inaction?

Sometimes inaction is an active decision.

You can recognize that something is scary, painful or uncertain without trying to solve it tonight.

You aren't pretending the problem doesn't exist.

You're deciding:

Not now.

Tomorrow, you can reopen the box.

Tonight, your job is to rest.

When Your Brain Still Won't Shut Up

Sometimes you've written everything down. You've made tomorrow's list. You've silenced your notifications. You've decided what can wait.

And your brain is still going.

That's exactly why we created our Guided Divorce Meditations.

Earlier this week, we released one of the meditations completely free on the podcast: For When You Can't Sleep.

It's about 10 minutes long, and Andrea walks you through putting those thoughts and fears somewhere safe for the night—not throwing them away, not pretending they don't matter, but giving yourself permission to stop carrying them until morning.

The complete Guided Divorce Meditation library is $20 and includes meditations created specifically for different moments of divorce when you need help quieting the noise.

[GET THE GUIDED DIVORCE MEDITATIONS HERE]

Resources Mentioned

Divorce Crash Course

Guided Divorce Meditations

OurFamilyWizard

Soberlink

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If How Not to Suck at Divorce is helping you get through your divorce a little smarter, calmer and more prepared, please subscribe and leave us a review. It helps more people find the show and allows us to keep creating resources that actually help you through this process.

Rate the podcast:

www.ratethispodcast.com/notsuck

And remember: you are going to get through this.

One step at a time. One day at a time. And sometimes, one hour at a time.

You've got this.

And we've got you.

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Mentioned in this episode:

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There are plenty of reasons why divorcing individuals have trouble sleeping at night. We're telling you how to differentiate between what actually needs your attention at 11 30 p.m.

What doesn't and what to do on today's episode of How Not to Suck at Divorce.

Okay, so Andrea, I'm prepping for this podcast with you. And I go into, you know, my closet to get all the apparatus we need for this podcast. And I realize

Apparatus.

that's right. It's a big word for you.

For me You're

such a jerk.

And I realized something. my next life, you know what I'm gonna I'm going to invent so I don't have to go to work anymore I am going to invent a universal chord There are chords for everything. And I'm not one of those really organized people in in work I am, but at like home, I'm not like one of those people that's like, okay, here's

This piece of equipment and this is exactly the cord that goes with it. It's just like cords are everywhere and I hate it.

Yeah, cords are not aesthetically pleasing.

Agreed.

That's what I'm gonna invent the next time that I think of well, actually when I get a little more time in my life, you you won't see me anymore 'cause I'll be inventing chords.

Okay, listen. I mean, if chords are what keep you up at night, then I guess you need to go chordless, my friend. Why don't we help the other people out there who have bigger problems than their chords? 'Cause I imagine right now they might want to choke you with a cord if they continue to hear us go on and on about our problems. Although I have to say I

Absolutely hate chords too, especially when you trip over one, like your fucking kids' iPad cords that are everywhere. I just ripped one out of the wall earlier today because I tripped on one and I just I lost it. So okay, chords or divorce, which is worse? Vote below.

With that, let's talk about what kind of keeps people up at night. I mean, obviously, from a divorce lawyer's perspective, I have a lot of clients that are up at night because they're worried. They don't feel like they know kind of what the roadmap looks like for their divorce. A lot of times they worry about real things that could happen, but I would say the majority of the time they're worrying about things that potentially are out of their control or that might never happen. Did you go through that, Andrea, when you were getting divorced?

Yeah. It's the things that are out of your control and your your brain starts to fill in the blanks of what we don't know. you start off at eleven thirty at night and the next thing you know, it's like 2 34 AM. And the problem with that is not only is hit disruptive, but then the next day when you should be a fully functioning human, when you're actually making these decisions about your divorce, you can't.

I think you're right. when you wake up and that panic sets in and you're like, there's absolutely no way I'm going back to bed, you need to identify is this something you know to be worried about? And this is how we're going to do it. The first thing I want you to do is keep some paper by your bedside. I say paper because phone in the middle of the night with that bright light in your face, even if you have

Yeah.

it turned down to the minimum.

