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How to Reduce Racing Thoughts at Night

Ways to quiet your mind and relax so you can get to sleep

  • Schedule "Worry Time"
  • Address Stressors

Prepare for Sleep

  • If You're Still Struggling

If your mind is racing, it may seem like you'll never fall asleep. Racing thoughts at night can be hard to "turn off," since they can only perpetuate the stress or anxiety that caused them in the first place.

Lying awake in bed is unlikely to help. In fact, it's likely to make matters worse. Managing stress , unwinding before bed, and using distraction and relaxation techniques, however, can help you slow your thoughts and get a better night's sleep.

This article walks you through these strategies for reducing racing thoughts at night.

Verywell / JR Bee

Schedule "Worry Time"

Scheduled worry time is a point in your day when you sit down and list what is causing you stress and anxiety, as well as some actions you can take to help address them.

For example:

By writing down your stressors and creating an action plan , you help yourself:

  • Put a name to the sources of stress
  • Release worries from your mind
  • Find ways that the stress can be relieved
  • Enjoy a sense of accomplishment when you tackle and review your tasks

If thoughts related to the stress present themselves at night, you can respond by simply telling yourself, " I don't need to think about this right now. Instead, I will think about it tomorrow during my scheduled worry time."

These affirming thoughts can shut down racing thoughts and allow you to get to sleep.

Address Your Stressors

Rather than being overwhelmed, break your stressors down into manageable chunks —and then get to work.

Here's an example: If you have a major project due at work in two weeks and feel overwhelmed or don’t know where to begin, identify the components causing your anxiety and make them part of the action plan. For instance:

  • Review the files
  • Speak with your coworker
  • Schedule a meeting
  • Draft the proposal
  • Finalize the presentation

As you accomplish the tasks day by day, you cross them off. Eventually, you can remove the stressor itself from the list.

Spend about five minutes before bed writing a quick to-do list for your days ahead. Research suggests this may help some people fall asleep faster. Tell yourself that you wrote down your tasks and you can revisit them tomorrow.

What If I Can't Cross Off a Task?

There may be some items on the list that have no apparent resolution. This ambiguity may cause additional anxiety and zap your energy throughout the day.

If you find yourself stuck in this loop, tell yourself to let it go and come back to it tomorrow. There are other things you can focus on today.

A solution may become clearer with time. And since the item is written down, you don't have to worry that you'll forget about it.

It can be helpful to set aside intentional time to relax before bed to make the night a relaxing time. Good sleep hygiene involves stopping certain activities and establishing a familiar routine that tells your body it's time for sleep.

Your circadian rhythm is the internal clock that tells you when it's time for sleep. These internal rhythms can be thrown off by several things, including lack of sunlight and too much blue light from computer screens.

A few hours before bed, turn off screens, including:

In addition, put your work aside and disengage from social media. There will always be more to do, but you have done enough for today . Now it's time to relax and prepare for sleep.

Spend at least 30 minutes, or perhaps as long as one or two hours, unwinding, and decompressing before bedtime.

Fill this time with relaxing activities, such as:

  • Listening to calming music
  • Taking a shower or bath
  • Meditating or praying

You may find that establishing a nighttime ritual that incorporates some of these activities sends your body signals that it's time to wind down.

Right before bed, or if you find yourself awake at night, you might try some other relaxation techniques, including:

  • Breathing exercises
  • Progressive muscle relaxation
  • Guided imagery

These can distract you from the effort of trying to fall or stay asleep. They can also reduce racing thoughts at night.

If You're Still Struggling

If you continue to struggle with sleep, speak with your healthcare provider about additional treatment options.

For example, you might benefit from  cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI) , medications to relieve anxiety, or sleeping pills for insomnia.

Our Doctor Discussion Guide can help you start that conversation.

Insomnia Doctor Discussion Guide

Get our printable guide for your next healthcare provider's appointment to help you ask the right questions.

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Stress and anxiety can cause racing thoughts at night that prevent you from getting the sleep you need.

By identifying your stress, scheduling time to attend to your worries, and establishing a healthy bedtime routine, you may be able to avoid racing thoughts and sleep more soundly.

Newman MG, Llera SJ. A novel theory of experiential avoidance in generalized anxiety disorder: a review and synthesis of research supporting a contrast avoidance model of worry .  Clin Psychol Rev . 2011;31(3):371–382. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2011.01.008

Scullin MK, Krueger ML, Ballard HK, Pruett N, Bliwise DL. The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep: A polysomnographic study comparing to-do lists and completed activity lists .  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General . 2018;147(1):139-146. doi:10.1037/xge0000374

Wahl S, Engelhardt M, Schaupp P, Lappe C, Ivanov IV. The inner clock—Blue light sets the human rhythm .  J Biophotonics . 2019;12(12). doi:10.1037/xge0000374

By Brandon Peters, MD Brandon Peters, MD, is a board-certified neurologist and sleep medicine specialist. 

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Why Am I Having Racing Thoughts at Night?

Wendy Wisner is a health and parenting writer, lactation consultant (IBCLC), and mom to two awesome sons.

mind wandering can't sleep

Daniel B. Block, MD, is an award-winning, board-certified psychiatrist who operates a private practice in Pennsylvania.

mind wandering can't sleep

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Why Your Thoughts Race at Night

What do racing thoughts at night feel like.

  • Tips for Coping
  • Treatment Options

Racing thoughts at night are often a symptom of anxiety, but anyone can experience them when they have worries on their mind. Such thoughts can be hard to control, cause you to feel overwhelmed, and make it difficult or impossible to sleep. Racing thoughts that make it so you can't sleep are often caused by stress, anxiety, other mental health conditions, medications, or excessive caffeine consumption.

For example, imagine that you’re finally settling in for the night. You’re tired and ready to get some rest. But as soon as the lights go out and your head hits the pillow, your thoughts start racing.

You begin to think about your to-do list, or the endless worries you have about the day and weeks ahead. Or maybe you begin thinking about something embarrassing or scary that happened to you years ago. You may be ruminating on a “worst case scenario” situation you imagine happening sometime in the future.

Whatever your thoughts are, you can’t stop them from coming. As the thoughts race, your heart pounds too, and it feels like you will never get to sleep. This all feels unfair! Night is supposed to be the time when you finally get to unwind and relax. Your racing thoughts make that feel impossible.

If you are experiencing racing thoughts at night, you are far from alone. Many of us experience them at one time or another, especially if we are experiencing heightened stress in our lives. Some of us may experience this chronically as part of a mental health challenge we face.

Either way, having racing thoughts at night does not have to be your fate. There are helpful and effective ways to cope with and treat racing thoughts at night.

Some people who experience racing thoughts at night also experience racing or anxious thoughts during the day. But many people also have the experience of feeling relatively calm during the day, only to find that their thoughts start to race as soon as they try falling asleep.

The reason for this is that most of us are more easily distracted from our worries and fears during the day. We are working , caring for others, indulging in screen time, and moving rapidly from one activity to another, barely aware of our interior emotional experience. But when everything goes dark and quiet at night, we find ourselves alone with our thoughts, and the darker, more difficult emotions and worries tend to present themselves.

Racing thoughts are thoughts that come on suddenly and seem to populate your mind without you being able to control them. Some common experiences include:

  • A list of thoughts that stream through your mind on a loop
  • The feeling that you are watching different thoughts and scenarios play themselves in your mind, as if on a movie reel
  • The thoughts seem to come in quick succession, as though someone is talking too fast inside your head
  • You may also be experiencing other signs of anxiety that accompany these racing thoughts, such as a racing heartbeat, sweating, or sped up breathing

What Causes Racing Thoughts at Night?

Life stressors—such as job stress, familial stress, financial stress , or experiencing a major life transition—is the most frequent cause of racing thoughts at night. This is likely the cause if the experience of racing thoughts at night is new to you, and can be traced to a new stressor or stressful event.

Racing thoughts at night can also be attributed to mental health disorders, especially anxiety disorders. Experiencing racing thoughts at night might be something experienced frequently, or intermittently by people who have mental health challenges, and can be exacerbated by difficult life circumstances.

Below are some of the most common causes of racing thoughts at night.

Life Stresses and Transitions

Experiencing a job loss, worrying about your financial future, moving, having a baby —any major life change or stressor can cause you to experience racing thoughts at night.

Anxiety and Panic Disorder

People who have anxiety tend to have more trouble sleeping and may experience racing thoughts at night. Panic disorder also makes you more likely to experience this. Sometimes racing thoughts at night resemble symptoms of a panic attack.

Racing thoughts are one of the characteristics of bipolar disorder, especially during a manic episode. However, simply having racing thoughts does not mean you have bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder has other attributes as well, including intense mood fluctuations, engaging in risky behavior, and experiencing delusions or hallucinations. Bipolar disorder requires a proper diagnosis from a doctor or psychiatrist.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

People who experience obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may have racing thoughts. Usually, nighttime isn’t the only time that people with OCD experience racing thoughts. Obsessive thoughts, compulsions, and fixations on things like order and cleanliness are other common characteristics of OCD.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Experiencing a trauma, either recently or years ago, can cause post-traumatic stress disorder. Symptoms of the disorder include racing thoughts, including at night. In this case, you may fixate on the traumatic event that happened to you, and experience flashbacks to it.

Medications

Certain prescribed medications, either for mental health or to treat a medical condition, can cause racing thoughts and insomnia . If you have recently started a new medication and have found that the racing thoughts at night correlate with this, talk to your doctor about potential side effects and alternative medications.

Recreational Drugs

Certain recreational drugs, like methamphetamine and cocaine , can cause racing thoughts. Additionally, racing thoughts and insomnia can be a symptom of withdrawal from certain medications, including opioids .

Caffeine Consumption

Consuming caffeine, especially too close to bedtime, can make it hard to fall asleep, and can cause your thoughts to race. Some people are more sensitive to the effects of caffeine than others.

Tips for Coping With Racing Thoughts at Night

For many of us, making a few life changes and adopting some healthy habits to cope with stress, can help reduce or eliminate nighttime ruminations and insomnia. Here are some tips.

Keep a “Worry Journal”

Writing down some of your thoughts and fears before you go to bed can be therapeutic and can help reduce nighttime stress. Often, our stressful thoughts boil to the surface at night, but they are still in our heads the rest of the day. Having an outlet to “let them all out” when it’s not late at night can really help:

  • Get a notebook and label it “ worry journal ”
  • Take 5-10 minutes a day to list your worries
  • Or, spend 5-10 minutes doing some freewriting about whatever thoughts come to mind

Meditation , either right before bed, or sometime during the day, can have a strong impact on your ability to fall asleep without overwhelming thoughts.

  • If this is your first time adopting a meditation practice, keep it simple.
  • You can start with just a few minutes a day, and then go from there.
  • If you need help, there are several apps on the market that will guide you in a meditation.
  • There is no “right” way to meditate; just closing your eyes in silence for a few minutes a day is enough.
  • You might find that your thoughts race while you meditate, but meditation is an opportunity to learn to watch your thoughts go by more mindfully, and learn to let them go.

Decrease Screen Time Before Bed

Many of us are addicted to our screens, and stay on them all day, through bedtime. Unfortunately, these habits have a tendency to wreak havoc on our ability to fall asleep easily and can cause us to have a racing mind at the end of the day. Additionally, too much screen time before bed, along with “blue light” emitted from screens, can cause a decrease in melatonin levels, which can make it more difficult to fall asleep.

Be Mindful of Your Evening Media Consumption

Watching scary TV or movies , or reading disturbing books right before bed, can impact our sleep, and cause racing thoughts. Many of us have become addicted to “doomscrolling,” too, feeling compelled to keep up with upsetting world events and news items.

Making a point to replace our evening media consumption with a bath, meditation session, or a heart-to-heart with a loved one, can work wonders.

Address Your Life Stressors

Some aspects of life are out of our control, and these situations can contribute to heightened stress and anxiety, along with insomnia. But sometimes, experiencing something like racing thoughts before bed can be looked at as a wake-up call to make some life changes to reduce stress.

Maybe it’s time to leave a toxic job. Maybe you need to address the dysfunction in one of your primary relationships. Feel empowered to make the changes that will allow you to live a healthier, less stressful life.

Treatment Options for Racing Thoughts at Night

If you are experiencing racing thoughts at night, and trying different coping tips don’t seem to be helping, it might be time to seek professional help. Seeking counseling or therapy is a great option for dealing with racing thoughts at night and insomnia. Talking to a doctor or psychiatrist about medical options may be a good choice for you too.

Your counselor or therapist can help you figure out what’s causing your racing nighttime thoughts, including what life stressors may be impacting you, and whether or not you have a mental health condition that may be contributing.

One of the most successful types of therapy to deal with anxiety, insomnia, and symptoms like racing thoughts is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT helps you become more aware of your thoughts and helps you learn coping strategies for quieting them down. CBT also helps you manage your anxiety, and begin to recognize signs of it before it is able to take completely over.

If you are experiencing chronic anxiety, generalized anxiety, panic disorder, or another mental health challenge, there are medications available to help you manage your feelings. Common medications for anxiety include anti-anxiety drugs like benzodiazepines and antidepressants. These medications can also help you fall asleep more easily. Your doctor may also be able to prescribe you sleeping pills to help with racing thoughts and falling asleep.

A Word From Verywell

Having racing thoughts at night doesn’t have to be your reality forever. You might feel hopeless, as though you will never get a chance again to settle easily into sleep. If you feel basically “fine” during the day, you may think that pursuing methods for reducing your racing thoughts at night isn’t important or worth it.

But having difficulty falling asleep, experiencing heightened stress at bedtime, and not getting enough sleep , can have impacts on your overall health and mental health. There are effective solutions out there to address your racing nighttime thoughts, and you deserve a peaceful night’s sleep.

Bea A, Drerup M. When You’re Trying to Sleep But Your Mind Is Racing, Give These Tactics a Try . Cleveland Clinic. Updated May 7, 2019.

National Institute for Mental Health. Anxiety Disorders . Updated July 1, 2018.

American Psychiatric Association. What Is Bipolar Disorder? Updated January 1, 2021.

National Institute for Mental Health. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder . Updated October 1, 2019.

National Institute for Mental Health. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder . Updated May 1, 2019.

U.S. National Library of Medicine. Caffeine . Updated September 21, 2021.

Black D, O’Reilly G, Olmstead R, Breen E, Irwin M. Mindfulness Meditation and Improvement in Sleep Quality and Daytime Impairment Among Older Adults With Sleep Disturbances: A Randomized Clinical Trial . JAMA Internal Medicine. 2015;175(4):494–501. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.8081

By Wendy Wisner Wendy Wisner is a health and parenting writer, lactation consultant (IBCLC), and mom to two awesome sons.

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10 Sleep Experts on What to Do When You Can’t Sleep at Night

Sad and depressed woman lying in bed at home.

Some nights, it’s like you can’t get your brain to shut up long enough for you to fall asleep . You’re mentally reviewing the day you just completed while also previewing the day ahead ; sometimes, your mind may even reach way back into the archives and pull up something embarrassing you did back in high school. So fun! Or maybe you’re dealing with your little ones’ dreaded nighttime routine and the second your head hits the pillow , you’ve already begun stressing about having to run it all back the following day. Nothing like a dose of insomnia to ease your worries.

Racing thoughts or overthinking can be a sign of a serious mental-health condition like anxiety . But these nights also happen to everyone from time to time — and once we’re too old for bedtime stories , it’s not always clear what to do. Since of course there’s no one solution that will work for everybody, we’ve rounded up suggestions from ten sleep experts to help you turn your brain off at night. At the very least, it’s something to read next time you can’t sleep.

Get a little proactive.

“When you lay down at night, you don’t have any of the distractions that surround you during the day — people talking to you, dogs barking, the temptation of your smartphone. Thus, when you go to bed and remove the distractions, simmering concerns and anxiety can rise to the top. If you are struggling with a lot of anxiety, keeping a ‘worry journal’ near your bed where you jot down concerns about 30 minutes before bedtime (or in the middle of the night if you can’t sleep) can help you with this issue. Meditation during the day can also help you deal with the ‘monkey mind.’” — Dr. Craig Canapari, associate professor at the Yale University School of Medicine and director of the Pediatric Sleep Center at Yale New Haven Hospital

Distract yourself with meaningless mental lists.

“The absolute prerequisite for sleep is a quiet mind. Think of something else, rather than what’s worrying you — something with a story to it. It can be anything of interest, but of no importance, so you can devote some brain energy to it without clashing into the real world and going straight back to your worries. I fly a lot, so I imagine I have my own private jet and how would I arrange the furniture on it. If you’re someone who likes going to music festivals, what would your lineup be?” —Neil Stanley, sleep expert

Try to stay awake instead.

“Thinking about sleep and wishing for it to happen is a recipe for staying awake. This is where paradoxical thinking comes in. If you give yourself the paradoxical instruction to stay awake instead, you’ll be more likely to fall asleep. If you can be comfortable with the idea of remaining awake, then the performance anxiety and frustration that are associated with trying to sleep have nowhere to go and your arousal level drops.” —Colin Espie, professor of sleep medicine at the University of Oxford

Or just get out of bed.

