I can’t sleep and my mind won’t stop racing — what do I do at 2am?

Stop trying. That is the load-bearing, strange first line of the library’s page on this, and the rest of the answer is the boring things people skip on the way to the dramatic ones.

Let resting be the whole goal. The page Stop trying to fall asleep says sleep is the one performance that flees an audience, and at 2am the audience is you: checking, scoring, forecasting tomorrow’s wreckage. People who ended years of this describe the same turn: they demoted the night from a test to a rest. Lying still in the dark with your eyes closed genuinely gives back some of what sleep gives, and once the night stopped being a failure in progress, most of them found sleep showed up on its own. Two small rules serve the demotion. Do not look at the clock; if the alarm has not rung, the time is none of your business. And if something physical is quietly wrong, too warm, dead pillow, the wrong position, fix it first.

Give the mind one boring job. The same page says a racing mind will not accept think about nothing but will accept a small, dull assignment: animals A to Z, counting down from three hundred by threes, building a house room by imaginary room. If list games leave gaps that worry sneaks through, one person found the hunt for a K-animal was exactly long enough to remember their mortgage, use sound instead: an audiobook or podcast you already know, at the edge of audibility, on a timer. Familiar, quiet and finite is the recipe.

Move the thinking to an hour that can use it. Several people on that page arrived at the same diagnosis: the thoughts race at bedtime because bedtime is the first silence in the day. Their fix was a daytime slot for the thinking, twenty minutes of walking without a podcast, a page of scribbled worries, a planning session with the calendar open. One person splits the shifts: the day self solves problems; the night self is a tired child who should not be allowed to run anything, and is told, out loud if needed, that the office is closed until morning. The daytime levers that decide the night: caffeine finished by early afternoon, movement most days but not right before bed, a steady wake time, and alcohol never as a sleep aid, because it sedates and then unravels the night from about 3am.

Anchor the wake-up. Anchor the wake-up, not the bedtime explains why a firm new bedtime never holds: bodies need different amounts of sleep, so a bedtime is a guess about a number you do not control. Set a wake-up time, keep it seven days a week, and let bedtime find itself. The active ingredient relayed there from a sleep specialist is thirty minutes of light in your eyes after the alarm. Expect one to two hard weeks.

Give the worry a page. The journaling trio offers three uses of a notebook for a mind that loops. Write to your future self, who only needs you legible. Interrogate the feeling: ask it why, then ask the answer why, because the first answer is nearly always a cover story. And stage the argument: when two sides of you are fighting, give each the pen in turns, because written down the sides cannot interrupt each other.

Who this is not for. The anchor page’s safety line: if your sleep looks like a disorder rather than a drifted schedule, hours awake at night, unrefreshing sleep no matter the timing, breathing that stops, that is a doctor conversation, not a technique, and the library’s page on being always tired walks that road. And if what keeps you up is money, there is an answer here written for that night.