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The middle of the night

Can't sleep at 2am? What to do right now

Short version: get out of bed. Here is why, and what to do instead of lying there.

2 min read

Last reviewed August 26, 2026

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If you have been awake a while, get out of bed. Not because lying there is dangerous, but because lying awake in bed is the thing that teaches your body the bed is a place for being awake. That is the association making tomorrow harder.

What to do

  1. Leave the bedroom. Somewhere else, dim light, comfortable.
  2. Do something quiet and slightly boring. A dull book. Not work, not news, not anything with a scroll.
  3. Go back when you feel sleepy — genuinely sleepy, heavy-eyed, not merely tired of sitting up.
  4. If it happens again, do it again. Some nights that is three times.
  5. Get up at your usual time anyway. Sleeping in shifts the whole problem into tomorrow night.

This is stimulus control, one of the components of CBT-I. It is dull, it is unglamorous, and it works slowly rather than tonight.

Don't check the clock

Knowing it is 2:47 changes nothing about whether you fall asleep, and it starts the arithmetic — how long is left, how bad tomorrow will be — which is arousal, and arousal is the opposite of what you need. Turn the clock away. Put the phone across the room.

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The night itself is not the problem to solve

Waking in the night is normal. Everyone surfaces at the end of each sleep cycle; most of the time nobody notices. What turns a normal wake into an hour awake is the reaction to it.

Which is why nothing you do at 2am fixes this. What you do at 2am stops it getting worse. The fixing happens in daylight, over weeks, with a consistent rising time and a bed used for sleeping.

When this is worth taking to a doctor

Get it looked at rather than worked around if you snore loudly, wake gasping, or have been told you stop breathing; if your legs feel restless in the evening; if this started suddenly or alongside a new medication; or if the daytime tiredness is affecting your driving.

Citations

  • Edinger JD, et al. Behavioral and psychological treatments for chronic insomnia disorder in adults: an American Academy of Sleep Medicine clinical practice guideline. J Clin Sleep Med. 2021;17(2):255–262. doi:10.5664/jcsm.8986
  • Qaseem A, et al. Management of chronic insomnia disorder in adults: a clinical practice guideline from the American College of Physicians. Ann Intern Med. 2016;165(2):125–133. doi:10.7326/M15-2175

Frequently asked questions

Protocols generally use fifteen to twenty minutes, judged by feel rather than by watching a clock. Checking the time tends to make the arousal worse.

Briefly, yes. The trade is that lying awake in bed strengthens the association between the bed and being awake, which is what makes tomorrow night harder.

The light matters less than what the phone does to your attention. Email, news and messages pull you further awake. If you use it, use it for something dull.

A pattern lasting three or more nights a week for three months or more is what clinicians call chronic insomnia, and it is worth doing something structured about rather than managing night by night.

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