“If 20 minutes has gone by as the mind races and is unable to relax back to sleep, it’s best to get out of bed. Without looking at your phone or any other screen devices, go to another dimly lit room where you keep a notebook. Write down the thoughts that are keeping you awake. Finish with the words, ‘It can wait until tomorrow.’ Then, go back to bed, focus on the breath, and mindfully relax into those words, giving yourself permission to yield to sleep.” —Jenni June, sleep consultant

Lower your heart rate.

“First of all, racing thoughts actually make sense. Think about it: It’s literally the only time of the day that you get where someone is not asking you questions or pulling your attention elsewhere. When the lights go off, the brain unfortunately kicks into gear, and this can be an issue. What most people do not know about entering into a state of unconsciousness is that you need a heart rate of about 60 or below. When your mind is racing, your heart rate is usually much higher. These thoughts are producing anxiety, which releases cortisol and makes it even more difficult to fall asleep. So what can you do?

I teach a breathing technique that helps lower the patient’s heart rate below 60. My favorite is 4-7-7 breathing, or box breathing: in for a count of four, out for seven, hold for seven. This requires concentration, counting, and not focusing on your worries or anxieties. It also mechanically slows your heart rate and gets you into the sleep zone. Meditation can work, or playing simple mind games like reciting the alphabet, etc.” — Dr. Michael J. Breus, clinical psychologist and sleep-medicine expert at Sleep Doctor

Write down whatever’s freaking you out.

“Spend a maximum of 20 minutes just getting everything out of your head and onto paper every day. It’s a therapeutic way to see that you probably don’t have loads to worry about, rather just a few reoccurring things. You can then see which worries are hypothetical (i.e., what if I make a mistake at work and lose my job) or ‘real’ worries (e.g., I made a mistake and have lost my job). For the real worries you can then make an action plan/problem-solve and for the hypothetical ones, learn to let them go.” —Kathryn Pinkham, National Health Services insomnia specialist

Get back in bed and do some deep breathing.

“Deep breathing acts as a powerful distraction technique, particularly if paired with counting. You want to aim to breathe out for longer than you breathe in, and pause after breathing in and out; so you might choose to count for three when you breathe in, then pause and count to five when you breathe out, then pause. Really focus on your breathing and counting, and if your mind wanders off, just take note of that and return your attention to the exercise. You may need to do this for ten minutes or so.” —Christabel Majendie, sleep therapist

Try not to try so hard.

“Try not to struggle or ‘try harder’ to overcome the sleeplessness or get rid of unwanted thoughts, as this can worsen insomnia. One successful approach to overcome this negative cycle is to instead learn to observe and accept these struggles, using mindfulness strategies to help.” —Jenny Stephenson, director of HappySleepers

Or maybe plan how you’ll get some sun in the a.m.

“Getting more sun exposure in the midmorning can help readjust the brain’s internal clock and make it easier to fall asleep later that night. In my book, I write about how sun exposure is now a key part of many professional athletes’ travel schedules, and seen as a way of preventing jet lag. Non-athletes can do similar things. Someone who can’t seem to fall asleep at night may want to try getting as much exposure to natural light in the morning, essentially prepping themselves to fall asleep when they want to.” — David K. Randall, author of Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep

And if all else fails 


“The great era of tinkering with sleep aids was popular in early modern Europe. Here are a few of my favorites:

‱ Put some blood-sucking leeches behind your ears. When they bore holes in the skin, pull them out and place a grain of opium in each hole. (From 16th-century French physician AndrĂ© du Laurens.)

‱ Kill a sheep, and then press its steaming lungs on either side of the head. Keep the lungs in place as long as they remain warm. (From 16th-century French surgeon Ambroise ParĂ©.)

‱ After the evening meal, eat lettuce, drink wine, and rub an ointment made of the oil of violets or camphor on the temples. Dissolve a mixture of poppy seeds, lettuce seeds, balsam, saffron, and sugar and cook it in poppy juice. Then listen to pleasant music and lie down on a bed covered with the leaves of fresh, cool plants. (From 15th-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino.)” —Benjamin Reiss, author of Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World

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How to Quiet a Racing Mind to Get Better Sleep

If you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, try these strategies to quiet your mind and get the rest you need.

Karen Asp

Can’t put that racing mind to bed? Whether it’s stopping you from quickly falling asleep or staying asleep, there’s no question an unsettled mind can be a major obstacle to slumber.

“It’s one of the most common problems we hear in our sleep clinic, especially among people struggling with insomnia ,” says Lawrence Chan, DO , a professor of sleep medicine at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus.

The problem is more than just annoying. Racing thoughts at bedtime — even if they aren’t anxious or worried thoughts — might contribute to sleep problems in people who have insomnia, according to one study . The researchers noted that this is different from rumination, which is defined as obsessive, repetitive thinking that tends to focus on negative content.

There’s a reason many people can’t stop thinking about things before going to bed. Whether you’re exploring a new city or simply plugging away at your routine to-do list, your brain is collecting new information all day long, explains Michael Breus, PhD , a clinical psychologist in Manhattan Beach, California, who specializes in sleep disorders. He is also the author of The Power of When , a book on understanding your body clock and circadian rhythms.

“Not until you climb into bed do you have any quiet time, and all of that information, including your worries, comes flying through the door,” he says.

Anxious thoughts and rumination can also keep you awake, of course. If you tend to wake up in the middle of the night and a racing mind won’t let you get back to sleep, it may mean that something is bothering you more than you’d care to otherwise admit or address, Dr. Breus says. “It’s generally a sign that something stressful is going on in life.”

Whether you’re stressed, excited, or simply replaying your day, use these tips to help quiet your racing mind — before thinking too much at bedtime becomes a habit that’s too intense to stop on your own.

How Do Big Life Changes (Like Living Through a Global Pandemic) Affect Our Sleep?

How Do Big Life Changes (Like Living Through a Global Pandemic) Affect Our Sleep?

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What to do when you can’t fall asleep, 1. ditch the devices.

Sleep doctors have been telling you for years to stop using smartphones, laptops, and tablets right before bed for good reason. Not only does the light from electronic screens mess up your melatonin production, which makes sleep physiologically harder to achieve, but smart devices can also heighten anxiety and worry if you’re reading stressful news. This habit makes the cycle of ruminating about bothersome or unpleasant news that much worse, Dr. Chan says.

Plus, the apps, websites, and news you’re reading on such devices are meant (in large part) to keep you and your brain engaged, he adds. “The internet is designed to capture attention so that you spend more eye time on screens, which can be a detriment to sleep,” says Chan.

To protect your shut-eye, switch off your devices one to two hours before bed, ideally, or at least 30 minutes if you can’t swing that.

2. Schedule Some ‘Worry Time’

Just as you schedule time to see friends or get a massage, do the same with your worries. Schedule 15 to 30 minutes a day, at least one to two hours before bed, to write down those worries. In addition, create at least one action item you can do to help deal with the issue. Thinking through those potential stressors earlier in the day should help ease how much you worry about them when your head hits the pillow, Chan says. “Ideal sleep depends on creating routines and schedules, and this is no different,” he says.

3. Create a Routine to Power Down Your Brain

Most people assume that sleep is like breathing: Your body will just do it. Not true. Modern-day living has created so much stimulation during the day that brains now operate at warp speed, and if you don’t give yours time to rest, it’ll continue going at that speed at bedtime, says David Brodner, MD , founder of and principal physician at the Center for Sinus, Allergy, and Sleep Wellness in Boynton Beach, Florida.

At least 30 minutes before you go to bed, start your preparations and then do something relaxing like listening to music or reading. Keep it consistent, and you’ll train your body to expect sleep after that relaxation period.

4. Keep a Gratitude List

Now that you’ve dumped your worries, replace the void where those negative thoughts once lived with positive ones by starting a gratitude journal, Breus suggests. The impact of those positive thoughts is greater when you write them down. So try spending a few minutes each night listing three to five things you’re grateful for.

5. Practice 4-7-8 Breathing

You’ve heard how deep breathing can help combat stress, but it can also help you fall asleep. In order to sleep, your heart rate needs to slow down, Breus says, and breathing techniques are one of the most effective ways to achieve this goal.

One of Breus’s favorites is 4-7-8 breathing: Inhale for a count of four, hold for seven, and then blow out for eight. Do this at least five to seven times to slow your heart rate.

You could also try mindfulness meditation, which helps you let go of negative and racing thoughts so you go to sleep or get back to sleep, according to the Sleep Foundation . Try apps like Calm and Headspace.

6. Do Progressive Muscle Relaxation

As you lie in bed, tense and relax all of your muscles one by one, starting at your toes and ending at your head. Not only is this incredibly relaxing, as the name implies, but it also forces you to think about the physical parts of your body, directing your attention away from whatever thoughts or stressors you’re fixating on, Breus says.

7. Maintain a Consistent Sleep Schedule

Going to bed and waking up at the same time each day is one of the pillars of sleep hygiene — those guidelines sleep docs recommend for ensuring a good night’s sleep . It helps the mind, too. “If you try to go to bed early, when your brain’s not ready to sleep, it will focus on other things,” Breus says, which keeps the brain excited and awake.

What to Do if You Wake Up in the Middle of the Night

1. get out of bed.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, climbing out of bed after about 20 minutes of worrying is the tried-and-true advice sleep doctors tell everyone they help and one of the hallmark steps of therapy for insomnia. If you spend time in bed worrying, your brain will begin to associate the two and not be able to sleep, Chan says. You’ll create a vicious cycle for yourself, whereby your bed increasingly becomes a space where it is difficult for you to sleep.

Instead, get out of bed and do something calming, such as reading a book, doing light chores, or journaling. As soon as you start getting sleepy, head to bed. “The goal is to increase your sleep efficiency, meaning that when you’re in bed, you’re sleeping,” Chan says.

2. Slow That Heart Rate

You may have used the 4-7-8 breathing technique or deep muscle relaxation before bed. Now try them again, as your goal is to not only lower that heart rate but also take your mind away from your thoughts, Breus says.

3. Write Down Your Worries

Keep a notepad and pen by your bed to scribble down worries that are at the front of your mind, Dr. Brodner says. This isn’t the same as pre-bed structured worry time, since you’re not creating solutions; you’re just getting your worries out of your head so your mind can rest.

4. Turn On the TV (and Half-Close Your Eyes)

This tip may be controversial, but a much-loved movie or TV show can take your mind off whatever is bothering you and potentially help you relax, says Breus.

Now, we know what you’re thinking: Yes, TVs emit blue light, which can mess with your melatonin production and make it harder to nod off. But unlike smartphones and tablets, which you hold close to your face, TVs are usually positioned “so far away that you’re not getting as much blue light as you think,” says Breus. Plus, most people aren’t actually watching TV as much as listening to it with their eyes closed, and blue light can’t penetrate closed eyelids.

Note, though, that most sleep guidelines recommend against TV in bed, including some experts from Sleep Foundation , so if listening to the TV isn’t helping you sleep, don’t do it.

It’s also worth stating that everyone has trouble sleeping from time to time. But if restless nights become the norm, rather than an occasional occurrence, tell your doctor. If you’re experiencing symptoms of insomnia , there are ways your doctor or a sleep specialist can help.

Editorial Sources and Fact-Checking

Everyday Health follows strict sourcing guidelines to ensure the accuracy of its content, outlined in our editorial policy . We use only trustworthy sources, including peer-reviewed studies, board-certified medical experts, patients with lived experience, and information from top institutions.

  • Weiner L et al. Investigating Racing Thoughts in Insomnia: A Neglected Piece of the Mood-Sleep Puzzle? Comprehensive Psychiatry . November 2021.
  • Suni E. What to Do When You Can’t Sleep: Insomnia Solutions. Sleep Foundation . October 23, 2023.
  • Achauer H. Why Are We All Still Watching TV Right Before Bed? Sleep Foundation . July 8, 2022.

How Late Night Boredom Can Lead to Bedtime Procrastination… and Wreck Your Sleep

mind wandering can't sleep

A 2021 study found that being bored can lead to bedtime procrastination 1 , or putting off when you actually go to bed, which can lead to poorer sleep quality overall.

  • Ai Ni Teoh, PhD , senior psychology professor at James Cook University Singapore
  • Angela Holliday-Bell, MD , board-certified physician, certified sleep specialist, sleep coach, and founder of The Solution is Sleep
  • David Rabin, MD, PhD , board-certified psychiatrist, neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and inventor, and co-founder & chief innovation officer at Apollo Neuro
  • Michael Breus, PhD , sleep expert and clinical psychologist
  • Rebecca Robbins, PhD , assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and associate scientist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital

But if you’re so bored, and it’s currently at or past your typical bedtime, why not just... go to bed? Well, it turns out being bored can make you less aware and attentive of that simple reality and more prone to the kinds of distractions that will have you wired rather than tired. Below, sleep experts explain how late night boredom can lead you to put off sleep, as well as other reasons for bedtime procrastination, plus how to overcome the habit and nix sleep disruptions.

How late night boredom causes bedtime procrastination

In the study noted above, researchers assessed levels of boredom proneness, mind wandering, and fidgeting, as well as sleep quality in 270 people, and found that higher levels of such boredom indicators were correlated with poorer sleep quality. To explain that association, the researchers also identified two meditators: inattention and bedtime procrastination.

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“Our study tested a model that drew links from boredom to inattention, and from inattention to bedtime procrastination, and subsequently sleep quality—and the results confirmed the model,” says social psychologist Ai Ni Teoh, PhD , lead author of the study. “This suggests that people who are bored find it hard to concentrate, meaning they may not pay attention to their bedtime if they’re bored at night, which could lead to delaying bedtime.” The result? Poorer sleep quality , says Dr. Teoh, which can eventually lead to mental and physical health issues.

“People who are bored find it hard to concentrate, meaning they may not pay attention to their bedtime if they’re bored at night, which could lead to delaying bedtime.” —Ai Ni Teoh, PhD, social psychologist

While Dr. Teoh says the study didn't include what the participants did when they were bored and choosing not to go to bed, she and sleep psychologist Rebecca Robbins, PhD , assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, both have a pretty good hunch: watching TV or scrolling social media. (After all, boredom proneness goes hand-in-hand with social media usage 2 .)

“At the end of the day, our willpower is depleted,” Dr. Robbins says. “We have been making decisions and processing information all day, so we are less able to self-regulate and prioritize healthy choices, like keeping our consistent bedtime routine.” Throw in late night boredom, and it’s no wonder you might grab your phone and start scrolling… and before you know it, it’s 1:00 a.m.

What is the psychology behind bedtime procrastination?

So, late night boredom can certainly lead to bedtime procrastination by essentially making you more distractible. The more bored (and less attentive) you are, the more likely you are to get caught in a doom-scroll spiral, for example, unwittingly putting off your bedtime in the process.

But another cause of bedtime procrastination happens more purposefully—by way of something called revenge bedtime procrastination . The term refers to when you “intentionally delay your bedtime to engage in activities that you deem more enjoyable,” says board-certified sleep specialist Angela Holliday-Bell, MD , sleep expert for the sleep-tech brand Helight .

The psychology behind revenge bedtime procrastination has to do with getting “revenge” for how busy you are during the day by carving out time late at night (past your optimal bedtime) to do the things you want to do. This can involve binge-watching TV shows, scrolling on social media, reading—really any form of entertainment you didn’t have time for during the day.

“At night, when we’re not at work or under the demands of others, we often feel like we can be direct agents of our time,” says neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dave Rabin, MD, PhD , co-founder of sleep-tech brand Apollo Neuro . “We use that time to feel more in control.”

The problem is, taking control over those late-night hours often means choosing to fill them with anything but sleep… even when you know that sleep is what you really need. “People get so absorbed in the activity they choose that they lose track of time, and then it’s one to two hours past their bedtime,” explains clinical psychologist and sleep specialist Michael Breus, PhD .

Who’s most affected by bedtime procrastination?

If you’re a person who needs a good deal of stimulation to feel satisfied, chances are you’ve encountered your fair share of late night boredom, perhaps leading you to seek out activities that wind up delaying your bedtime. The same goes if you’re someone whose optimal productivity happens at nighttime, says Dr. Rabin. (This means you probably have a night-owl chronotype , or circadian rhythm pattern.) Maybe that’s just when you wind up wanting to get stuff done or be creative or do something enjoyable… anything but sleep.

Those who have their entire days sucked up by work or obligations to other people are also more likely to be affected by bedtime procrastination—and that almost always includes parents, says Dr. Holliday-Bell. “That’s because after work, they tend to have a host of other childcare duties that take the remainder of their time in the evenings,” she says. “That leaves what should be their bedtime as the only time they have left to indulge in other activities.” Cue the bedtime procrastination.

What are the consequences of bedtime procrastination?

Whether it’s late night boredom or a desire to reclaim time for yourself that’s keeping you up into the wee hours of the night, bedtime procrastination can certainly affect your health.

“Most people who engage in any kind of bedtime procrastination end up getting less sleep than is required to meet their health needs,” says Dr. Holliday-Bell. “This leads to sleep deficiency , which can affect everything from your cardiovascular health to your diabetes risk.” That’s not all. Because sleep loss is connected with mental health issues , over time, sleep procrastination can also up your risk for developing depression and anxiety, she says.

“Most people who engage in any kind of bedtime procrastination end up getting less sleep than is required to meet their health needs.” —Angela Holliday-Bell, MD, board-certified sleep specialist

In the more immediate term, not getting enough sleep means “you’re not giving your body the chance to recover properly, both physically and mentally, which can increase your chances of burnout, irritability , fogginess, and fatigue,” says Dr. Rabin.