It's still not good and it's not gonna help you go back to sleep, right?

and there's also that scientific evidence of when you actually write something down, like the the muscles that it takes to write things down, it helps it move out of your brain. So we've got our pad and paper. What's next?

you're going to write down what you're actually worried about. And speaking of that, Andrea, I wonder if this has ever happened to you. So, you know, we're so used to not writing anymore. We're like typing or we're texting or we're voice texting. Have you ever written like lately and actually had to try to like write something nicely and it just comes out almost like it looks like a drunk person wrote it?

Well, I mean, you've seen my handwriting. That's kind of me on a good day, but yeah.

Okay, so that's what I'm

talking about. You want to write it, write down what you're worried about, and hopefully in a way that in the morning you might be able to read what you just wrote.

I think that we've got two different things going on here. I think that for what we're first tackling, which is like the actual shit, like if there's actually something that needs to be addressed, that you need to write in a legible, is that the word apparatus in a legible way, right? However, if there's also just stuff that you need to brain dump.

If it's feelings, if it's just shit that's living inside your head and heart that you need to get out, then I say, baby, go for it. Scritchin scritching. Really, words are hard today. Chicken scratch the shit out of the other side of the paper just to get it out there. But for what we're first talking about is I'm pretty sure you're looking at the things that actually need to be addressed, right?

Actually, I I have to think about that a little bit because I think that in the middle of the night when you're going through a divorce, kind of what you just touched on, your mind is everywhere. You know the one big issue that's really bothering you, but like it could be I'm really worried about this upcoming trial or this hearing that I have. That's really what's bothering me. But then you're sitting there thinking about like, my gosh, and then Johnny's lunch tomorrow. I don't think I made that. And then, did I sign up Johnny for soccer?

and and and it keeps going. So I agree with you, Andrea. I think write everything down because everything coming out will be helpful to walk through it. Because my next action item is I want you to go through after you've listed everything out. I don't even care if it's related to the divorce. Anything that's on your mind that you can't sleep because it's just like a jumbled mess, write it down. List it one, two, three, all the way down. Then I want you to go back through it and I want you to ask on each line.

Can I actually take action on this tonight? Is there something I can do tonight that will calm this situation down or make me feel a little bit better? And if there is, I want you to put a check mark next to it. If there's not, because it's totally out of your control, I want you to put an X next to it.

I would say bonus points if people are color coded. You know, you could even have like some cute little colored pens and paper next to your bed. you could even if you wanted to trick your brain instead of like a check mark, you could do a heart, you know, like in red. If it's like, yes, heart, we're gonna do this, or like a big X, you know, or a line through it. So it's like, nope, getting this one out of my brain. So if somebody has check marked or hearted.

Are you telling them that that's something that you want them to take action on that minute, or is that for tomorrow?

I mean, ideally it would be for tomorrow if you can calm yourself down and and say to yourself, I always say when people are getting really anxious and really stressed out, I always say, change the channel in your brain. We got to change that channel for now. You'll go back to the channel tomorrow. But we all know there are times where you it effectively cannot change that channel. So in those times, and I'm hoping it's, you know, 10% of the time, not 90% of the time, maybe you know, no matter what.

This one thing, number one, is so bothersome that there's no way I'm going back to bed. And if that's the case, I understand it. I've been there. I've done it. And sometimes it means if you have something that you can control or that you can do to calm yourself down in that situation, it might be that you take that step to do it at that point in time. Again, very minimal amounts of times would I want this to happen. The majority of the time I'd love to see people go back to sleep to calm their body and put it.

as a check mark to deal with in the morning.

My advice is that if it's something simple, like a permission slip for a kid's field trip, or I didn't sign them up for fun lunch the next day, something that doesn't take a lot of time, right? If you can get it done in two minutes or less and get it done right, then do it. The other option, and this is what I'm a really big fan of, and I think you are as well, rather than staying up.

Later to complete a task, especially if it involves emailing your attorney, because the last thing we want you to do is fire off an email when you're tired. Why? Because that email is going to be 10 times longer than it needs to be, and that's going to end up costing you more money. So set your alarm for 30 minutes earlier. Get up 30 minutes earlier. Get up an hour earlier the next day if you need to.

