#36

The haunting thoughts that keeps you up at night

Earlier this week, I struggled to fall asleep. Now, I know you’re reading this thinking, “What’s the headline here?” For context, I usually sleep like a baby. Within minutes of my head hitting the pillow, I’m out like a light. Shit, I’m the guy who falls asleep while getting his haircut. I’ve fallen asleep in the cinema. I have, on one occasion, even fallen asleep during sex with my wife.

So the fact that I was lying there staring at the ceiling until 4am was significant. And no, I hadn’t had six coffees. I wasn’t scrolling TikTok. There wasn’t a party happening next door. I just couldn’t switch my brain off. Now, I’m aware that conditions like insomnia and sleep apnea can seriously disrupt sleep. But there’s another reason many of us struggle to fall asleep that we probably don’t talk about enough.
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The haunting thoughts come out at night.
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If you’re anything like me, you carry a lot of weight on your shoulders. The expectation to provide for your family. To be strong, but emotionally available. To endure hardship without letting it consume you. To stay in shape. To build a career. To manage your money. To be a good partner, father, son, brother and friend. To have some sort of spiritual foundation. And then, on top of all that, there’s that relentless ambition telling you that you still haven’t done enough. The problem with carrying all of this is that every now and then you look in the mirror and realise you’re not hitting the mark.

That night, when I looked in the mirror, I realised I wasn’t hitting the mark in many of those areas. And staring back at me was a physical manifestation of my haunting thoughts. Not some supernatural creature, but something much worse. An amalgamation of every memory of when I had dropped the ball before, combined with every imagined scenario of what could happen if I let it happen again.

Failure. Disappointment. Regret. Losing things I worked hard to build. Letting people down.I spent my waking hours that day in conversation with that side. Trying to convince it that I wouldn’t fall again while it tried to convince me that my ruin was already on the horizon.

I got into bed , and despite my wife sleeping next to me it felt like it was just me and him, and he had my full attention. Seneca wrote something nearly 2,000 years ago that perfectly describes this feeling:

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

There’s actually some science behind this too.

Researchers have found that rumination, repeatedly going over stressful events and negative thoughts, is associated with taking longer to fall asleep. The body might be lying in bed, but mentally you’re still fighting the battle. (PubMed)

That was me at 3:17am. I was physically exhausted, but mentally at war.

So what did I about it?

I wish I had a magical pill for this. Trust me, if I did, I would’ve taken it years ago, but no I don’t have a cure. What I do have is enough experience with myself to recognise the behaviours I tend to abandon in the weeks and months before I end up in this place. And when I looked at my life honestly, three stood out.

1. I stopped giving my stress somewhere to go

I’ve had an unhealthy relationship with stress for as long as I can remember.

My natural response is basically:

I’m fine.

Then:

I’m fine.

Then:I’m still fine.

And eventually my body responds:

No the f*ck you’re not.

I’ve ignored stress to the point of serious burnout before, so over the years I’ve had to learn that stress needs an outlet.

For me, that tends to be training. Walking. Journaling. Prayer. Talking to friends. Sometimes sitting somewhere without my phone and actually thinking. Now, none of these things magically remove the problems, but they stop me from carrying every problem inside my own head.

Interestingly, one small sleep-lab study found that people who spent five minutes before bed writing a detailed list of things they needed to do over the coming days fell asleep faster than people who wrote about things they’d already completed. (PubMed)

There’s something powerful about taking what’s spinning around in your head and putting it somewhere else. Paper can carry some of this weight for you, and so can another person. But when you refuse to give stress an outlet , eventually it finds one itself. Sometimes at 4am 🙃

2. I started looking outward more than inward

This one is dangerous because you rarely notice yourself doing it. You start spending more time looking at everyone else’s life than examining your own. Look what Johns earning, what Ryan is building and how Marks' body looks. And slowly, without realising it, you’ve outsourced your definition of enough to the internet.

The finish line starts moving, and suddenly your 6 figure salary isn’t enough because someone earns more. Being fit isn’t enough because someone has 9% body fat. Sometimes those haunting thoughts aren’t telling you that your life is falling apart, it’s telling you that you’re behind and those two things aren’t the same.

I’ve had to remind myself that there will always be someone ahead of me in some category.

The question isn’t:

“Am I ahead of everyone else?”

It’s:

“Am I becoming the man I said I wanted to become?”

That’s a much harder question, but at least it’s your question.

3. I strayed from the basics

This might be the biggest one. Whenever life gets complicated, we have a tendency to search for complicated solutions. You need to read another book, listen to another podcast , build another productivity system. Add a 20th step to your hour long morning routine.

But when I look back at the periods where I’ve felt most grounded, the answer has usually been embarrassingly simple. Do honest work, train hard, eat good food, get some sleep, spend time with people I love, practice gratitude, pray and keep promises to yourself. Doing the things I know I’m supposed to do even when nobody's watching. The basics aren’t sexy, but they work. And when you abandon them for long enough, those haunting thoughts will get louder.

It’s much harder for that voice to tell me I’m becoming a failure when I’ve spent the day doing things I respect myself for. I might not have solved every problem. I might still be behind on something. There might still be uncertainty about the future. But I can put my head on the pillow knowing:

I did what I could today.

Sometimes that’s enough.

The Man Daily Way

I don’t think the goal is to kill those haunting thoughts I’m not even sure you can.

Because part of that voice comes from somewhere useful.

It comes from ambition, standards and responsibility.

The desire to protect the people you love. The desire to become something more. The problem starts when that voice stops being your adviser and becomes your master.

So when the haunting thoughts come out at night, don’t just fight them.

Listen to what they’re pointing at.

Is there something you’ve been avoiding?

A conversation you need to have?

Work you’ve been putting off?

Stress you’ve refused to acknowledge?

Or have you simply drifted away from the habits that keep you grounded?

Write it down. Talk to someone. Pray about it. Make the plan. Then get back to the basics.

Because you probably won’t silence every fear about tomorrow. But you can live today in a way that gives those fears less evidence.

And maybe that’s the real battle.

Not becoming a man with no haunting thoughts.

Becoming a man who knows what to do when they show up.