Speaking of irritability, bedtime procrastination can also affect your relationships: “People tend to have shorter fuses and become more easily frustrated when they aren’t getting enough sleep,” says Dr. Holliday-Bell. So keep that in mind the next time you stay up late scrolling, too.

How to prevent sleep procrastination

1. add more “me” time into your day.

If you’re staying up late at night in order to do things you would’ve wanted to do during the day, it’s worth considering how to fit more “me” time into your daytime schedule, says Dr. Holliday-Bell—even if that’s just five minutes here and there.

“The key is to actually schedule things you enjoy during the day so that you don’t feel like nighttime, when you should be asleep, is the only time you have to do those things,” she says. That could just mean penciling in time for a short walk or some online shopping, or listening to your favorite audiobook or playlist while cooking or eating dinner.

2. Reframe the way you think about your bedtime and sleep

While your “me” time can involve a long list of enjoyable activities, Dr. Holliday-Bell says your bedtime routine should be one of them. So, aim to create a sleep-friendly environment that’ll actually put you in the mood to sleep—versus leaving your sleep on the back burner.

“Sleep is one of the best forms of self care and should be looked at as an investment in your well-being,” says Dr. Holliday-Bell. When your bedtime routine becomes a way to indulge in that self care, it’ll become something to look forward to, rather than put off.

3. Allow your mind to wander throughout the day

Dealing with late night boredom in particular? When you're bored, you're more easily distracted. And in that state, you're more likely to put off going to bed. But here's the thing: Dr. Robbins says it's not bad to be bored , in general. “After all, we cannot sustain a razor-sharp focus for protracted periods of time,” she says. Reducing the impact of boredom on sleep just comes down to indulging your boredom during the day rather than late at night.

That means working a few activities into your daytime schedule that can let your mind wander freely. Some examples: cooking, putting away dishes, and folding clothes.

It's also important to give yourself this type of mental break ahead of hitting the hay; otherwise, your thoughts about work or other obligations could keep you awake. “Before bed, mind wandering can help you separate from your planned, regimented, and focused day, and shift into a state of mind that’s more conducive to sleep,” says Dr. Robbins.

4. Squeeze in some exercise during the day

Daytime exercise can play a huge role in helping you wind down at night—especially if your days tend to involve a good deal of stress, or you’re also coping with insomnia. “When we don’t get [our anxiety] out, it accumulates, so when we try to fall asleep, our bodies are still feeling pent up with restlessness and energy,” says Dr. Rabin. And in that state, you’re just far more likely to put off sleep in favor of some late night scrolling (womp womp).

To move anxiety out of the body and better ensure you’re ready to sleep when the time comes, Dr. Rabin suggests getting your heart rate up each day, even for just 15 to 30 minutes.

5. Set a bedtime alarm

Newsflash: Alarms aren’t just for waking up; they can also be for going to sleep. According to Dr. Holliday-Bell, setting a bedtime alarm can be key in preventing sleep procrastination . When it goes off, it’ll be a clear reminder that it’s time to start your bedtime routine—which can keep you from going down the binge-watching or doom-scrolling rabbit hole, she says.

4 tips that will help you get enough sleep

Ready to sleep like a baby ? When you follow these expert-approved strategies for better sleep, you’ll be more likely to avoid sleep procrastination and drift off easily.

1. Wake up at the same time every day

While setting a consistent bedtime is important, one of the best strategies for better sleep is having a consistent wake-up time (yes, even on the weekends), says Dr. Holliday-Bell. “This entrains your circadian rhythm to send alerting signals at the same time each morning, which can then lead to sleepiness cues arriving around the same time each night.”

2. Develop a relaxing bedtime routine—and start it early

Is your nighttime routine pure chaos? That’ll pave the way for bedtime procrastination and poor sleep quality.

Instead, strive for consistency, says Dr. Holliday-Bell. “Not only does a consistent routine help you to transition from the stress of the day to the stillness of the night, but also, it can be protective against stress that might otherwise interfere with your ability to fall asleep.”

To develop that routine, consider how you can create a sleep-friendly environment. “For instance, light a candle, turn the lights low, take a warm shower, and download a smartphone app that can ease you to sleep with soothing activities, stories, or mindfulness exercises,” suggests Dr. Robbins. (There are plenty of free sleep apps that are audio-only—meaning, no screen use required.) You might also try walking before bed for a better night’s sleep. Bottom line: Whatever it is that helps you leave the stressors of the day behind, go for it.

Also, start this routine early—ideally, 60 minutes before your bedtime if you’re also coping with insomnia, says Dr. Robbins. Still want time to scroll social media? Cool. Just do it before your hour-long wind-down begins so that you reserve this whole time for shifting into sleep mode.

3. Skip the afternoon caffeine

Your mid-afternoon coffee might feel like a great pick-me-up, but that caffeine is only going to keep you up when you have it too late in the day. “If you find yourself having multiple cups of coffee every day…that can result in chronic sleep deprivation, which causes poor functioning,” says Dr. Rabin.

If you want to improve your sleep quality, cut down on sleep disturbances, and reduce your chances of engaging in bedtime procrastination, Dr. Breus recommends not drinking any caffeine after 12 p.m. “Caffeine has a half-life of six to eight hours and can certainly affect your sleep even past the point at which you’re feeling its effects,” he says. In the afternoon and evening, go for a rest-inducing drink instead, like chamomile tea.

4. Get rid of (most) of your devices in the bedroom

For the best sleep, you’ll want to do away with digital devices (namely your phone, laptop, and TV) at least an hour before bed, says Dr. Robbins. Doing so, she says, is the antithesis to the boredom that can lead to sleep procrastination. “If we keep our routines consistent, we fall asleep faster, into better quality sleep,” she says.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. First, the aforementioned audio-based apps can provide mindfulness exercises that put you to sleep sans screen. Second, a sunrise alarm clock (like the Hatch 2 Restore ) can act as a phone-free way to create a sleep-friendly environment (one equipped with sleep stories , relaxing sounds, and mood lighting, no less). And sleep-enhancing devices like the Apollo Neuro , which can deliver soothing low-frequency vibrations to your wrist, can help you drift off more easily.

  • Teoh, Ai N. “Boredom Affects Sleep Quality: The Serial Mediation Effect of Inattention and Bedtime Procrastination.” Personality and Individual Differences , vol. 171, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110460.
  • Whelan, E., et al. “Is Boredom Proneness Related to Social Media Overload and Fatigue? A Stress-strain-outcome Approach.” Internet Research , 2020, https://doi.org/0.1108/intr-03-2019-0112.

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How to Shut Off a "Wandering Brain" When You’re Trying to Sleep

surprising cure for restless legs syndrome

Do you often find yourself lying in bed wide awake, unable to sleep at 3 a.m. because of a wondering brain? Research has shown that people with insomnia have difficulty shutting down mind-wandering brain regions at night, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to fall asleep.

Racing thoughts at night not only disrupt your sleep, they also interfere with your ability to function the next day. One study found that insomniacs had to work harder at their jobs during the day than normal sleepers because they had trouble turning on brain regions necessary to perform memory tasks. [i]

Further, the people with insomnia had trouble shutting down brain regions used for daydreaming even during the day (so it’s no wonder their minds continued to wander at night, too). Dr. Sean Drummond of the University of California, who lead the study, said: [ii]

“Some aspects of insomnia are as much a daytime problem as a night-time one.”

Proper sleep isn’t only crucial for memory and focus during the day, of course. Too little sleep is linked to a shorter lifespan and chronic conditions like obesity, depression, diabetes, cancer and high blood pressure.

So if a wandering mind is preventing you from sleeping at night, taking action to quiet it could, quite literally, save your life.

Wandering Brain? 7 Ways to Get Your Sleep Back

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an ‘off’ button for your brain? This way you could simply shut it off when racing thoughts are keeping you awake. The next best thing is to take steps to quiet your brain before bedtime and during the night, should you wake up. By using the tips that follow your brain will be just as ready for restful slumber as the rest of your body.

7. Write Your Worries on Paper

Do this well before bed by simply jotting down all those pesky worries and unfinished tasks in a notebook. This will clear them from your head and lessen the chances of waking up to ponder them. Be sure to make your worry list well before bedtime (you don’t want to write the list right before bed, as they’ll still be fresh in your mind when you want to sleep).

If you still find that you wake up with racing thoughts, keep a notepad by the side of your bed to write down thoughts in the middle of the night.

6. Deep Breathing

Quiet your mind chatter by taking slow deep breaths and purposefully focusing on each breath as you do so. Feel your lungs expand, your chest rise, the air flowing through your nose 
 then slowly exhale and repeat until you’re asleep.

5. Distract Your Brain

If your brain keeps wandering to anxiety-inducing thoughts, distract it by focusing on something else. Try to think of celebrity names that start with “A” or ‘sing’ your favorite song in your mind. Another trick is to put your fingers on the inside of your wrist to feel your pulse, and simply focus all of your attention on that.

4. Remove Disturbances from Your Bedroom

It’s important to minimize things that may wake you up from a sound sleep (allowing your mind to start wandering). Common sleep disturbances include pets, a snoring partner, light pollution, temperature (typically too warm) and noise. Try adding pink noise to your bedroom and using an eye mask to create a quiet, dark environment that is conducive to sound sleep.

3. Think Positive

Turn your wandering nighttime mind from stressful thoughts to positive ones. Focus on an enjoyable event in your life or imagine yourself in your favorite location, such as at the beach or hiking through a forest. Mentally transfer yourself to your happy place.

2. Get Out of Bed

If you’ve tried the above tips and still can’t sleep, don’t force yourself to lie in bed. Get up, grab a cup of chamomile tea and read something (calming). When you feel yourself nodding off, get back into bed.

1. Try GABA — a Natural Brain Quieter

Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is a neurotransmitter known for its inhibitory effect on nerves, essentially helping them to calm down.

Low levels of GABA are linked to mood and anxiety disorders, which is why some anxiety medications and hypnotics like Ambien and Lunesta actually work by increasing GABA activity. These drugs are linked to serious and bizarre side effects (like sleep eating, sleep sex and sleep driving!), so I can’t recommend their use.

However, GABA in its natural form can be invaluable. When taken orally, one study found that GABA worked effectively as a natural relaxant, inducing relaxation and diminishing anxiety within one hour of taking it. [iii] When you don’t have enough GABA, you may have racing thoughts and other feelings of anxiety that make it nearly impossible to sleep. GABA is known for essentially shutting off brain activity and reducing feelings of anxiety that keep you awake.

wandering brain and sleep

  • Magnesium citrate
  • Valerian root
  • Lemon balm leaf
  • Hops flower
  • Passion flower

Just take two capsules of Sleepzyme approximately one hour before bed each night with an 8 oz. glass of water to calm your mind chatter and get some sleep .

[i] Sleep. 2013 Sep 1;36(9):1307-16.

[ii] Daily Express August 31, 2013

[iii] Biofactors. 2006;26(3):201-8.

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Jesse is the co-founder and visionary CEO of The Healthy Back InstituteÂź, the world-leading source of natural back pain solutions. His mission as a former back pain sufferer is to help others live pain free without surgery and pharmaceuticals.

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4 thoughts on “How to Shut Off a "Wandering Brain" When You’re Trying to Sleep”

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Hello, I am a counsellor from Canada (hence the double “L” in counsellor) and have been practicing for over 30 years, Regarding the information about the “Wandering Brain” and sleep problems; these are great tips for promoting a better sleep habit. Tip 3, 5, 6, and 7 also work for feeling “stressed and “anxious” during the day. My observation is that the underlying concept/idea behind these techniques is rarely discussed in a clear way. This is the concept of being “present to the moment”; thus, anything that promotes the application of a present focus, works to calm a “wandering mind”. I think the interesting thing about this unifying concept, is that anything you do that is present focused, helps with sleep and anxiety problems, leaving the door wide open for all sorts of “techniques” and practices, well beyond whatever is written in the literature. And if you have ever slept badly, or are anxious, various “techniques” can all work, but can also fail to work at times, so the more things/techniques you can try out the better. Does your team have any comments about this observation?

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I could not agree more, and in 2014 we will be researching and seeking out “all sorts” of techniques to help individuals work toward not only optimal health but also optimal state of being…

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Here’s a crazy thing that I read about–and always works for me. Focus on totally relaxing two things: yout TONGUE and the EYEBALLS. I will take ten deep breaths and just focus on one of them. Then I take another 10 deep breaths and focus on the other. If I am not asleep yet, I just do the same and focus on both. It never fails!

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A combination of zinc, magnesium and calcium taken together helps induce sleep in most people in 30 to 45 minutes, with no grogginess on wake up. It is the combination that produces the effect in the brain and nervous system. You can purchase them in a combination product from several of the better vitamin suppliers or just combine 1 of each if you already have them separately in your vitamin inventory. Just normal dose for each 35-50 mg zinc, 300-500mg Mag. and 700-1000mg Calcium – and preferably not on a full stomach before bed.

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How to focus a wandering mind, new research reveals what happens in a wandering mind—and sheds light on the cognitive and emotional benefits of increased focus..

We’ve all been there. You’re slouched in a meeting or a classroom, supposedly paying attention, but your mind has long since wandered off, churning out lists of all the things you need to do—or that you could be doing if only you weren’t stuck here


Suddenly you realize everyone is looking your way expectantly, waiting for an answer. But you’re staring blankly, grasping at straws to make a semi-coherent response. The curse of the wandering mind!

But don’t worry—you’re not alone. In fact, a recent study by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert sampled over 2,000 adults during their day-to-day activities and found that 47 percent of the time, their minds were not focused on what they were currently doing. Even more striking, when people’s minds were wandering, they reported being less happy.

mind wandering can't sleep

This suggests it might be good to find ways to reduce these mental distractions and improve our ability to focus. Ironically, mind-wandering itself can help strengthen our ability to focus, if leveraged properly. This can be achieved using an age-old skill: meditation. Indeed, a new wave of research reveals what happens in our brains when our minds wander—and sheds light on the host of cognitive and emotional benefits that come with increased focus.

What happens in the wandering mind?

For something that happens so often, what do we really know about this process of mind-wandering?

For thousands of years, contemplative practices such as meditation have provided a means to look inward and investigate our mental processes. It may seem surprising, but mind-wandering is actually a central element of focused attention (FA) meditation. In this foundational style of meditation, the practitioner is instructed to keep her attention on a single object, often the physical sensations of breathing. 

Sounds simple enough, but it’s much easier said than done. Try it for a few minutes and see what happens. 

If you’re like most people, before long your attention will wander away into rumination, fantasy, analyzing, planning. At some point, you might realize that your mind is no longer focused on the breath. With this awareness, you proceed to disengage from the thought that had drawn your mind away, and steer your attention back to your breath. A few moments later, the cycle will likely repeat.

At first it might seem like the tendency toward mind-wandering would be a problem for the practice of FA meditation, continually derailing your attention from the “goal” of keeping your mind on the breath. 

However, the practice is really meant to highlight this natural trajectory of the mind, and in doing so, it trains your attention systems to become more aware of the mental landscape at any given moment, and more adept at navigating it. With repeated practice, it doesn’t take so long to notice that you’ve slipped into some kind of rumination or daydream. It also becomes easier to drop your current train of thought and return your focus to the breath. Those who practice say that thoughts start to seem less “sticky”—they don’t have such a hold on you.

As a neuroscientist and meditator, I’d long been fascinated with what might be happening in my brain when I meditate. Being familiar with both subjective, first-person meditative practice and objective, third-person scientific research, I wondered what would happen if I put these two modes of investigation together. Could I get a more fine-grained picture of how this process works in the brain by leveraging the experience of these cognitive shifts during meditation?

I started by considering the default mode network, a set of brain areas that tend to increase in activity when we’re not actively engaged in anything else—in other words, when our minds tend to wander. Maybe it was this default mode network that kept barging in during my meditation, interfering with my ability to keep my attention focused. And maybe this network was what I was learning to “tune down” by practicing over and over. I wondered if I could test this scientifically.

Supported by funding from the Mind & Life Institute , and with the help of colleagues at Emory University, I started to test which brain areas were related to meditation. We asked meditators to focus on their breath while we scanned their brains: whenever they realized their minds had been wandering, they’d press a button. Then they would return their focus to the breath as usual, and the practice would continue. As they did so, we collected MRI data showing which brain regions were active before, during, or after the button press that corresponded to various mental states.

The study, published in the journal NeuroImage , found that, indeed, during periods of mind-wandering, regions of the brain’s default mode network were activated. Then when participants became aware of this mind-wandering, brain regions related to the detection of salient or relevant events came online. After that, areas of the executive brain network took over, re-directing and maintaining attention on the chosen object. And all of this occurred within 12 seconds around those button presses.

Looking at activity in these brain networks this way suggests that when you catch your mind wandering, you are going through a process of recognizing, and shifting out of, default mode processing by engaging numerous attention networks. Understanding the way the brain alternates between focused and distracted states has implications for a wide variety of everyday tasks. For example, when your mind wandered off in that meeting, it might help to know you’re slipping into default mode—and you can deliberately bring yourself back to the moment. That’s an ability that can improve with training.

The benefits of building focus

What are other practical implications of this knowledge? Recent behavioral research shows that practicing meditation trains various aspects of attention . Studies show that meditation training not only improves working memory and fluid intelligence , but even standardized test scores . 