Morgan always says, like, as soon as that first cup of coffee is hitting your system, that's go time, baby. And she's right. I, Morgan, have been getting up earlier a lot of days lately when I, when my evening to do list is really getting long, I know myself, I don't work past 9 p.m. It's not nothing good is gonna come out of me. So if I need to get up at 5 30 a.m., 6 30 a.m., whatever it is, I do it.

I could not agree more. And what I would say is the the items that you have that check next to, the big items that you know that you have to do something to calm yourself down on, you could put a running list together for your lawyer of these items. You know, this is what and tell the lawyer, this is what's keeping me up at night. This is what really is bothering me. Can we set a time? Here are bullet points of what's really bothering me. Ideally, it would be the next morning, not that night.

If it is that night, because you're like, I am never going back to sleep, I've just got to get this off my chest. I don't want you to send it. What I want you to do is type it and I want you to put it in your drafts and I want you to review it in the morning when you're fresh. And one other piece of advice, because I did this to myself the other night, and I know if I'm doing it, other people are doing it too. I usually set, I'm kind of like you, Andrea, I'm not great at night, I'm great in the morning. And I usually set my phone where

No more messages come in after a certain time at night. It's emails, it's text messages are quiet. I also have, you know, different things at work that will, you know, go off that I totally set to know more after a certain time. The one thing I didn't do is I have one client that likes to communicate with me in a certain way. And so I'm falling asleep the other night and it's, you know, I don't know, 10 30 or whatever, and things start dinging. And so then I'm like,

Is this an emergency? You know, I'm thinking to myself,

Mm.

and then I was fighting with my brain. I'm like, I shouldn't look at it. I'll deal with it in the morning. Nothing I can do. I have no control over it right now. What could I possibly do or say? Whatever it is. But I fought myself and I caved in and I looked at it. And guess what? It was the dumbest thing to do because it kept me up thinking all night.

It was so stupid and it could have just been something that I pushed off till the morning. I wouldn't look at it until then. So what I'm saying to you is if your ex is messaging you or emailing you at late at night, you've got to set those boundaries after a certain hour so you're not looking at it because that's the number one way to disrupt your sleep.

With that, for all of our friends out there and listeners who use our Family Wizard, please make sure that you don't have that daily notification set to like past 8 p.m. That is the worst time to get that blast from the co-parenting app saying, okay, here's the laundry list of things that your co-parent wants you to know about today. Because if you're using our Family Wizard, then there's a

pretty good chance that things might be a little tough or contentious. You don't want that headache late at night. You need to set it for a more benign time of the day when you can actually respond to any concerns or requests or demands or temper tantrums or whatever it is, but not at a time where it's going to really disrupt you from sleeping. So that's one of the things that I really like that the app does is it lets you choose because

To your point, somebody might not have a client texting them late at night. They could, it could be their ex. It could be their ex who's intentionally, because they know that sleep is important to you, they can say, you know what? Andrea's been such a bitch lately. I'm gonna text her at 10 30 at night, letting her know that she's about to hear from my attorney tomorrow.

Or,

it's like Chad and Brenda are resident couple on this divorce podcast.

Chad's been out at the bar all night downing 17 dirty vodka martinis. Yes, I know you're jealous, Andrew. Good

Love that for Chad. Love that for him.

for Chad. But what's not good is when he gets home and he's an email warrior to Brenda. And so Brenda's email starts lighting up at 11 or midnight, you know, just hitting her with all this nonsense.

Again, that's what Family Wizard is for. So obviously think about that, but you can't let that that's something that will keep you up all night because Chad had a great night until he came home and hammered out these emails.

Goes both ways, right? It could be Brenda who's out all night throwing back the espresso martinis, and maybe she's gonna start sending Chad messages late at night that have nothing to do with anything just her aimless complaints, There's nothing for him to do about it, but it's still blowing up his phone and getting in the way of him sleeping. So, friends, don't do that.

