Befriending Wakefulness: How to Stop Nighttime Panic and Finally Sleep

On the first night of Rosh Hashanah, as I lit the candles, my married daughter told me she had been having contractions on and off throughout the day. In my mind, my immediate reaction was, No, not tonight. Please, I need to sleep.

She and her toddler had moved in for Yom Tov, so the house was full of warmth and activity. We gathered around the table that evening, dipping our apples into honey, enjoying a delicious roast, and tearing into our fluffy round challos. It was festive, it was special, and it was exhausting. By the time I finished cleaning everything up, it was close to 11pm. After a long day of cooking, baking, and the typical Erev Yom Tov rush, I collapsed into bed.

My daughter was still having contractions, but they seemed to be the same as they had been all day. I convinced myself that I had at least one solid night left to recharge. I thought, once the baby arrives, I’ll be bouncing between the hospital and caring for her toddler, so tonight I need this sleep.

But at 1:30am came a knock on my bedroom door.

I stumbled out of bed, hardly knowing what planet I was on, and opened the door. My daughter stood there and said, “I think it’s time. I need to go in.” We agreed that I would walk up to the hospital at 8am to check in on her. She left for the hospital, and there I was—suddenly wide awake.

The panic set in almost immediately. My thoughts turned loud and sharp: I must sleep. If I fall asleep right now, I’ll still only get five hours. But what if I don’t fall asleep right now? Tomorrow I’ll be a wreck. I won’t have the energy I need. I’ll be useless.

My mind raced with different “solutions.” Maybe I should try reading. Maybe I should smell lavender. Maybe I should force myself to relax. But none of it was helping, because beneath all of that was the heavy pressure I was putting on myself: I need to sleep. I must sleep now.

And here’s the funny part—I’m a sleep coach. Yet in that moment, I wasn’t coaching myself. I was catastrophizing. I wasn’t just awake—I was fighting the fact that I was awake, and the more I fought, the more impossible sleep felt.

This is what happens when fear of wakefulness takes over. It’s not just the clock ticking that keeps you up; it’s the panic, the desperation, the voice inside that says, If I don’t sleep, everything tomorrow will fall apart. Fear tells your body to stay on high alert. And when your body is on alert, it simply cannot relax into sleep.

The truth is, fear of wakefulness is often more powerful than wakefulness itself. Being awake in the middle of the night is uncomfortable, but what makes it unbearable is the story we tell ourselves about it. Instead of lying there quietly, our minds begin to predict disasters: we’ll be exhausted tomorrow, we won’t cope, we’ll lose our patience, we’ll fall apart. That kind of thinking doesn’t just make us anxious—it wires our bodies to stay alert, which is the exact opposite of what allows sleep to happen.

This fear often shows up in a cycle. First comes the awareness: I’m awake. Then comes the worry: What if I don’t fall back asleep? That worry grows into catastrophizing: If I don’t sleep, I’ll fail tomorrow, I’ll disappoint people, I’ll fall apart. Before long, the panic has completely taken over, and the body is flooded with adrenaline and tension. At that point, even if you were a little drowsy before, you are now fully awake—and it feels impossible to find your way back to rest.

That’s exactly what happened to me. At 2am, my brain was not calm or rational. It was screaming, You need to sleep now. But that urgency was the very thing blocking sleep. It’s a paradox: the harder we chase sleep, the further it runs away.

After about twenty minutes of tossing, turning, and spiraling, I finally pulled myself out of bed and took a drink of water. I told myself something I often tell my clients but had forgotten to apply in the heat of the moment: You don’t need to sleep right now. It’s okay to simply rest.

I reminded myself that lying in bed with my eyes closed is still giving my body recovery time. I told myself that I had managed before on far less sleep, and tomorrow would be okay no matter what. Most importantly, I gave myself permission to simply be awake without panicking about it.

That shift is what I call befriending wakefulness. Instead of fighting it, I allowed it. Instead of telling myself that being awake was dangerous or disastrous, I told myself it was safe. And the moment I took away the pressure, my body no longer felt it needed to stay on high alert.

I read a little to settle my mind, threw a towel over the clock so I wouldn’t keep checking the time, and let myself rest. Before I even realized it, I was asleep.

That night reminded me of something powerful: the problem wasn’t that I was awake. The problem was the panic about being awake.

When we catastrophize about what tomorrow will look like, we create a level of stress that makes sleep almost impossible. But when we allow ourselves to simply rest without forcing sleep, we give our minds and bodies the space to naturally drift back into it. Sleep often shows up the very moment we stop demanding it.

Befriending wakefulness doesn’t mean giving up on sleep. It means removing the fear that blocks it. It means creating a safe, calm space where sleep is welcome but not forced. It means telling yourself that your body is resilient, that rest in itself has value, and that you will manage tomorrow regardless of how many hours you get.

The next time you find yourself awake in the middle of the night, remember this: wakefulness is not your enemy. The fear of wakefulness is. When you let go of that fear, when you release the panic and allow yourself to simply rest, you create the conditions where sleep can return.

If you feel that panic in the night and want help shifting your relationship with wakefulness, please feel free to book a complimentary call. And if you’d like to dive deeper into this topic, check out my blog post: Why Am I So Tired But Wide Awake in Bed?.