It’s not surprising—this kind of repeated mental exercise is like going to the gym, only you’re building your brain instead of your muscles. And mind-wandering is like the weight you add to the barbell—you need some “resistance” to the capacity you’re trying to build. Without mind-wandering to derail your attempts to remain focused, how could you train the skills of watching your mind and controlling your attention?

In our study, we also wanted to look at the effects of lifetime meditation experience on brain activity. In agreement with a growing number of studies, we found that experience mattered—those who were more experienced meditators had different levels of brain activity in the relevant networks. This suggests that their brains may have changed due to repeated practice, a process called neuroplasticity. 

One brain area stood out in this analysis: the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the default mode network that is particularly related to self-focused thoughts , which make up a good portion of mind-wandering content. It turns out that experienced meditators deactivated this region more quickly after identifying mind-wandering than people who hadn’t meditated as much—suggesting they might be better at releasing distracting thoughts, like a re-hash of a personal To Do list or some slight they suffered at work yesterday.

In a follow-up study, we found that these same participants had greater coherence between activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and brain areas that allow you to disengage attention . This means that the brain regions for attentional disengagement have greater access to the brain regions underlying the distraction, possibly making it easier to disengage. Other findings support this idea—more experienced meditators have increased connectivity between default mode and attention brain regions, and less default mode activity while meditating.

This might explain how it feels easier to “drop” thoughts as you become more experienced in meditation—and thus better able to focus. Thoughts become less sticky because your brain gets re-wired to be better at recognizing and disengaging from mind-wandering. And if you’ve ever struggled with rumination—re-living a negative experience over and over, or stressing (unproductively) about an upcoming event—you can appreciate how being able to let go of your thoughts could be a huge benefit. 

Indeed, the Killingsworth and Gilbert study I mentioned earlier found that when people’s minds were wandering, they tended to be less happy , presumably because our thoughts often tend towards negative rumination or stress. That’s why mindfulness meditation has become an increasingly important treatment of mental health difficulties like depression , anxiety , post-traumatic stress disorder , and even sexual dysfunction .

More on Mindfulness & Mind-Wandering

Learn more about how mind-wandering can make you unhappy

How mindful are you? Take our quiz!

Watch Jon Kabat-Zinn talk about mindfulness .

Reading all this might make you think that we’d be better off if we could live our lives in a constant state of laser-like, present moment focus. But a wandering mind isn’t all bad. Not only can we leverage it to build focus using FA meditation, but the capacity to project our mental stream out of the present and imagine scenarios that aren’t actually happening is hugely evolutionarily valuable, which may explain why it’s so prominent in our mental lives. These processes allow for creativity, planning, imagination, memory—capacities that are central not only to our survival, but also to the very essence of being human.

The key, I believe, is learning to become aware of these mental tendencies and to use them purposefully, rather than letting them take over. Meditation can help with that.

So don’t beat yourself up the next time you find yourself far away from where your mind was supposed to be. It’s the nature of the mind to wander. Use it as an opportunity to become more aware of your own mental experience. But you may still want to return to the present moment—so you can come up with an answer to that question everyone is waiting for.

About the Author

Wendy hasenkamp.

Wendy Hasenkamp, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and Senior Scientific Officer at the Mind & Life Institute.

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Gears in the brain spinning at night.

Mind Racing Before Sleep? Here Are Strategies to Fall Sleep Peacefully

Published on June 30, 2020 Reading Time: 3 minutes Dr. Carl Rosenberg

“I just can’t turn my brain off at night.” This is one common complaint among those who struggle with insomnia and others who have difficulty falling asleep. Worrying about daily stressors, like work and finances, counting the minutes that go by, and imagining how tired you will be in the morning…it can be an irritating problem.

If your thoughts are keeping you up at night, the trick is to change the unhealthy pattern. We have provided some information on the cause of this problem and strategies to help you find relief from a racing mind at night.

Racing Mind and Anxiety

Rapid thoughts are often a symptom associated with anxiety. They can make people feel out of control or as if they are going crazy.

When it comes to sleep, this effect of anxiety is a cyclical problem. Because your brain struggles to focus when it is tired, it often leads to racing thoughts. Anxiety and racing thoughts then keep you awake, a lack of sleep is bothersome, and sleep deprivation continues to contribute to anxiety. So, how can we break this cycle of anxiety and sleeplessness?

Find out more about symptoms of insomnia and CBTi – an Effective, Drug-Free Treatment for Insomnia .

tips for calming your mind and falling asleep

This infographic provides some advice for calming your brain and getting to sleep faster.

How to Get to Sleep when Your Mind Is Racing

If you are frustrated and tired, try these cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. You may discover a more relaxing and effective way to get the sleep you need.

Don’t Lie Awake in Bed

This can be a very frustrating problem that seems to become worse the more you think about it. It’s imperative that you break this vicious cycle of poor sleep and worry about not sleeping. For this reason, we recommend avoiding lying awake in bed. If you haven’t nodded off within 20 minutes of putting your head on the pillow, get up. Go back to your relaxing activity – journaling, reading, meditation, listening to music…Then, when you begin to feel sleepy, try to go back to bed.

This CBTi technique is called stimulus control . It may sound counter-productive, but many people find that engaging in a relaxing activity outside of bed helps occupy the brain in a positive way. This works to break the negative association that insomniacs and restless sleepers often develop in relation to bedtime.

Calm Your Mind

Relaxation training is what many commonly associate with calming exercises. Though these methods may feel silly at first, guided imagery, medication, and mindfulness are all beneficial for a racing mind. More specifically, you can focus on slowing your breath and using progressive muscle relaxation to take your mind off stressors.

Free Your Thoughts

It’s difficult to fall asleep when you are making lists of things to do and worrying about family, work, money, and other challenges. Rather than trying to simply ignore these thoughts, try to eliminate them from your thought patterns before bed. In the evening, you should get in the habit of identifying stressors by journaling and writing down lists for yourself. Once the ideas are on paper, you may find that you’ve freed up your mind.

Keep It Positive

To break the cycle of racing thoughts and worrying about lack of sleep , highlight the positive aspects of your life. Keeping a gratitude journal can help disrupt the negative mindset. Making this type of journaling a habit, gives you the opportunity to emphasize the good relationships and features that you are thankful for in your life.

Focus on Your Senses

To take the focus away from stressful thoughts, create a wind-down routine around sensorial experience. Lower the lights and consider a relaxing way to stimulate each of the five senses to find a method that works well for you. Here are some ideas.

  • Sight – guided imagery, coloring mandalas , pictures of a peaceful place
  • Smell – scented candle, aromatherapy
  • Touch – warm bath, weighted blanket , self-massage, light yoga
  • Taste – sleep-friendly snack , chamomile tea
  • Hear – sound machine, white noise, instrumental music

Make the Bedroom Your Haven for Sleep

It’s important to reserve the bedroom for sleep and make it a relaxing space. This means keeping it neat and furnishing it with colors and textures that you find soothing, rather than stimulating. Keep work materials, computers, and screens out of the bedroom.

Good sleep hygiene includes turning the temperature down in the bedroom and using shades or curtains to make it dark and help induce sleep. To avoid counting minutes and worrying about not having enough time to get the rest you need, keep alarms and clocks away from the bed.

Want more advice? Check out these 10 Tips for Falling Asleep Faster .

Always Feeling Tired? Find the Solution

Contact Sleep Health Solutions of Ohio for a full sleep evaluation and begin the journey to a more rested life.

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Written by Dr. Carl Rosenberg

Dr. Rosenberg is specialized in sleep medicine and neurology. He is also certified by the American Board of Sleep Disorders Medicine and the American Board of Psychology and Neurology. Patients with a wide range of issues are referred for sleep studies and he works together with them to find effective solutions that fit their lifestyle.

Dr. Carl Rosenberg frequently blogs for Sleep Health Solutions Read other articles written by Dr. Carl Rosenberg

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  • Controlling Your Thoughts

How to Stop Your Mind from Wandering

Last Updated: August 6, 2021 References

This article was co-authored by Ni-Cheng Liang, MD . Dr. Ni-Cheng Liang is a board certified Pulmonologist and the Director of Pulmonary Integrative Medicine at Coastal Pulmonary Associates affiliated with the Scripps Health Network in San Diego, California. She also serves as a Voluntary Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine while volunteering for the UCSD Medical Student-Run Free Clinic for uninsured patients. With over 15 years of experience, Dr. Liang specializes in pulmonary and respiratory medical concerns, mindfulness teaching, physician wellness, and integrative medicine. Dr. Liang received her Doctor of Medicine (MD) from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Dr. Liang was voted as a San Diego Top Doctor in 2017 and 2019. She was also awarded the 2019 American Lung Association San Diego Lung Health Provider of the Year. There are 12 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 27,958 times.

It’s normal for the human mind to wander. There are so many different things filling your mind and pulling your thoughts in different directions. This isn’t always a bad thing, either. If you’re a creative person, a wandering mind can spark a new creative project. However, wandering thoughts can also prevent you from getting things done, keep you up at night, or hurt your mental health if you spend your whole day thinking anxious thoughts. Luckily, with some practice and the right techniques, you can learn to focus your mind on the present and control your thoughts to keep them from racing all over the place when you don’t want them to!

Doing Exercises and Activities

Step 1 Slow down your breathing to occupy your mind.

  • You can also look up different breathing exercises , such as yogic breathing or deep throat breathing, and try those out to find something that works for you.

Step 2 Do a physical activity to focus on something else.

  • For example, if you work in an office and you get 15 minute breaks, you could go outside and go for a 10 minute walk around the block to clear your head.
  • If you work from home, you could take a 15-30 minute break and clean and organize your home office space. A clean workspace can also help you focus!

Step 3 Take 10-15 minutes to do nothing and focus on being in the present.

  • Try combining this period of doing nothing with slow breathing or another type of breathing exercise. This can help keep your mind from wandering for these 10-15 minutes and calm your thoughts down.
  • For example, if you work at home and find that you can’t concentrate, take a break and go sit on your balcony or lay down on your bed, away from your laptop and work things. Do nothing for at least 10 minutes and see how it affects your racing thoughts.

Tip : Stay off your phone and other electronics during this time. If you spend the time on social media, for example, you're not giving your mind a rest. Truly try to do nothing at all other than just sit or lay there.

Step 4 Say a mantra to get other thoughts out of your mind.

  • For example, if you’re feeling stressed, you could use a simple phrase like “everything is OK” or “life is beautiful.”
  • Single word mantras you can try include “strong,” “calm,” and “finish.” These could work well if you’re trying to power through something like a run or a chore without getting distracted.

Step 5 Try meditating to...

  • You can search online for meditation techniques or download something like a mindfulness app to help you if you’re totally new to meditating. Meditation takes practice, but stick with it and you might find that you really benefit from it!
  • The classic mantra for focusing on meditation is just “om.” You could try repeating this out loud or in your head while you meditate.

Controlling Anxious Thoughts

Step 1 Write down all your concerns to get them out of your head.

  • This can also help you organize your anxious thoughts, so you can address their causes later on.
  • For example, if you’re having trouble sleeping because you can’t stop thinking about everything you have to do tomorrow, try writing down a to-do list to get the thoughts out of your head and help you get to sleep.

Step 2 Think about positive alternative scenarios to stop worrying.

  • For example, if you are worried about turning a project in to your boss, think about ways it could help your career if your boss really loves your work.
  • Say you’re studying for a test in a topic that you find difficult and you keep thinking about what will happen if you fail the test, so it’s hard to focus on studying. Instead, try thinking about how great you can do on the test and how it will boost your grade if you study hard.

Step 3 Work on any tasks that are hanging over your head.

  • For example, you might be avoiding putting a big report together at work because it’s slow and tedious, but you find your mind wandering to this task that’s hanging over you. Set aside time in each day to work on the report, so you make progress instead of just dreading it.

Step 4 Talk to someone to get your anxious thoughts out of your head.

  • For example, if you can’t seem to focus on anything because all you’re thinking about is your ongoing divorce, maybe seeing a therapist to talk about it would help you control those thoughts.
  • If your mind is wandering because you’re frustrated about something at work, maybe getting a coffee with a coworker you trust and talking to them about whatever the issue is will help calm your mind.

Tip : If you think you might have clinical-level anxiety, it’s always best to talk to a professional about it. They can provide you with a professional treatment to help you get it under control.

Step 5 Try to accept the things that you cannot change.

  • For instance, say you’re having trouble focusing on being present with your family over a long weekend because you’re worried about something at work. Try to accept that in this particular moment you can’t do anything about your work tasks and focus on enjoying the family time.

Step 6 Pay attention to the root causes of anxious thoughts and address them.

  • For example, if your mind is continuously thinking about what it would be like to work in a different job, it might be time to consider a career change and start looking for another position.
  • If you keep thinking about a conflict with a colleague you’re having at work, it might help calm your thoughts to sit down with them and talk about it.

Focusing on Tasks

Step 1 Do 1 task at a time to concentrate on just that 1 thing.

  • Any activities you do throughout your day can be considered tasks. For instance, when you’re eating your lunch, try to focus just on your lunch. Don’t try to multitask and work or study while you eat.
  • If you’re talking to someone, try to focus 100% on the conversation and not let yourself get distracted by noises or other people around you. After the conversation is over, move on to your next task.
  • If you need to put together a presentation for a work meeting, focus on getting the presentation totally done before you move onto another task like checking your email or looking at data.

Tip : Training your brain to focus on 1 thing is just like training your body. It can be hard at first, but with practice you can learn to control your mind and focus it on the task at hand.

Step 2 Practice avoiding momentary distractions to build concentration.

  • For example, if you work in an office with a bunch of other people around, it can be tempting to look around the room to find the culprit any time someone coughs or sneezes. Don’t let yourself do this!
  • If you have to sit next to a window and there is something going on outside that distracts you, such as a building under construction, practice not looking out the window every time a crane moves.
  • You can also try removing distractions in settings like classrooms and offices by closing drapes or blinds to block your view or putting in headphones to block out noise.

Step 3 Designate a specific time to worry, think, or plan.

  • For example, you could give yourself a free thinking period from 5:30-6:00 every day. During this time, don’t try to work, study, or get any other tasks done. For these 30 minutes, let yourself think about any worries you have or do any planning you need to do.
  • Say you keep thinking about an upcoming vacation and all the things you still need to do to get ready. Instead of letting your mind wander to it all day, designate a time block during which you can do things like making a packing list or researching sites you want to visit, then refocus on your other tasks.

Expert Q&A

Ni-Cheng Liang, MD

  • Mini-interactions with nature can help you feel more calm and focus on the present. For example, if you go for a walk to try and calm your thoughts, try walking barefoot across some grass or touching some trees and leaves in a park. [19] X Research source Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
  • Everyone has days during which their mind wanders more than normal and it feels impossible to get things done. It’s OK to take a day off work and stay home to help relieve stress, calm your mind, and stay healthy mentally. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 2

mind wandering can't sleep

  • Persistent anxious thoughts can be a sign of a bigger mental disorder. If you can’t get your anxiety under control on your own, see a licensed therapist who can help you develop a treatment plan. [20] X Research source Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 1

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Control Your Mind

  • ↑ Ni-Cheng Liang, MD. Board Certified Pulmonologist. Expert Interview. 18 June 2021.
  • ↑ https://ggia.berkeley.edu/practice/mindful_breathing
  • ↑ https://rachelfintzy.com/20-tips-to-stop-your-mind-from-wandering-and-overthinking/
  • ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-s-mental-health-matters/201604/5-ways-stop-your-racing-thoughts
  • ↑ https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_focus_a_wandering_mind
  • ↑ https://www.fastcompany.com/90300162/ask-yourself-these-four-questions-when-your-mind-starts-to-wander
  • ↑ https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/anxiety-and-panic-attacks/self-care/
  • ↑ https://adaa.org/tips
  • ↑ https://www.successconsciousness.com/blog/concentration-mind-power/how-to-keep-your-mind-from-wandering/
  • ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-work/200910/easily-distracted
  • ↑ https://www.k-state.edu/counseling/topics/career/concentr.html
  • ↑ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2017/11/08/7-ways-to-pull-your-wandering-mind-back-into-the-present-moment/#785965da3314

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Nora Bradford

This Is What Your Brain Does When You’re Not Doing Anything

brain

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine .

Whenever you’re actively performing a task—say, lifting weights at the gym or taking a hard exam—the parts of your brain required to carry it out become “active” when neurons step up their electrical activity. But is your brain active even when you’re zoning out on the couch?

The answer, researchers have found, is yes. Over the past two decades they’ve defined what’s known as the default mode network, a collection of seemingly unrelated areas of the brain that activate when you’re not doing much at all. Its discovery has offered insights into how the brain functions outside of well-defined tasks and has also prompted research into the role of brain networks—not just brain regions—in managing our internal experience.

In the late 20th century, neuroscientists began using new techniques to take images of people’s brains as they performed tasks in scanning machines. As expected, activity in certain brain areas increased during tasks—and to the researchers’ surprise, activity in other brain areas declined simultaneously. The neuroscientists were intrigued that during a wide variety of tasks, the very same brain areas consistently dialed back their activity.

It was as if these areas had been active when the person wasn’t doing anything, and then turned off when the mind had to concentrate on something external.