And here's another important side note if you don't want your ex doing that to you, don't do it to them. Because if there's ever an established pattern of bad behavior that ever gets in front of attorneys' eyes or the judges, god forbid, the judges' eyes, you want to make sure that it's a one way street and you want to make sure that it's not something where they're like, yeah, but you texting him back a Seth Rogan meme.

Or, you know, some inappropriate gift, which guys, if you ever need a list of inappropriate things to send your ex or co-parent, hit me up because I've got a whole list of them. But don't do it. You're going to get in trouble and you're going to get your hand slapped. And then it just makes your whole case fall down the drain. Don't text your ex late at night. Don't email your attorney late at night. There's almost nothing that cannot wait until the next day.

So should we recap all of this for everyone? Cause then I want to get into really quickly what you do with all those things that you had to put an X next to.

Okay, so number one, in the middle of the night, if you cannot sleep, what I want you to do is get a pen and paper out. I want you to write down what you're worried about. Label it one through a hundred and thirty-five. Hopefully not that many, but you

boy.

you get what I'm saying if it's a real bad night. Next to each number, I want you to ask yourself, can I take action on this tonight? Or do I have control over the outcome on this tonight?

If the answer is no, I want you to put an X next to each one or even put a line through it. I don't even care. It might feel better to have that big line through it, just knocking things off the list. On the ones that might be a yes, meaning, can I control the outcome tonight or can I take action on this tonight? And I will tell you, there's not much you can do in the middle of the night. So hopefully you're not going to have a lot of action items at 2 a.m. But if there is something that you can do, I want you to put a check mark next to it.

And then we'll talk about what you can do next.

So let's talk about the things that you crossed off. Just because you crossed it off on your sheet of paper, whether you used a color-coded pen or not, it doesn't mean that it got crossed off in your brain. It's still there, right? let's say it has something to do with money or your kids or how long this process is taking You can make as many X's and cross marks as you like. It doesn't really make it go away. So what do you do then?

That is one of the reasons why, if you did not yet hear the episode that we released two days ago, go back and listen to it. On our mini episode this week, we released one of our guided meditations. And this one specifically is for when you can't sleep. it's about 10 minutes, and you get me. And I'm talking you through

Exactly what you need to do to help your brain say goodnight. So it's a lot of validation of what you're going through and here's what you do. Here's how you put all of those thoughts and feelings into like a box, essentially. And then you close the lid on the box. You're not throwing the box away. The box is gonna be there for tomorrow, but you're not doing this now. And the reason why we develop these guided meditations.

It comes from, you might have heard me talk about this or before or not, but I I have a panic disorder. So I suffer from really awful panic attacks. And what I notice is that one of the things that helps me more than anything else is when I'm walking and listening to something. I didn't want something super like woo-woo, where it's like, connect with your inner child and let's go for a walk with her. Like, shut up. No.

But I needed a voice of reason and a steady voice of calm that could validate where I was and tell me what the hell do I do? So that's exactly what we created. it's all these different specific moments. What we're doing right now, the one that we're talking about today is obviously when you can't sleep at night. That's what I want you to do. I want you to go and play that meditation. If you want to buy.

The meditations, they're $20 and it gets downloaded to your favorite podcast app, just like our show does, and then they're there whenever you need them. You have to find a way to make the noise shut up. That is the only thing that you can control. And it goes back to what I said at the very beginning of this episode. There's a lot of problems with not sleeping. And it's not just, I'm gonna be tired the next day. You're potentially setting yourself up for a

really bad next day where you can overeat, over intake on caffeine, over intake on anything, and make bad decisions because you're exhausted. And when we're exhausted, we are primed to make mistakes.

I love that we did the meditation podcast for everybody because I think that nobody's doing that. It's it's all kind of shoving divorce information down their throats. And sometimes that they don't need all of that. They need just to calm themselves down. So back to what we were talking about. What do we do with the list where you've crossed out the things because you can't control it in the middle of the night? What I want you to tell your brain at that point is I'll deal with this tomorrow. This is a tomorrow issue.

