When overthinking at 5am tries to steals your day…..
Updated: Sep 30
I woke up at 5am this morning with thoughts spinning at a thousand miles an hour. They were jumping from one thing to the next, garbled and barely making sense. I could feel it in my body too. That familiar flutteriness in my tummy and chest. A sense of urgency and a need to fix everything had already started to take hold, before I’d even opened my eyes.
Years ago, I would have carried on thinking and let myself get tangled further and further into the weeds, until eventually I’d get up feeling exhausted and bamboozled and tried to carry on with my day.
Now, I’m more likely to spot it while it’s happening. Oh. Here’s that old pattern… My brain is working in overdrive again and I haven’t even started my day.
There wasn’t one problem I was trying to solve. My thoughts were moving from one thing to the next to the next sometimes overlapping, then circling back to the first one again. It didn’t even feel logical, but the urgency made each thought feel as though it needed my attention right now.
I started to think about the cost of it. Was I going to begin the day exhausted again, already running on a low battery? I could feel how easily that became another thing to worry about, and now, on top of everything else, I had to solve my overthinking. This was not good!
So I asked myself a different question: What do I really need?
If I think I might like to get back to sleep, sometimes cognitive shuffling helps.
Other times, I bring my attention to small things I’m grateful for. Nothing grand like ‘I have a job’ or ‘I’m happy to have a home’. Small things….The softness of my bed. Clean pillows that smell fresh ( that’s if they do of course which isn’t often!) The warmth under the duvet, the quiet of the house. Perhaps I think about my morning coffee. It's a helpful way to ground yourself instead of following thoughts of what you need to do or what might happen.
Sometimes I simply come back to my breath. I notice one breath in and one breath out, without trying to change it. When my thoughts wander off again, I can come back to the next breath.
If I’m wide awake, I might write the thoughts down. Get the big blur out of my head and onto a page, where I can see that I don’t have to deal with all of it at once.
None of these things guarantees that I’ll fall asleep or feel instantly calm. This morning, I needed to stop leaning into the urgency of solving everything. I needed to remind myself that it was okay to feel unsettled. I was steady enough, even if my thoughts were all over the place. My body needed that reminder too.
If this sounds familiar, it’s something we can explore together in coaching. We might look at what sets your thoughts spinning, how you notice it happening, and what helps you find your way back to feeling steady.
I’m Nicky Walker, an ADHD coach working with adults who have ADHD or AuDHD.
At Shine On ADHD Coaching, I offer a space to understand your patterns and find ways of working that feel right for you.
You can book a free discovery call here:
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