Researchers called these areas “task negative.” When they were first identified, Marcus Raichle , a neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, suspected that these task-negative areas play an important role in the resting mind. “This raised the question of ‘What’s baseline brain activity?’” Raichle recalled. In an experiment, he asked people in scanners to close their eyes and simply let their minds wander while he measured their brain activity.

He found that during rest, when we turn mentally inward, task-negative areas use more energy than the rest of the brain. In a 2001 paper, he dubbed this activity “ a default mode of brain function .” Two years later, after generating higher-resolution data, a team from the Stanford University School of Medicine discovered that this task-negative activity defines a coherent network of interacting brain regions, which they called the default mode network .

The discovery of the default mode network ignited curiosity among neuroscientists about what the brain is doing in the absence of an outward-focused task. Although some researchers believed that the network’s main function was to generate our experience of mind wandering or daydreaming, there were plenty of other conjectures. Maybe it controlled streams of consciousness or activated memories of past experiences. And dysfunction in the default mode network was floated as a potential feature of nearly every psychiatric and neurological disorder, including depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Since then, a flurry of research into the default mode has complicated that initial understanding. “It’s been very interesting to see the types of different tasks and paradigms that engage the default mode network in the past 20 years,” said Lucina Uddin , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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The default mode was one of the first brain networks characterized by science. It consists of a handful of brain regions, including a few at the front of the brain, like the dorsal and ventral medial prefrontal cortices, and others scattered throughout the organ, like the posterior cingulate cortex, the precuneus, and the angular gyrus. These regions are associated with memory, experience replay, prediction, action consideration, reward/punishment, and information integration. (The colored highlighting in the following figure indicates some of the outer brain areas that become more active when the default network engages.)

brain

Since its discovery, neuroscientists have loosely identified a handful of additional distinct networks that each activate seemingly disparate areas of the brain. These activated areas don’t act independently, but rather harmonize in synchrony with each other. “You can’t think about a symphony orchestra as just the violins or the oboes,” Raichle said. Similarly, in a brain network, the individual parts interact to bring about effects that they can only produce together.

According to research, the effects of the default mode network include mind wandering, remembering past experiences, thinking about others’ mental states, envisioning the future and processing language. While this may seem like a grab bag of unrelated aspects of cognition, Vinod Menon , the director of the Stanford Cognitive & Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, recently theorized that all of these functions may be helpful in constructing an internal narrative . In his view, the default mode network helps you think about who you are in relation to others, recall your past experiences and then wrap up all of that into a coherent self-narrative.

Marcus Raichle

The default mode is clearly up to something complicated; it’s involved in many different processes that can’t be neatly described. “It’s kind of silly to think that we’re ever going to be like, ‘This one brain region or one brain network does one thing,’” Uddin said. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

Uddin began investigating the default mode network because she was interested in self-recognition, and many self-recognition tasks, such as identifying your own face or voice, appeared to be associated with the network. In recent years, she has shifted her attention to interactions between brain networks. Just as different brain areas interact with each other to form networks, different networks interact with each other in meaningful ways, Uddin said. “Network interactions are more elucidating to study in some ways than just a network in isolation because they do work together and then come apart and then change what they’re doing over time.”

Lucina Uddin

The neuroscientist Lucina Uddin investigates how different brain networks, including the default mode network, interact.

She’s particularly interested in how the default mode network interacts with the salience network , which seems to help us identify the most relevant piece of information at any given time. Her work suggests that the salience network detects when something is important to pay attention to and then acts as an off switch for the default mode network.

Researchers have also been examining whether mental health disorders like depression could be linked to problems with the default mode network. So far, the findings have been inconclusive. In people with depression, for example, some researchers have found that network nodes are overly connected, while others have found the opposite—that nodes are failing to connect. And in some studies, the default mode network itself isn’t abnormal, but its interactions with other networks are. These findings may appear incompatible, but they align with recent findings that depression is perhaps a cluster of different disorders that present with similar symptoms.

Meanwhile, Menon has developed what he calls the triple network theory . It posits that abnormal interactions between the default mode network, the salience network, and a third one called the frontoparietal network could contribute to mental health disorders including schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, dementia, and autism. Typically, the activity of the default mode network decreases when someone is paying attention to an external stimulus, while activity in the two other networks increases. This push and pull between networks may not work the same way in people with psychiatric or developmental disorders, Menon suspects.

Deanna Barch , who studies the neurobiology of mental illnesses at Washington University in St. Louis, is intrigued by the triple network theory. Investigating how networks are wired up differently in people with mental health disorders can help researchers find underlying mechanisms and develop treatments, she said. However, she doesn’t think network interactions alone will fully explain mental illness. “I think of understanding connectivity differences as a starting point,” Barch said. “It’s not an endpoint.”

The current understanding of the default mode network is surely not its endpoint, either. Since its discovery, it has pushed neuroscientists to think beyond the responsibilities of single brain regions to the effects of interactions between brain networks. And it’s driven many people to appreciate the inward-focused activities of the mind—that even when we’re daydreaming or at rest, our brain is hard at work making it happen.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine , an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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Why your brain may be "sleeping" when your eyes are wide open

A new understanding of sleep may explain why the mind wanders.

brain

The classical idea of sleep is that it's an all-or-nothing phenomenon. If someone is responsive, they are awake. If they are not awake, they are in snooze-town.

This concept is bolstered by what we observe in the brain. Tests that detect electrical activity show this activity looks different during wakefulness and sleep, and especially during deep sleep. Slow wave activity is most common during our deepest moments of slumber, a beating rhythm of neurons linked to memory and learning consolidation.

But this view of one of, if not the most , quintessential parts of life is changing. Recent research suggests various parts of the brain can be in different sleep states, regardless of whether a person is, from a behavioral perspective, awake or asleep.

This idea lends itself to an emerging concept — the phenomenon of “local sleep,” explored by Thomas Andrillon and colleagues in a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications .

During local sleep, brains can show signs of the slow waves seen in deep sleep despite the person whose cranium holds that brain being awake. This study suggests slow waves during waking hours may predict when the mind wanders or when it goes blank.

It also means the relationship between sleep and consciousness is more tangled than previously realized.

“Sleep, from a brain perspective, is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon,” Andrillon, a research fellow at the Paris Brain Institute and Monash University, tells me.

“In particular, sometimes, different parts of the brain can be in different wake or sleep states. The boundary between wake and sleep is therefore far more fluid than previously thought.”

Searching for slow waves

When your mind goes blank, it means you’re awake but feel empty of mind; your stream of consciousness has come to a halt. Mind-wandering, meanwhile, is when your focus drifts to thoughts unrelated to the task at hand — like when you’re thinking about what you should have said during an argument earlier in the day while you’re answering emails at night.

“Why do we spend so much time not paying attention to our environment?”

Daydreaming, Andrillon says, is a form of mind-wandering, but it is also “fundamentally different.” Daydreaming is more elaborate than most mind-wandering, and its neural mechanisms could be quite distinct, too. He should know: “I am a frequent, and perhaps too frequent, daydreamer.”

Andrillon’s academic interest in both daydreaming and mind-wandering is rooted in longstanding questions like: Why do we spend so much time not paying attention to our environment? What happens in the brain during these moments?

To determine the answers to these questions and more, Andrillon and colleagues recruited 26 people and recorded their whole brain electrical activity while they completed a boring task for almost two hours. Every 30 to 70 seconds, the researchers interrupted the participants and asked them whether their mental state was mind-wandering, mind-blanking, or task-focused — as well as how tired they were.

The idea here, Andrillon explains, is that mind-wandering, for example, “could be associated with parts of the brain sleeping while the rest is awake,” Andrillon says.

day dreaming, mind wandering

Mind-wandering “could be associated with parts of the brain sleeping while the rest is awake.”

Subsequent analysis revealed that before their minds started to wander, slow waves started emerging in frontal brain areas. Meanwhile, if slow waves appeared in rear regions of the brain, such as the parietal lobe, they tended to be followed by mind blanking.

When these shifts happen in the brain, past research suggests they occur spontaneously — without the knowledge or will of the person.

The study team proposes these states of mind may be explained by “sleep-like, low-frequency, high-amplitude waves” and the occurrence of slow waves predicted the time of attentional lapse.

Local sleep, a concept to explore

There’s a reason Andrillion hedges the findings’ implications. Because of the non-invasive nature of the study, the researchers don’t have complete access to the neural activity of individual brain regions. This makes it difficult to tell if specific regions were actually sleeping and which ones were not.

“What we have is something that looks like sleep, which is an important distinction,” he says.

Andrillion hypothesizes local sleep is a function of saving up energy. It could be “the equivalent of a ‘battery saver,’” he says, something that allows you to “switch off parts of your brain so that you can slow down the accumulation of fatigue and save up your resources for later.”

In a way, this is why his team is interested in examining the brain activity during sleep and wakefulness in individuals with ADHD . Attentional issues often go hand-in-hand with sleep problems if you have ADHD. It’s possible local sleep could help explain why.

The researchers also want to learn if the mechanisms that drive slow waves during wakefulness are the same as the ones produced during sleep — and they want to build ways of predicting these transitions.

“It would be great to see if we could use slow waves to detect mind-wandering and lapses of attention in real-time and in real-life settings,” Andrillion says.

This article was originally published on July 11, 2021

mind wandering can't sleep

Nir Eyal

How to Tame Your Wandering Mind

Learn to take steps to deal with distraction..

Posted April 24, 2022 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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  • We can tame our mind-wandering.
  • Three tips can help you use mind-wandering to your advantage.
  • These include making time to mind-wander and controlling your response to it.

Nir and Far

Researchers believe that when a task isn’t sufficiently rewarding, our brains search for something more interesting to think about.

You have a big deadline looming, and it’s time to hunker down. But every time you start working, you find that, for some reason, your mind drifts off before you can get any real work done. What gives? What is this cruel trick our brains play on us, and what do we do about it?

Thankfully, by understanding why our mind wanders and taking steps to deal with distraction, we can stay on track. But first, let’s understand the root of the problem.

Why do our minds wander?

Unintentional mind-wandering occurs when our thoughts are not tied to the task at hand. Researchers believe our minds wander when the thing we’re supposed to be doing is not sufficiently rewarding, so our brains look for something more interesting to think about.

We’ve all experienced it from time to time, but it’s important to note that some people struggle with chronic mind-wandering : Though studies estimate ADHD afflicts less than 3% of the global adult population, it can be a serious problem and may require medical intervention.

For the vast majority of people, mind-wandering is something we can tame on our own—that is, if we know what to do about it. In fact, according to Professor Ethan Kross, director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan and author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It , mind-wandering is perfectly normal.

“We spend between a third to a half of our waking hours not focused on the present,” he told me in an email. “Some neuroscience research refers to our tendency to mind-wander as our ‘default state.’”

So why do we do it?

“Mind-wandering serves several valuable functions. It helps us simulate and plan for the future and learn from our past, and it facilitates creative problem-solving,” Kross explained. “Mind-wandering often gets a bad rep, but it’s a psychological process that evolved to provide us with a competitive advantage. Imagine not being able to plan for the future or learn from your past mistakes.”

Is mind-wandering bad for you?

“Like any psychological tool, however, mind-wandering can be harmful if used in the wrong context (i.e., when you’re trying to focus on a task) or inappropriately (i.e., when you worry or ruminate too much),” according to Kross. In other words, mind-wandering is a problem when it becomes a distraction. A distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you planned to do.

If, for instance, you intended to work on a big project, such as writing a blog post or finishing a proposal, but instead find yourself doing something else, you’re distracted.

Nir And Far

The good news is that we can use mind-wandering to our advantage if we follow a few simple steps:

1. Make time to mind-wander

Mind-wandering isn’t always a distraction. If we plan for it, we can turn mind-wandering into traction. Unlike a distraction , which by definition is a bad thing, a diversion is simply a refocusing of attention and isn’t always harmful.

There’s nothing wrong with deciding to refocus your attention for a while. In fact, we often enjoy all kinds of diversions and pay for the privilege.

A movie or a good book, for instance, diverts our attention away from real life for a while so we can get into the story and escape reality for a bit.

Similarly, if you make time to allow your mind to drift and explore whatever it likes, that’s a healthy diversion, not a distraction.

The first step to mastering mind-wandering is to plan time for it. Use a schedule maker and block off time in your day to let your thoughts flow freely. You’ll likely find that a few minutes spent in contemplation can help you work through unresolved issues and lead to breakthroughs. Scheduling mind-wandering also lets you relax because you know you have time to think about whatever is on your mind instead of believing you need to act on every passing thought.

It’s helpful to know that time to think is on your calendar so you don’t have to interrupt your mind-wandering process or risk getting distracted later.

2. Catch the action

One of the difficulties surrounding mind-wandering is that by the time you notice you’re doing it, you’ve already done it. It’s an unconscious process so you can’t prevent it from happening.

mind wandering can't sleep

The good news is that while you can’t stop your mind from wandering, you can control what you do when it happens.

Many people never learn that they are not their thoughts. They believe the voice in their head is somehow a special part of them, like their soul speaking out their inner desires and true self. When random thoughts cross their mind, they think those thoughts must be speaking some important truth.

Not true. That voice in your head is not your soul talking, nor do you have to believe everything you think.

When we assign undue importance to the chatter in our heads, we risk listening to half-baked ideas, feeling shame for intrusive thoughts, or acting impulsively against our best interests.

A much healthier way to view mind-wandering is as brain static. Just as the random radio frequencies you tune through don’t reveal the inner desires of your car’s soul, the thoughts you have while mind-wandering don’t mean much—unless, that is, you act upon them.

Though it can throw us off track, mind-wandering generally only lasts a few seconds, maybe minutes. However, when we let mind-wandering turn into other distractions, such as social-media scrolling, television-channel surfing, or news-headline checking, that’s when we risk wasting hours rather than mere minutes.

If you do find yourself mentally drifting off in the middle of a task, the important thing is to not allow that to become an unintended action, and therefore a distraction.

An intrusive thought is not your fault. It can’t be controlled. What matters is how you respond to it—hence the word respon-sibility.

Do you let the thought go and stay on task? Or do you allow yourself to escape what you’re doing by letting it lead you toward an action you’ll later regret?

3. Note and refocus

Can we keep the helpful aspects of mind-wandering while doing away with the bad? For the most part, yes, we can.

According to Kross, “Mind-wandering can easily shift into dysfunctional worry and rumination. When that happens, the options are to refocus on the present or to implement tools that help people mind-wander more effectively.”

One of the best ways to harness the power of mind-wandering while doing an important task is to quickly note the thought you don’t want to lose on a piece of paper. It’s a simple tactic anyone can use but few bother to do. Note that I didn’t recommend an app or sending yourself an email. Tech tools are full of external triggers that can tempt us to just check “one quick thing,” and before we know it, we’re distracted.

Rather, a pen and Post-it note or a notepad are the ideal tools to get ideas out of your head without the temptations that may lead you away from what you planned to do.

Then, you can collect your thoughts and check back on them later during the time you’ve planned in your day to chew on your ideas. If you give your thoughts a little time, you’ll often find that those super important ideas aren’t so important after all.

If you had acted on them at the moment, they would have wasted your time. But by writing them down and revisiting them when you’ve planned to do so, they have time to marinate and may become less relevant.

However, once in a while, an idea you collected will turn out to be a gem. With the time you planned to chew on the thought, you may discover that mind-wandering spurred you to a great insight you can explore later.

By following the three steps above, you’ll be able to master mind-wandering rather than letting it become your master.

Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal, who has lectured at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, is the author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.

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Does the Mind Wander When the Brain Takes a Break? Local Sleep in Wakefulness, Attentional Lapses and Mind-Wandering

Thomas andrillon.

1 School of Psychological Sciences, Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Jennifer Windt

2 School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

3 School of Psychology, Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

4 Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

5 Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Sean P. A. Drummond

Mark a. bellgrove, naotsugu tsuchiya.

6 Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Osaka, Japan

7 Advanced Telecommunications Research Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan

Sleep has been classically described as an all-or-nothing global phenomenon. However, recent research strongly suggests that this view requires tempering. Invasive and non-invasive recordings in animals and humans show that neural activity typically associated with sleep can locally occur during wakefulness. Although local sleep is defined neuronally, it has been associated with impaired performance during cognitive tasks. Comparatively, the phenomenology of local sleep (i.e., what it feels like when your brain is partially asleep) has been less explored. Taking into account the literature on the neuronal and behavioral profile of local sleep intrusions in wakefulness, we propose that occurrences of local sleep could represent the neural mechanism underlying many attentional lapses. In particular, we argue that a unique physiological event such as local sleep could account for a diversity of behavioral outcomes from sluggish to impulsive responses. We further propose that local sleep intrusions could impact individuals’ subjective experience. Specifically, we propose that the timing and anatomical sources of local sleep intrusions could be responsible for both the behavioral consequences and subjective content of attentional lapses and may underlie the difference between subjective experiences such as mind wandering and mind blanking. Our framework aims to build a parallel between spontaneous experiences in sleep and wakefulness by integrating evidence across neuronal, behavioral and experiential levels. We use the example of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to illustrate how local sleep could explain complex cognitive profiles which include inattention, impulsivity, mind-wandering and mind-blanking.