And the ones that I crossed off tomorrow, I'm gonna wake up and I'm going to go through them. And it might be like a to-do list. Maybe I'll just move some of those into the attorney question list. But I will tell you that if you just tell your brain tomorrow we'll deal with this, it will calm a little bit because you have a plan. A lot of times when your brain runs, it's because you have no plan. So you're telling your brain, I have a plan to deal with this, but it's going to be tomorrow. On the action items that are outstanding for that night.

You just need to determine, is it something I really want to write down questions for my lawyer now because it will make me feel better? Or can I table this, but I know these are questions that are going to be for my lawyer tomorrow.

You know, people often categorize problems into two categories: things that I can control and things that I cannot control. I'd like to challenge the way we look at that. I'd like to look at this as things that need action and things that need my inaction. So we talked about this a few episodes ago. Sometimes doing nothing sends louder response.

Sometimes the inaction is recognizing that this is hard and that this sucks. we're not telling you pretend everything is fine and go night night. No. Recognize that this is hard. Yeah, it's hard. And I deserve a need to sleep. So what needs my immediate action and what needs my immediate inaction? What am I gonna recognize is hard and what am I going to actively do nothing about right now? Because that is the smarter choice.

It's a very different take And I think that it's important that we start looking at things through a different lens. Because I don't know, for me, Morgan, it was always so frustrating when people said, like, well, that's out of your control. Cause it felt so wrong, especially like as a parent, you know, to think like, sorry, there's nothing you could do about that.

and what I want you to do is once it's done, I want you to tell your brain, okay, that's it for tonight. Game over.

Done.

Good night. We're done. And shut her down. And like I always tell my one son who gets up all the time, I'm like, you don't have to go to sleep. Just tell your body I'm going to rest. You don't have to say, I have to go to sleep because that will amp you up. Because we all know if you can't sleep, and then you tell yourself, I can't sleep, I can't sleep. That just makes you worse. All you have to say is

I don't care. I'm gonna sit here, I'm gonna look at the ceiling in the dark, and I'm going to rest, and that is good enough.

pro tip, if anyone else suffers like the way that I think a lot of people do, like, you know, Morgan's son, my older son, has the same problem. He actually had the struggle last night. Sometimes I have it. Another little trick that sometimes works, change your environment. Sometimes leaving the room where you have the experience of not sleeping makes it better.

So, like for me, if I wake up in the middle of the night, sometimes it's really hard for me to fall back asleep in my bed because my body has that memory of like waking up in the room, if that makes any sense. And then you're like, I I don't know. Like somehow it's like you want to leave the scene of the crime. So sometimes,

Do you go sleep in your car?

yes, that's exactly what I want people to do, Morgan. I want them to, I want them to collect all the cords they can around their house. And I want them to take all their cords and get into a car.

Go to the living room. Maybe you go for a little walk outside. I don't care what time it is, as long as you live in a safe neighborhood, get some fresh air on your skin, on your body. Hey, there is nothing better than listening to one of our guided meditations while you're moving. Telling you, like take a walk around your block, come back in. And if you gotta lie on the couch and maybe watch a TV show while your brain finally drifts off, then do it.

Whatever it takes for you to rest, because Morgan is exactly right. For a lot of people, telling your body, I have to go to sleep, I have to go to sleep, you're not gonna fall asleep. So just rest. Tell your brain, not now, we're done. We've done everything we need to do. We're done for the day.

That's right. So check out our DCC, our course online. We also have all the new meditations. If that's something that can help you, again, we're here to help. If you need more community, we'd love to see you in our private community. It's totally confidential. You don't have to put your name there, but you will find others going through the same thing that you are. We do this show for you. If you like it, please rate and review us. It allows us to keep going and bring on amazing guests.

And keep bringing out guides that are really helpful.

And remember, you're gonna get through this. You might not feel like you're gonna get through it, especially if you're listening to this episode and you're like, yeah, I have not been able to sleep for days now. my God, I know it this time will pass. But do something. You're gonna get through this a lot faster if you take action. Take the action.

Keep swimming. I promise you will get to the other side of this. And we are here to support you every single step of the way. And remember, my friends, you can do this and you've got this.

And we, my friends, have got you.