Introduction

Sleep and wakefulness have been traditionally considered as mutually exclusive states. At the behavioral level, sleep is characterized by a transient loss of responsiveness to the environment ( Carskadon and Dement, 2005 ; Cirelli and Tononi, 2008 ). This behavioral unresponsiveness was found to correspond, at the physiological level, to specific patterns of brain activity. Notably, Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep, which amounts to 75–80% of the total time spent asleep in healthy adults ( Ohayon et al., 2004 ; Carskadon and Dement, 2005 ), is characterized by the occurrence of high-amplitude slow oscillations. These so-called “slow waves” were initially described as alternations between moments of neuronal silencing and firing synchronized across the entire cortex ( Steriade, 2003 ; Vyazovskiy and Harris, 2013 ).

Recent discoveries in animal and human sleep physiology have tempered the notion of slow waves as necessarily being a global physiological event ( Nobili et al., 2012 ; Siclari and Tononi, 2017 ; Krueger et al., 2019 ). Within NREM sleep, some brain regions can show slow waves while others do not ( Nir et al., 2011 ; Nobili et al., 2011 ). Such regional aspects of sleep activity had already been observed in certain animal species (e.g., dolphins who can enter unihemispheric sleep, sleeping in one brain hemisphere at a time) ( Mascetti, 2016 ; Rattenborg et al., 2019 ) and in sleep pathologies ( Terzaghi et al., 2009 ; Dodet et al., 2015 ; Castelnovo et al., 2016 ; Riedner et al., 2016 ). However, in the past few years, local sleep involving changes in sleep depth within NREM sleep has been robustly observed in individuals without sleep disorders ( Huber et al., 2004 ; Nir et al., 2011 ). Even more striking is the observation of local sleep-like slow waves outside of NREM sleep, in wakefulness ( Vyazovskiy et al., 2011 ; Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 ; Quercia et al., 2018 ) or REM sleep ( Funk et al., 2016 ; Bernardi et al., 2019 ). These slow waves are isolated (local in time) and spatially restricted (local in space) and consequently largely overlooked in standard classifications that focus on the global characteristics of sleep and wake states. The occurrence of local slow waves outside NREM sleep (i.e., in wakefulness or REM sleep) and the local modulation of the presence of slow waves within NREM sleep have been termed ‘local sleep’ ( Box 1 ).

Glossary: Some of the terms used in this Perspective are widely used but not systematically defined and the same terms may be used by behavioral, phenomenological and/or neurophysiological approaches to refer to slightly different target phenomena. Below we define each term to the extent that is acceptable across different disciplines in order to facilitate further interdisciplinary work, both theoretical and empirical.

Wakefulness: Wakefulness is a state in which individuals can rapidly and reliably react to environmental demands. At the physiological level, wakefulness is characterized by a pattern of brain activity dominated by fast, low-amplitude, desynchronized oscillations.

Sleep: Sleep is a state behaviorally defined by a transient loss of responsiveness. To induce responses, stimuli have to be more intense than during wakefulness. The recovery of responsiveness is usually associated with a reversal to neural patterns of wake activity. Neuronal activity during sleep is dominated by slow, high-amplitude, synchronized oscillations in Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep and by low-amplitude, theta (4–7 Hz) and mixed-frequency oscillations in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep.

Local Sleep: A concept introduced by Huber et al. (2004) (in sleep) and Vyazovskiy et al. (2011) (in wakefulness). In its most general sense, local sleep refers to transient, regional neurophysiological states showing a mixture of features characteristic of (i) wakefulness and sleep, (ii) different sleep stages (NREM and REM sleep), or (iii) different sleep depths (light or deep sleep). Local sleep is local both in time and space. As a relatively new concept in the sleep literature, its precise definition is likely to evolve with time.

Microsleep: Microsleep is classically defined as a global shift in neuronal activity from wakefulness to light NREM sleep for a duration of 5 to 14 s. Above 14 s, the individual is considered asleep. Below 5 s, the individual is considered awake but could potentially show signs of local sleep (< 5 s).

Attentional lapse: Attentional lapses refer to the redirection of an individual’s attention away from a specific task. These lapses are accompanied by a drop in objective performance as well as an increase in performance variability.

Mind-wandering: Mind-wandering is defined as spontaneous, dynamic and often associative thought. In the context of laboratory experiments, this is often operationalized as task- and/or stimulus independent thought. Mind-wandering can be considered as the phenomenological dimension of a large group of attentional lapses.

Mind-blanking: Mind-blanking refers to subjective reports of reduced awareness and a temporary absence of thought (empty mind) or lack of memory for immediately past thoughts. Mind-blanking can be considered as the phenomenological dimension of a distinct kind of attentional lapse compared to mind-wandering.

ADHD: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder with a worldwide prevalence of approximately 5%. The diagnosis is based on age-inappropriate levels of inattention, hyperactivity and/or impulsivity.

Behavioral and Neuronal Effects of Local Sleep

Local sleep during wakefulness was originally defined based on the identification of a hallmark of NREM sleep within wakefulness: sleep slow waves ( Vyazovskiy et al., 2011 ). These sleep slow waves can be observed in invasive intracranial recordings [local field potentials (LFP), electrocorticogram (ECoG)] or non-invasive scalp electroencephalography (EEG) in the form of high-amplitude, slow oscillations (< 4 Hz). At the level of individual neurons, these slow oscillations involve a brief episode of neuronal silencing (OFF period) followed by synchronous activation of neighboring neurons ( Steriade, 2003 ; Vyazovskiy and Harris, 2013 ). OFF periods appear as the most unequivocal definition of local sleep intrusions during wakefulness as they directly show an increase in local synchrony and an interruption of neural activity similar to that which can be observed during sleep. However, these OFF periods cannot be recorded non-invasively.

Investigations in humans have therefore focused on the detection of local high-amplitude slow oscillations, which typically accompany OFF periods ( Steriade, 2005 ). However, the exact frequency bands used to detect these waves differ from one study to another, with some studies focusing on the theta range ( Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 ), others on the delta range ( Quercia et al., 2018 ), and yet others on a combination of the theta and delta range ( Vyazovskiy et al., 2011 ; Nir et al., 2017 ). It is unclear if these so-called delta and theta waves refer to distinct events. Indeed, during normal sleep, slow waves have complex frequency profiles (e.g., a mixture of a delta component with faster oscillations) ( Siclari et al., 2014 ; Halász, 2016 ). Further, there can be considerable variability when estimating the frequency of short-lived, isolated slow waves. Adding to the difficulty of comparing existing methods is the fact that the basic physiological properties of local sleep events in wakefulness are yet to be determined (topographical distribution, spatial extent, peak frequency, duration, etc). These parameters have been studied in sleep ( Riedner et al., 2007 ; Siclari et al., 2014 ) but not in wakefulness. Existing studies suggest that local slow waves occur in both frontal and parietal regions ( Vyazovskiy et al., 2011 ; Hung et al., 2013 ; Quercia et al., 2018 ), with a larger number of waves in parietal regions ( Vyazovskiy et al., 2011 ; Hung et al., 2013 ).

In summary, local sleep can be defined, at the level of neuronal networks, by the brief local appearance of events similar to sleep slow waves (delta and/or theta waves) which are in turn associated, at the level of single-neuron activity, with episodes of neuronal silencing ( Figure 1 ). Local sleep is thus different from the concept of microsleep ( Box 1 ) as it is defined by the local occurrence of a specific pattern of neural activity (slow wave) for, potentially, a much shorter period of time than microsleep. As is the case for microsleep, however, local sleep can be reliably induced by sleep deprivation. First, when examining scalp EEG, the power in the delta/theta band (corresponding to sleep slow waves) increases with time spent awake ( Cajochen et al., 1995 ), a phenomenon thought to reflect the build-up of sleep pressure ( Finelli et al., 2000 ) and potentially mediated by functional and structural changes in neuronal networks ( Tononi and Cirelli, 2014 ). More recently, it has been shown that this increase in the power of slow oscillations is accompanied by the occurrence of isolated waves that bear a striking resemblance to sleep oscillations ( Vyazovskiy et al., 2011 ; Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 ; Quercia et al., 2018 ).

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Can local sleep in wakefulness affect behavior and subjective experience? (A) Isolated sleep-like slow waves (which are local in time and space) can be observed during wakefulness. (B) These slow waves can be observed in scalp EEG or intracranial recordings (ECoG/LFP, top) and are associated at the level of single-unit recordings (bottom) with episodes of neuronal silencing. (C) Local sleep increases with time spent awake, even more so in brain regions involved in a given recurrent task (use-dependent). The timing and location of local sleep occurrences could determine their impact on objective performance and, possibly, subjective experience.

Interestingly, the occurrence of local sleep intrusions varies as a function of both the time spent awake and the degree to which a particular brain region has been activated by environmental demands (e.g., a specific task) ( Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2019 ). A recent study linked the occurrence of local slow waves during sleep with neuronal plasticity and learning ( Quercia et al., 2018 ). Using a spatial memory task, Quercia et al. (2018) showed that local sleep occurrences in wakefulness are predictive of errors but can also be explained by learning-related processes. This is particularly interesting since similar use-dependent or learning-dependent regional modulations of slow waves have been observed during sleep ( Huber et al., 2004 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 ). Altogether, these results support a link between local sleep and neuronal plasticity in both wakefulness and sleep. In a nutshell, the recruitment of a neuronal network by a given task would fatigue this network, particularly when the network is subject to plastic changes. This neuronal fatigue would translate in local sleep occurrences, which would negatively impact behavior in a region-specific, task-specific fashion.

At the same time, it is unlikely that extensive usage of local neural circuitry is the sole predictor of local sleep occurrences. Rather, it is more likely that local sleep is modulated by a combination of use-dependent and circadian factors. Sleep in general is known to be influenced by both time spent awake and circadian processes ( Borbély, 1982 ). Consistent with this view, previous research has demonstrated the existence of local modulations of brain activity during the day, in response to both circadian rhythms and sleep pressure ( Muto et al., 2016 ). However, this circadian viewpoint has not been taken into account by the majority of studies on local sleep and represents an important future research direction.

Although local sleep has been primarily defined at the physiological level, its occurrence during wake has been associated with impaired task performance: trials preceded by local slow waves typically show slower reaction times and increased error rates ( Vyazovskiy et al., 2011 ; Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 ; Nir et al., 2017 ; Quercia et al., 2018 ). These performance decrements were proposed to result from the transient period of neuronal silencing associated with local slow waves ( Vyazovskiy et al., 2011 ). Indeed, during sleep, episodes of neuronal silencing accompanying slow waves have been associated with perturbations of sensory encoding and information processing ( McCormick and Bal, 1994 ) and it has been proposed that sleep slow waves could be the mechanism explaining sensory isolation ( Schabus et al., 2012 ; Andrillon et al., 2016 ) and loss of consciousness ( Tononi and Massimini, 2008 ) in NREM sleep. Importantly, the behavioral consequences of local sleep in rodents engaged in a specific task are region-specific: local sleep intrusions occurring in the neural networks involved in the task were more likely to lead to behavioral impairments ( Vyazovskiy et al., 2011 ). Likewise, in humans, local sleep occurrences led to task-specific behavioral impairments ( Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 ).

Impact of Local Sleep on Phenomenology

Local modulations of sleep-like activity not only impact behavioral performance during wakefulness, but might also affect the contents or structure of subjective experience during sleep. Recent research, relying on subjective reports and serial-awakening paradigms ( Siclari et al., 2013 ), has emphasized the diversity of sleep-related subjective experiences, ranging from immersive, narratively complex and often emotionally intense dreams to isolated thoughts and imagery, to a form of minimal subjective experience that lacks specific thought contents and imagery ( Windt, 2015 ; Windt et al., 2016 ). We propose that local aspects of sleep could explain the emergence of different sleep-related experiences. For example, local modulations of slow-wave activity within NREM and REM sleep have been associated with the occurrence of dreams ( Siclari et al., 2016 ). Specifically, a decrease in the number of slow waves (which can be interpreted as a regional reduction of sleep depth) in parietal regions is associated with subjective reports of dreaming upon awakening, although the causal nature of this relationship is debated ( Boly et al., 2017 ; Wong et al., 2019 ). The spatio-temporal properties of the decrease in slow-wave activity are predictive not only of the occurrence of dreams but also of their content ( Siclari et al., 2016 ) (e.g., a decrease in slow-wave activity in motor regions was associated with more reports of movements during dreams). These results suggest that local slow waves could act as a functional switch enabling or disabling specific cognitive processes during sleep, with direct consequences on oneiric contents ( Siclari et al., 2016 ) but also the ability to process external stimuli ( Andrillon et al., 2016 , 2017 ; Tamaki et al., 2016 ; Blume et al., 2018 ).

Local sleep in wakefulness could be associated with similar changes in subjective experience. Indeed, spontaneous experiences in wakefulness and sleep share similar properties at the phenomenological level. Wakeful cognition is a highly dynamic process and fluctuations in spontaneous experience forming the so-called “stream of thought” ( James, 1890 ) are at the core of mind-wandering research ( Smallwood and Schooler, 2015 ) ( Box 1 ). The sampling of conscious experiences during the day ( Wamsley, 2013 ; Smallwood and Schooler, 2015 ), an approach similar to that used in dream research ( Horikawa et al., 2013 ; Siclari et al., 2013 ), reveals that individuals spend on average 30–50% of their time thinking about something other than the task at hand ( Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010 ; Seli et al., 2013 ).

It has been suggested that dreaming and mind wandering could be placed on a continuum ( Fox et al., 2013 ; Domhoff, 2018 ). First, dreaming and mind wandering seem supported by overlapping neural networks, including the Default Mode Network (DMN) ( Fox et al., 2013 ). Second, from a phenomenological perspective, dreams are at core immersive, involving a simulated world centered on a simulated self ( Windt, 2015 ; Windt et al., 2016 ). Similarly, daydreams tend to be focused on self-related concerns ( D’Argembeau, 2018 ) and often contain vivid audio-visual imagery as well as emotions ( Foulkes and Fleisher, 1975 ). Yet, daydreams lack the “here and now” quality of sleep dreams: in wakefulness, we don’t lose touch with our actual environments or feel present in imagined ones as completely as we do in sleep-dreams. In this sense, dreams seem to be an intensified form of mind wandering.

Other sleep-experiences lack the immersive character of dreaming and hence have been termed dreamless sleep experiences. A subgroup of these is characterized by an absence of reportable content; these seem to involve simple or perhaps even minimal forms of subjective experience in which specific forms of thought contents or imagery are lacking ( Windt, 2015 ; Windt et al., 2016 ). This subgroup of dreamless sleep experiences appears close to what has been termed mind-blanking in wakefulness, that is to say episodes in which individuals report a lack of conscious awareness ( Ward and Wegner, 2013 ).

If sleep- and wake-related spontaneous experiences share similar properties at the phenomenological level, are they also related at the physiological level? More precisely, can local sleep explain the presence or absence (as well as content) of spontaneous experiences not just in sleep, but also in waking? This tantalizing question will need further investigation but initial results are promising. First of all, while the local decrease in slow-wave activity over parietal regions correlates with the occurrence of spontaneous experiences during sleep (dreams), a local increase during wakefulness over the same regions correlates with a reduction in spontaneous thoughts ( Perogamvros et al., 2017 ). These results are in line with the involvement of the parietal cortex in multimodal integration ( Alais et al., 2010 ) and consciousness ( Koch et al., 2016 ; Boly et al., 2017 ). Other physiological indexes of vigilance have shown a link between fluctuations in attention or subjective experience and sleepiness. Attentional lapses in general have been associated with a diminution of noradrenergic activity using fMRI or pupillometry ( Mittner et al., 2014 , 2016 ), a proxy for noradrenergic activity ( Varazzani et al., 2015 ; Joshi et al., 2016 ). This is particularly interesting as Noradrenaline (NA) is one of the key neuromodulators allowing sleep/wake transitions ( Siegel, 2004 ) but also plays a central role in the modulation and orientation of attention ( Sara, 2009 ; Sara and Bouret, 2012 ; Thiele and Bellgrove, 2018 ). At the phenomenological level, mind-blanking in particular has been associated with a reduction in pupil diameter and increase in subjective sleepiness ( Unsworth and Robison, 2018 ). Here, we go one step further by hypothesizing that fluctuations in spontaneous experiences during wake not only correlate with states of low vigilance but actually share common neuronal mechanisms with sleep-related spontaneous experiences.

Local Sleep as a Comprehensive Model of Attentional Lapses

We propose a multi-level model of attentional lapses from neurophysiology to behavior and phenomenology. In our framework, local sleep intrusions represent a unifying physiological mechanism that could not only predict the occurrence of attentional lapses but also describe these lapses in terms of their behavioral consequences and phenomenological properties. Other markers of low arousal have been proposed to predict attentional lapses. In particular, pupil size can predict the occurrence of attentional lapses and mind-wandering ( Mittner et al., 2014 ; van den Brink et al., 2016 ). However, pupil size is a global, systemic index of arousal [although pupil diameter can be linked with specific components of behavior ( van Kempen et al., 2019 )] and our local sleep framework could help move beyond global indexes to offer a regional marker predictive of specific behavioral impairments ( Figure 2 ). Interestingly, in this framework, a single physiological event can explain phenomena that have often been presented as opposed: impulsivity vs. sluggishness and mind-wandering vs. mind-blanking.

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Local sleep as a comprehensive model of attentional lapses under low levels of arousal. Under low levels of arousal (hypo-vigilance), the likelihood that local sleep intrusions occur increases. The spatial properties of these local sleep intrusions (which brain regions are affected) would determine the cognitive profile of attentional lapses (impact on objective performance and subjective experience). Global fluctuations of arousal could be determined by the level of activation of the Locus Coeruleus (LC) and the concentration in Noradrenaline (NA). Spatio-temporal properties of local sleep would further describe the cognitive profile of attentional lapses. Importantly, our model does not exclude the possibility that, under high levels of arousal (hyper-vigilance), objective performance and subjective performance can be affected by other neurophysiological mechanisms. MW, mind-wandering; MB, mind-blanking.

Previous studies investigating local sleep intrusions during wake focused mostly on task and region-specific effects, after forcing participants to continuously perform a single task [e.g., ( Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 )]. The goal of such paradigms is to fatigue circumscribed neural networks engaged in the task, increasing the likelihood of local sleep intrusions which would then result in errors on that particular task. In this type of paradigm, local sleep occurring in a given set of brain regions is expected to have the same behavioral outcomes. However, most everyday tasks require complex behavior and engage different brain regions. Participants performing these tasks are prone to multiple types of action failures ( Smith and Ratcliff, 2004 ), whose relationship with sleepiness are often unclear ( Anderson and Horne, 2006 ; Anderson et al., 2010 ; Drummond et al., 2012 ). An alternative method is to observe the occurrence of local sleep, attentional lapses and sleep-like activity during wakefulness following sleep deprivation ( Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 ) or even under normal conditions ( Quercia et al., 2018 ). Here, we propose that where and when local sleep occurs could predict not only the timing of errors but the type of error being made in a specific task.

In particular, local sleep occurrences could explain the occurrence of seemingly opposed behavioral failures such as omission errors (failure to produce a response) and commission errors (failure to control, select or suppress a response). The standard view is that commission errors are associated with executive control failure, whereas omission errors would rather mark the failure to maintain a more basic form of vigilance ( Ballard, 2001 ; O’Connell et al., 2008 ; Van Schie et al., 2012 ). This view would predict that omission and commission errors occur in different contexts of vigilance. Research on the effects of sleep deprivation showed, however, that sleep loss could actually result in both impulsivity and sluggishness ( Drummond et al., 2006 ; Anderson and Platten, 2011 ). According to our framework, the same neural mechanism (local sleep) occurring in different parts of the brain could explain both commission and omission errors associated with sleepiness. This is supported by previous research in humans showing that local sleep-like activity in perceptual areas leads to slower reaction times in a visual psychomotor vigilance task ( Nir et al., 2017 ), whereas slow waves in motor areas lead to decreased motor performance and slow waves in frontal areas lead to inhibition errors ( Bernardi et al., 2015 ).

Next, we hypothesize that local sleep can account not only for decreases in objective behavioral performance but also for changes in individuals’ subjective experience. The impact of local sleep on subjective experience has been less frequently studied ( Perogamvros et al., 2017 ) than its consequences on objective performance ( Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 ; Nir et al., 2017 ; Quercia et al., 2018 ). Previous work does acknowledge, however, that sleep restriction can lead to increased distractibility in various ways (e.g., increased sensitivity to environmental vs. endogenous distractors) ( Anderson et al., 2010 ). A more systematic approach to record and analyze subjective experience is needed. Based on current findings, we suggest that it will be useful to distinguish: (i) lapses induced by environmental stimuli (or external distractions); (ii) spontaneous thoughts (mind-wandering); (iii) task-related interferences (e.g., performance monitoring), and (iv) mind-blanking. We stress here the importance of including the dimension of mind-blanking. By contrast, mind-wandering research usually assumes that the mind wanders somewhere rather than nowhere ( Ward and Wegner, 2013 ; Smallwood and Schooler, 2015 ), leading to a comparative neglect of mind blanking as compared to mind wandering.

Importantly, it has been previously suggested that these different types of subjective experiences correspond to different neural mechanisms and different levels of arousal. Mind-wandering has been proposed to be associated with a high level of arousal and fleeting or racing thoughts, whereas mind-blanking has been associated with decreased vigilance and low arousal ( Mittner et al., 2016 ; Unsworth and Robison, 2018 ). However, this view is at odds with the fact that mind-wandering can occur in states or individuals with high sleep pressure ( Braboszcz and Delorme, 2011 ; Carciofo et al., 2014 ; Poh et al., 2016 ) and typically increases when environmental demands decrease (e.g., easy or unmotivating tasks) ( Antrobus et al., 1966 ). We offer here an alternative explanation to reconcile these views ( Figure 2 ). We propose that the occurrence of mind-wandering is fully compatible with a low level of arousal and a state of subjective and objective fatigue and that local sleep intrusions could mechanistically account for both mind-wandering and mind-blanking. Similarly, as for behavioral outcomes, the subjective experience associated with a given local sleep occurrence would depend on the anatomical location of these local sleep intrusions, which is a well-defined, testable hypothesis.

ADHD: A Test Case for Our Novel Framework

Local sleep could also represent a powerful explanatory account of inter-individual differences in attentional lapses in conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that affects 1–3% of adults and 3–7% of children ( Loe and Feldman, 2007 ; Ebejer et al., 2012 ). It is characterized by age-inappropriate levels of inattention, hyperactivity and/or impulsivity, which result in substantial challenges in life (decreased socioeconomic status, increased lifetime comorbid psychiatric disorders and higher rates of premature death) ( Dalsgaard et al., 2015 ). ADHD has a high genetic heritability (74%) ( Faraone and Larsson, 2019 ) and is associated with changes in brain anatomy and neural communication ( Faraone et al., 2000 ). However, the neural mechanisms underpinning the inattention and impulsivity which characterize the disorder remain unclear.

Key behavioral attributes of ADHD, established across numerous tasks, are the increase in omission errors, greater intra-individual variability in response timing, as well as more infrequent extremely slow responses ( Bellgrove et al., 2005 ; Johnson et al., 2007a , b ). At the phenomenological level, a recent study showed that both teenagers and adults diagnosed with ADHD also differ from non-ADHD individuals, showing increased levels of mind-blanking ( Van den Driessche et al., 2017 ), at the expense of both attentive states and mind-wandering.

This behavioral and experiential fingerprint of ADHD involving sluggishness and mind-blanking portrays ADHD as hypo-vigilant. This could seem at odds with the popular association between ADHD and hyperactivity. However, the association between ADHD and hypo-vigilance fits well with the frequent observation of sleep disturbances in ADHD adults and children ( Konofal et al., 2010 ; Hvolby, 2015 ; Virring et al., 2016 ; Gregory et al., 2017 ; Hiscock and Sciberras, 2019 ; Sciberras et al., 2019 ; Silk, 2019 ). In fact, as many as 73% of children with ADHD experience mild to severe sleep issues ( Sung et al., 2008 ). Children diagnosed with ADHD who exhibit sleep problems also tend to have more severe ADHD symptoms as well as poorer daily functioning compared to ADHD children without sleep problems. In addition, treatments used in ADHD (e.g., methylphenidate) are also used to curb excessive daytime sleepiness in narcolepsy ( Hvolby, 2015 ). Methylphenidate acts on the noradrenergic pathway, which controls attention and sleep/wake regulation ( Siegel, 2004 ; Sara and Bouret, 2012 ), once again suggesting a mechanistic link between the regulation of attention and modulations of sleep/wake activity.

A key question in the ADHD literature is therefore whether these sleep problems are mere correlates of the attentional disorder or whether they could be at the root of the behavioral features of ADHD. In favor of the latter, it has been hypothesized that ADHD symptoms arise from a dysregulation of arousal ( Geissler et al., 2014 ). Accordingly, ADHD patients may have elevated arousal levels at night, which could delay sleep onset and perturb sleep. As a consequence, these individuals would feel sleepy during the day, which could translate into an increase in local sleep intrusions and give rise to a pattern of sluggishness and impulsivity, mind-wandering and mind-blanking.

Thus, given that individuals with ADHD exhibit, when compared to healthy controls: (1) greater attentional lapses that affect task performance; (2) higher rates of mind-blanking; and (3) more sleep disturbances than healthy controls, local sleep could provide an interesting and largely overlooked neural mechanism for the behavioral phenotype in ADHD. This novel framework in ADHD research could also improve current therapeutic approaches, as current medications can improve daytime performance but can also perturb sleep ( Hvolby, 2015 ). A more systematic investigation of the impact of ADHD treatments on nighttime sleep and daytime sleepiness could help reassess the costs and benefits of these treatments. Finally, current ADHD therapeutic approaches could be complemented with a focus on the improvement of both sleep quantity and quality.

We outline here testable hypotheses regarding the relationship between the occurrence of local sleep and the behavioral and phenomenological profiles of attentional lapses. We hypothesize that local sleep occurrences could not only predict attentional lapses but also the type of lapse depending on the anatomical location of local sleep intrusions. Our model could lead to a better understanding of phenomena such as mind wandering and mind blanking. Indeed, mind wandering has been associated with the recruitment of the DMN ( Mason et al., 2007 ). Interestingly, it has been argued that similar patterns of brain activation can be accounted for by drowsiness in resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) ( Tagliazucchi and Laufs, 2014 ). In addition, it seems that DMN’s activation is mirrored by a deactivation of attentional networks such as the dorsal attention network ( Mittner et al., 2016 ). Local sleep occurrences within attentional networks could be the physiological trigger leading to the deactivation of attentional networks and the recruitment of the DMN, the combination of both resulting in an episode of mind wandering. Conversely, occurrences of local sleep within the DMN could prevent the emergence of spontaneous thoughts (mind wandering), leading to a state of mind blanking. Accordingly, previous findings ( Perogamvros et al., 2017 ) show that an increase in slow-wave power in regions overlapping with the DMN can reduce endogenous thoughts in both wakefulness and sleep. Finally, as during sleep, the set of brain regions affected by an episode of local sleep could be predictive of the specific content of the associated thoughts. For example, local sleep occurrences in prefrontal cortices could be associated with a lack of awareness and agency such as in dreaming ( Nir and Tononi, 2010 ; Voss et al., 2014 ). Local sleep occurrences in perceptual or associative areas, such as the “hot zone” identified by Siclari et al. (2016) (including sensory areas, precuneus, posterior cingulate), could lead to the occurrence of minimal subjective experience devoid of specific forms of imagery and thought contents (i.e., mind blanking) similar to white dreams during sleep ( Windt et al., 2016 ; Fazekas et al., 2019 ).

We further propose that local sleep could account for inter-individual differences in the frequency and type of attentional lapses. In particular, focusing on individuals with ADHD, we hypothesize that the reported increase in mind-blanking, at the expense of both mind-wandering and a focused state ( Van den Driessche et al., 2017 ), may be traced back to an increase in local sleep intrusions during the day. This larger propensity to enter mixed sleep/wake states could in turn be related to the sleep disturbances that often accompany the disorder. By showing that individuals with ADHD show more instances of local sleep, we could offer a more exhaustive account of their symptoms, which links daytime performance with disruptions of the restorative function of sleep.

Importantly, we do not argue here that all forms of attentional lapses can be explained by sleepiness and local sleep intrusions, nor that changes in subjective experience such as mind-wandering and mind-blanking are always associated with local sleep. It is of course possible that attentional lapses with similar behavioral consequences to those discussed here can occur in contexts of hyper-arousal rather than hypo-vigilance ( Figure 2 ). Nonetheless, we propose that attentional lapses associated with hypo-vigilance might be more frequent.

Although promising, this framework needs to be further established. It has already been suggested that local sleep intrusions, depending on their location, can affect specific aspects of wake behavior ( Vyazovskiy et al., 2011 ; Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 ; Nir et al., 2017 ; Quercia et al., 2018 ). However, previous findings were obtained in different tasks or studies, or investigated the correlation between local sleep and performance across trials and individuals rather than on the single-trial level. Similarly, the link between local sleep and subjective experience is suggested by previous research but these studies focused mostly on subjective experiences occurring during sleep. Although there is a phenomenological similarity between mind-wandering, mind-blanking and sleep-related experiences and while it is suggestive that both mind-wandering and mind-blanking occur under conditions of low arousal ( Braboszcz and Delorme, 2011 ; Poh et al., 2016 ; Unsworth and Robison, 2018 ), this needs to be established through simultaneous phenomenological and neural recordings. Furthermore, it is yet to be determined whether spatial properties of local sleep intrusions could predict changes in spontaneous experience in a region-specific fashion.

Finally, the conditions under which local sleep can be observed are yet unclear. Initial studies have shown local sleep intrusions following extensive sleep deprivation, with the first intrusions occurring only after a few hours of sleep restriction ( Hung et al., 2013 ; Bernardi et al., 2015 ; Nir et al., 2017 ). A recent study, however, showed that local sleep can also occur during an experimental task after a normal night of sleep ( Quercia et al., 2018 ). Is local sleep then an abnormal event, occurring when the brain is pushed to its limits or does it represent a normal component of the healthy brain’s physiology? Does local sleep affect each of us or is it constrained to very specific contexts or sub-populations? To answer these questions, it is necessary to perform interdisciplinary studies, combining the methods and approaches of sleep, vigilance and attention research. For example, paradigms established in attention research ( Robertson et al., 1997 ; O’Connell et al., 2009 ; Dockree et al., 2017 ) and seeking to explore the sub-processes of sensory processing and decision making can be modified to allow the probing of subjective experience with a comprehensive taxonomy of spontaneous cognition ( Smallwood and Schooler, 2015 ). The parallel recording of brain activity and in particular of EEG and pupillometry could then allow to map changes at the behavioral and experiential levels to physiological markers of local sleep and arousal ( Bernardi et al., 2015 ; van Kempen et al., 2019 ). Exploring local sleep with complementary brain imaging techniques such as Magnetoencephalography (MEG) or fMRI could help understand how local a given local sleep event is and how the occurrence of local sleep in one region can functionally affect connected regions. Our framework is designed to support a versatile methodology that could explore the impact of local sleep in various contexts (with or without sleep deprivation, with or without pharmacological treatments, in response to circadian manipulation, etc) and different populations (healthy individuals, ADHD, insomnia, etc).

Author Contributions

All authors contributed to the review and discussion of the literature and to the proposition of future directions.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Funding. TA and NT are supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Projects (DP180104128 and DP180100396) and a Strategic Project Grant from Monash University. TA is supported by the Human Frontier Science Program (LT000362/2018-L). NT and JW are supported by Arts-Medicine Interdisciplinary Research Program from Monash University. NT, JW, and SD are supported by AFFINITY grant from Monash University. JW is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE170101254). MB is supported by a Senior Research Fellowship from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) and his program of research is funded by the NHMRC, Australian Research Council (ARC), and the Office of Naval Research Global (ONR Global).

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How mind-wandering can improve your thinking and well-being.

Forbes Coaches Council

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Coach, consultant, and facilitator at Connect Consulting helping leaders improve their thinking, communications, and overall performance.

Do you practice meditation, mindfulness and mind-wandering?

The first two, meditation and mindfulness, are established ways to take control of your thoughts, increase your awareness and train your attention. When you practice meditation and mindfulness (which is a form of meditation), you clear your mind using a combination of mental and physical methods. As a result, you can increase the clarity of your thinking, regulate your emotions better and become calmer.

As for mind-wandering, it often gets a bad rap, frequently viewed as an undisciplined sequence of random thoughts that can take you down too many rabbit holes. Yes, when your mind wanders, you can think haphazard thoughts, talk to yourself, ruminate, daydream or all of the above; however, your brain is behaving naturally, according to neuroscientists . And even better, you can take advantage of your wandering mind to be more creative about the present and the future.

What is mind-wandering?

To learn how to direct this organic activity, it first helps to know how mind-wandering works. Mind-wandering is a feature of your brain’s default network . The network, which is on 24/7, works like a reflex, becoming more active when you’re passive. That is, as soon as your brain is at rest or you stop paying attention, either intentionally or accidentally, your brain automatically switches to the default network. And your mind wanders a lot—generally up to 50% of your waking hours—because the default mode is the brain’s preferred state of being.

In this mode, your mind is technically at rest, yet it’s actively working. Your mind darts among thoughts, feelings, images. You contemplate the future as well as revisit the past, including retrieving memories. And while mind-wandering can be all about you, it also can be social, considering other people and your relationships with them.

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For all of these reasons, mind-wandering is something to accept and even embrace, especially for addressing work challenges. When your mind meanders off in different directions, it can connect more dots, explore new opportunities, invent novel products and features, visualize more diverse options and envision fresh "what ifs."

Ready to practice mind-wandering?

Try the following:

1. Give yourself permission to have downtime so your mind can wander.

To think new, expansive thoughts, you need to rest your prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive function . That will activate your default network, which will help you think much more expansively than your prefrontal cortex.

This means quieting your brain, avoiding things that are too stimulating, like digital screens, and shifting to a positive—or at least not negative—mindset. You can then do things that don’t demand much brain power. For example, take a shower, do laundry, fix yourself a snack, walk the dog, go for a run or do another type of exercise.

2. Prime yourself before the downtime.

To give yourself a head start (pun intended) for your mind-wandering, get familiar with the topics you want to explore. Or even do some problem-solving in advance. In effect, you’ll be scattering seeds all over a pasture rather than planting them in nice, neat rows. These seeds can cross-pollinate, take root and grow in your default network. When you let your mind loose to wander, stop thinking about the seeds as well as the topics they represent. That will keep your brain in default mode. You want to stay there to keep your mind wandering.

For example, a few years ago, I’d often spend about an hour tackling tough work problems before going to a low-impact exercise class. Then during class, I’d get great insights on how to solve my problems, as well as other ideas.

3. Recognize that your default network works on its own schedule.

You can’t force yourself to come up with brilliant insights, clever ideas or remarkable solutions on demand. Instead, you need to put your brain into the favorable condition just described and your body into a comfortable physical space. You’ll be both helping your unconscious mind make new connections and resting your brain. The latter reduces your cognitive load, which is another benefit.

Troubleshooting

Feeling like you’re unable to harvest the quality thoughts you want? Don’t despair. Instead, consider whether you have any behaviors and/or are experiencing conditions that may inhibit you. For example, regular meditation presents challenges, since meditation is the exact opposite of mind-wandering. You’ll need to retrain your mind so that it feels it’s okay to wander.

Two other common conditions also get in the way: poor sleep and internal noise. Lack of sleep, especially if related to overall poor sleep hygiene, can interfere with the quality of your overall thinking as well as your health. In this case, use this as a wake-up call to work on improving your sleep. You can start with these CDC tips .

Second, if you can’t quiet the noise in your head, you may be unable to hear your insights through the chatter. When that chatter becomes ruminations—that is, constant worry about future or hypothetical situations, replaying of past events or brooding over things—that’s a concern, too.

For more on this topic, check out the best-seller Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by award-winning psychologist Ethan Kross. He explains why our inner voice often becomes a critic instead of a supportive coach. Even more useful, he also shares science-based tools you can use to escape the negative chatter and start to think more clearly and constructively. These tools work differently for everybody, so it's important to figure out which combination of tools works best for you to silence your inner critic.

Meanwhile, remember that mind-wandering is natural, healthy and a valuable tool for expanding your thinking. Don’t apologize for it. Instead, enjoy your journeys!

Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?

Liz Guthridge

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The Hatch Restore 2 is the secret to my early mornings

The Hatch Restore 2 is a sunrise alarm clock and sound machine that you control via a companion app, allowing me to customize its settings.

Since getting my first iPhone over a decade ago, buying an alarm clock has felt unnecessary. I did not see a reason to spend money on a separate device when there’s a free app pre-installed on my phone. I now realize that being startled awake by a blaring ringing noise is a terrible way to start my day. Plus, keeping my phone next to my bed offered too much of a temptation to answer one last email or watch one last TikTok before dozing off.

The solution was obvious, though it came in the form of a product I’d sworn off: an alarm clock. But not just any alarm clock. My research led me to the Hatch Restore 2, a customizable sunrise alarm clock that uses light and sound to guide users awake. It also acts as a sound machine , night light and clock.

The Hatch Restore 2 sunrise alarm clock lit pink, displaying the time 6:11 a.m

Now that I’ve used it for months, I can safely say that the Hatch Restore 2 (which the brand sent me to try) has altered my sleep for the better. I no longer dread waking up because I have the device’s beautiful lightscape and serene noises to look forward to, and listening to relaxing river sounds calms my mind as it lulls me to sleep. Below, I’ll share my experience trying the Hatch Restore 2 and why I think it’s worth investing in, regardless of what type of sleeper you are. 

SKIP AHEAD What is the Hatch Restore 2? | How I tried the Hatch Restore 2 | My experience with the Hatch Restore 2 | Potential drawbacks to keep in mind | Who is the Hatch Restore 2 best for?

mind wandering can't sleep

select Do you really need to use a top sheet? Experts explain

What is the hatch restore 2.

The Hatch Restore 2 ($199.99) is a cross between a sunrise alarm clock and a sound machine. If you’re unfamiliar with a sunrise alarm clock, it’s a device that mimics a sunrise by gradually emitting light up to an hour before your scheduled wake-up time. Sunrise alarm clocks gently encourage you out of your slumber instead of suddenly jolting you awake like standard alarm clocks do. Many also pair their sunrise with a peaceful sound like wind chimes or chirping birds to further coax you out of bed.

Hatch Restore 2

Hatch Restore 2

  • Highly customizable
  • Multifunctional
  • Easy-to-use companion app
  • Requires Wi-Fi connection
  • Not portable

Sunrise alarm clocks give your body time to react and adjust to leaving the sleep state and entering the wake state, according to Dr. Christopher Winter , a neurologist and sleep specialist. The Hatch Restore 2, which is available in three colors including Slate (gray), Latte (tan) and Putty (white),  takes that peaceful wake-up experience a step further by allowing you to fully customize its settings. The linen-covered device pairs with a free companion app ( iOS or Android ) via Wi-Fi, through which you can schedule up to 15 individual sunrise alarms along with 13 calming alarm sounds like morning birds and wind chimes. 

For each alarm, you choose the light color and brightness level for the sunrise, as well as the sound and its volume level. You also choose the sunrise duration, what time you want the alarm to go off and what days of the week you want the alarm to repeat. You can also set alarms with just a sunrise or just a sound, if you prefer. For example, if you want to be fully awake by 6:30 a.m. and set the sunrise duration to be an hour, the light starts gradually getting brighter at 5:30 a.m. It will reach its most intense brightness at 6:30 a.m., which is also what time the noise sounds. 

Hatch Restore 2 lit up orange

You can also toggle alarms on or off depending on when you want to use them. I set a weekday alarm and a weekend alarm, but toggle the weekday alarm off instead of deleting it if I have a day off or it’s a holiday.

The Hatch Restore 2 doesn’t just aim to ease you into your morning — it also helps lull you to sleep. You can program up to five unique sounds to use at night, like white noise, ocean waves and rain., and can choose each one’s duration and volume, plus whether you want to pair it with a night light. 

You can also program night lights without any noise if you just want to softly illuminate your room while sleeping. Unlike the sunrise alarm clock, you cannot schedule the sound machine or nightlight to start at a specific time, so you have to either turn it on via the Hatch app or by pressing a button on the device. However, you can set a rest reminder through the app, which sends a push notification to your phone at a specific time and on days you select, nudging to start heading you to bed.

The Hatch is also a digital clock. Through the app, you can choose to keep the clock on or off at all times, or turn it off at night. You can also set your preferences for the clock’s daytime and nighttime brightness levels in the app or on the machine itself. 

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How i tried the hatch restore 2.

In 2022, I received the Hatch Restore , the brand’s original model, as a holiday gift from my family and used it for a year until the new model came out. Up until that point I had been using my iPhone as an alarm clock. After the Restore 2 came out in 2023, the brand sent me it to try, and I’ve been using it for about four months in my New York City apartment, where I am the only one using the device. I typically wake up around 6:15 a.m. on weekdays and 8:30 a.m. on weekends. I’ve slept with a sound machine on at night for as long as I can remember and cannot sleep without one.

The Hatch Restore 2 (left) versus the Hatch Restore (right)

Because everyone’s sleep and wake habits are different, I asked five NBC Select staffers to try and share their feedback about the Restore 2. The brand sent SEO editor Nikki Brown , associate SEO reporter Ashley Morris , editor Cory Fernandez , and production coordinator Kelsey Fredricks the device — they’ve been using it for a little over a month. Associate reporter Bianca Alvarez bought the Restore 2 herself in 2023 and has been using it for about four months as well. All of my fellow testers have never used a sunrise alarm clock or Hatch product prior to trying the Restore 2. They all sleep alone, so, like me, they’re the only ones using the devices in their homes.

My experience with the Hatch Restore 2

When my colleagues and I came together to debrief about our experiences, we unanimously agreed that it revolutionized our sleep. Below, I’ll share more details about my experience using the Restore 2.

Setup and design

Setting up the Restore 2 is a very straightforward process because the companion app walks you through every step. I followed its prompts to connect the device to Wi-Fi, give it a name and start customizing my rise and rest routines.

The Hatch Restore 2 in three colors, from left to right: Putty, Latte and Slate

Since the curved device has a sleek, minimalist appearance, it practically blends into my bedroom. The buttons are also flush with the top of the device, so they do not draw attention to themselves. I also appreciate that the Restore 2 comes in three linen colors, allowing me to choose the one that best fits my bedroom decor. 

Sunrise alarm clock

It only took one sleep for me to understand how much of an impact a gentle wake-up call has on my morning. I wake up at 6:15 a.m. during the week to run before work, and my iPhone alarm would always make me jump. It was such an unpleasant experience to have at the start of my day, and I often found myself waking up in the middle of the night to check the time because I dreaded being woken up so abruptly. But that sense of dread has gone away since I started using the Restore 2, and I’m more likely to sleep through the night now since I’m not anticipating being startled awake. The gradual increase of light in my bedroom lets me slowly transition from a deep sleep into consciousness.

The Hatch Restore 2 lit up in pink

Another benefit of using the sunrise alarm clock is that it’s hard to ignore, says Alvarez. She previously used her iPhone as an alarm, but frequently slept through it because the volume was too low or she forgot to turn the volume on so her phone just vibrated. But the Restore 2 pairs light and sound to wake you up — together, those two cues are almost impossible to sleep through, she says. And while you can hit snooze on the device, it just stops the noise for nine minutes, which means the bright light still illuminates your room. I find it hard to fall back asleep when I’ve already seen a bright light, so while I may snooze the sound on my Restore 2 once in a while, it just briefly delays me from getting out of bed.

Being able to customize the sunrise I want to experience is one of the best parts about the Restore 2. I love scrolling through the different sound and light options to find a combination that works for my mood that week. 

Sound machine and nightlight

Prior to using the Restore 2, I relied on the same Homedics noise machine for years and was quite attached to it. I found the sound soothing and knew what my perfect volume level was, so I was worried that I would have a hard time adjusting to using a new noise machine. Now, however, I cannot imagine not dozing off while listening to the Restore 2’s relaxing river sound at a 24% volume level. 

The Restore 2’s three speakers make me feel immersed in the crisp, full noise more so than other sound machines I’ve used. And with over 20 noises to choose from, I was able to experiment with different options and really think about which one created a peaceful atmosphere in my bedroom. The Hatch app also remembers my ideal volume level, so I don’t have to fiddle with the settings every night.

While I do not use the night light feature, many of my fellow testers do: Fernandez turns on its dim night light before bed when he doesn’t want it to be completely dark yet, and Morris customizes the color of her night light depending on what she’s watching as part of her nighttime routine. Alvarez also programs one to keep her accountable about going to sleep at a reasonable hour. “Sometimes I’ll be working at night or watching TV and realize it’s getting too late, so I pick one of the sunsets and set it for an hour, that way I know when it turns off, it’s time for bed,” she says. The night light makes a great reading light, too.

Potential drawbacks to keep in mind

Requires a wi-fi connection.

To set up and use the Restore 2, it needs a Wi-Fi connection at all times. My fellow reviewers found that the location of their Wi-Fi router in relation to their Restore 2 impacted their ability to use the device. “The Wi-Fi in my bedroom wasn’t strong enough for the initial connection to work,” says Morris. “Once I checked the instructions, I saw that they suggested setting up the Restore 2 close to the router. I plugged it in beside my router and it worked immediately.”

Additionally, if the Wi-Fi or power goes out in your home, you won’t be able to use the Restore 2. If this were to happen overnight, you might not wake up on time. Fredricks says she sets a secondary alarm on her phone just in case. But requiring a Wi-Fi connection is par for the course with most other customizable sunrise alarm clocks as well, like the Loftie Clock , WiiM Wake-Up Light and Philips SmartSleep Sleep and Wake-Up Light . 

Must remain plugged in

Since the Restore 2 has to be connected to an outlet at all times, it’s not particularly suitable for traveling, but Brown wishes it was. The cord is also on the shorter side, which limits where you can set it up.

Reliant on the Hatch app

The only way to set up alarms and sound machines on the Restore 2 is through the Hatch sleep app, so you must have an iPhone or Android to use the device and cannot manually change its settings via the buttons on the device. However, after you schedule sunrise alarm clocks, noise machines and/or night lights, you can turn them on and off using the built-in buttons.

So long as the Restore 2 is plugged in, connected to Wi-Fi and connected to the Hatch app, it displays the time. The device’s clock syncs to the clock on your phone, which means it automatically adjusts itself during daylight saving time and if you move to a new time zone.

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Who is the hatch restore 2 best for.

Generally speaking, almost everyone can benefit from incorporating the Hatch Restore 2 into their sleep routine. My fellow reviewers and I each have different rise and wind down preferences, but we all found that the Restore 2 made our bedtime routines and morning routines more enjoyable, peaceful and easier to stick to.

More specifically, anyone who dreads being jolted awake by the alarm on their phone will appreciate the Restore 2. “This has been a game changer for me,” says Brown. “The difference between waking up to a gradual sunrise and calming sounds, and my iPhone alarm is huge. I haven’t needed to hit the snooze button once since I started using it, even after nights when I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I feel way more refreshed and alert.

Frequently asked questions

The device comes with a power cord, a charging block and a quick start guide. You get a one-year warranty with your purchase, and Hatch offers a 60-night money-back guarantee. If you don’t love the device, you can return it within 60 days and get a full refund.

The device itself is 7.5 inches long, 2.75 inches wide and 5.75 inches tall — it’s about the size of an Amazon Kindle e-reader , so it doesn't take up much room on my side table.

No, the Hatch Restore 2 does not require a subscription. However, subscribing to Hatch+ gives you access to Channels, which are playlists that the brand curates and frequently updates with exclusive music, dreamscapes, guided rest exercises and sleep stories (mini podcasts). Content includes guided meditations, true crime stories, fiction stories and jazz piano music. You can add content from the Channels to your wake up routine to automatically play after you turn off your sunrise alarm clock or build them into your rest routine through the Unwind library in the app.

Every Hatch Restore 2 comes with a free trial of Hatch+, giving you the opportunity to experience it before deciding if you want to let the subscription automatically renew. At checkout, you can choose to try Hatch+ for one month, which automatically renews at $49.99 a year if you don’t cancel it, or one week, which automatically renews at $4.99 a month if you don’t cancel it.

Alvarez tried Hatch+ for one month and ultimately decided to cancel it. The Restore 2 is fully functional without the subscription, and while she enjoyed experiencing its offerings, it did not drastically impact her experience using the device.

In terms of their basic functions, the original Hatch Restore, which launched in 2020, and the Hatch Restore 2, which launched in 2023, are not much different from each other. They’re both customizable sunrise alarm clocks and sound machines, and they, along with all of Hatch’s other products, share the same companion app. But there are some key differences to be aware of while shopping. We detailed them below:

  • Price : The Hatch Restore retails for $129.99, while the Hatch Restore 2 retails for $199.99, putting a $70 price difference between the models. If you’re looking for other sunrise alarm clocks to consider, the Loftie Clock ($149), WiiM Wake-Up Light ($129) and Philips SmartSleep Sleep and Wake-Up Light ($219.95) are comparable to the Restore 2 in their function. Note that the Loftie Clock, which doubles as a Bluetooth speaker , is not a sunrise alarm clock, though its Loftie Lamp ($249) has sunrise capabilities.
  • Physical appearance : The exterior of the Hatch Restore 2 is covered in a linen material, while the Hatch Restore has a two-tone design: the bottom is covered in a gray mesh material and the top is a white dome light. The linen covering on the Hatch Restore 2 diffuses light so it looks softer compared to the brighter, more intense light the Restore’s uncovered dome emits. The Restore 2 is also available in three colors, while the Restore only comes in one style.
  • Hardware : The buttons on the Restore and Restore 2 generally perform the same functions, but they’re laid out differently on the devices to make using them more streamlined. The Restore 2 also has three speakers compared to the Restore’s one speaker, which I found to make for a more immersive listening experience, especially while I play my favorite relaxing river noise on the sound machine.
  • Software : In addition to 10 new sunrise sounds, 21 new sleep sounds and new light and sound pairings, the Restore 2 allows you to add a Morning Moment (one of the brand’s mini podcasts) to your rise routine, which the Restore does not. Keep in mind, however, that some of the software updates for the Restore 2 are only available with the Hatch+ subscription, including Morning Moments and new light and sound pairings.

Meet our experts

At NBC Select, we work with experts who have specialized knowledge and authority based on relevant training and/or experience. We also take steps to ensure that all expert advice and recommendations are made independently and with no undisclosed financial conflicts of interest.

  • Dr. Christopher Winter is a neurologist and sleep specialist based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Why trust NBC Select?

Zoe Malin is an associate updates editor for NBC Select who covers sleep products like sleep masks , silk pajamas and weighted stuffed animals . For this article, she tried the Hatch Restore 2, which the brand sent her and five other NBC Select staff members to try.

Catch up on NBC Select’s in-depth coverage of personal finance , tech and tools , wellness and more, and follow us on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter and TikTok to stay up to date.

mind wandering can't sleep

Zoe Malin is an associate updates editor for Select on NBC News.

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  12. What to Do if Your Mind is Racing Before Sleep

    Calm Your Mind. Relaxation training is what many commonly associate with calming exercises. Though these methods may feel silly at first, guided imagery, medication, and mindfulness are all beneficial for a racing mind. More specifically, you can focus on slowing your breath and using progressive muscle relaxation to take your mind off stressors.

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    Download Article. 1. Slow down your breathing to occupy your mind. Concentrate your thoughts on controlling your breathing to bring your mind into sync with your body in the present moment. [1] Breathe in slowly while you count to 4-7, then breathe out slowly and count to 4-7 again, for example.

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