Sleep and money worries: why you lie awake at night and what helps

It is three o’clock in the morning. The house is quiet, but there is a calculator running in your head. Has the garage bill been paid yet? What if the boiler breaks down? Will you make it to the end of the month? During the day you manage to push those thoughts away, but as soon as it gets dark, they come back. If this sounds familiar, you are certainly not alone. Money worries and sleep have a difficult relationship, and it works in both directions.

Why worrying thoughts sound louder at night

During the day you are distracted by work, conversations and tasks. In bed that distraction falls away, and your brain reaches for whatever is still unresolved. Money worries are ideally suited to this: they are uncertain, they are about the future and there is nothing you can do about them at that moment.

In her cognitive model of insomnia (2002), sleep researcher Allison Harvey described how worrying, physical tension and closely monitoring your own sleep reinforce each other. You lie awake, you worry that you are not sleeping, and that extra worry keeps you awake even longer. Add money stress to that and the cycle turns faster.

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (Scarcity, 2013) showed that financial worries take up your mental bandwidth. Your brain keeps calculating and monitoring in the background, even when you do not want it to. At night there is nothing else left to claim that attention.

Sleeping badly makes money decisions harder

The relationship also works the other way round. After a bad night you are more irritable and less focused. A meta-analysis by June Lim and David Dinges (2010) brought together dozens of studies on short-term sleep deprivation and found clear negative effects on attention and working memory, among other things. Those are exactly the skills you need to stick to a budget, read a difficult letter or resist an impulse purchase. When you are tired, you are quicker to choose what is easy: the delivery app instead of cooking, leaving the letter for another day.

This creates a vicious circle: money worries keep you awake, and tiredness makes it harder to deal with those worries. The good news is that you can break the circle in two places: in the evening and during the day.

What helps: before going to bed

A few techniques have solid evidence behind them. With the sleep planner you can turn them into an evening routine of your own.

• Write down your to-do list. In a study by Michael Scullin and colleagues (2018), participants who spent five minutes before bed writing a to-do list for the coming days fell asleep faster than participants who wrote about tasks they had completed. It involved a small group of young adults, but the idea is simple: what is on paper does not have to be held in your head.
• Schedule a worry time during the day. The idea of postponed worry time goes back to work by Thomas Borkovec and colleagues (1983). You agree with yourself that every day at a fixed time, for example fifteen minutes after your evening meal, you write out your worries. If they come up at night, you tell yourself: ‘I will think about that tomorrow at seven o’clock.’
• Do not lie there endlessly. If you have been lying awake for more than about twenty minutes, get up and do something calm in dim light until you feel sleepy. This is part of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I). Guidelines such as those of the American College of Physicians (2016) recommend this therapy as the first treatment for chronic insomnia.
• No banking app in bed. Checking your balance at midnight rarely brings calm. Put your phone out of reach.

What helps: tackling the source during the day

Sleep tips ease the symptoms, but real calm only comes when the worries get smaller. That does not mean all your problems have to be solved. Often it is enough to know what is going on and to have a plan. A vague threat keeps you awake longer than a known problem with a clear next step.

1. Make a list of everything that is on your mind financially: outstanding bills, expected costs, questions you have no answer to.
2. Next to each item, write the very next concrete action. Not ‘sort out debts’, but ‘call the energy supplier on Monday about a payment plan’.
3. Schedule those actions in your diary, during the day, at a time when you feel fresh.
4. Tick off what you have done. Every step you tick off is one less thought at three in the morning.

Kevin and the night-time calculator

Kevin (44) is a self-employed joiner in Hasselt. Ever since a big client started paying late, he has been lying awake every night. In his head he works out when his VAT return is due and whether there will still be enough money in his account by then. During the day he is tired, makes small mistakes on site and keeps putting off the phone call to the client.

His partner suggests that every evening after dinner he sits down at the table for fifteen minutes with a notebook. Kevin writes down everything that is on his mind and notes one action for the next day for each item. In the first week there are twelve items on his list. After three weeks there are five left, and the most important one, sending the client a reminder, has been done. Kevin does not yet sleep through every night, but when he wakes up, he thinks: ‘It’s in the notebook.’ Usually he then falls asleep again.

Peace of mind starts with an overview

Sleep is one of the first places where money stress becomes visible, and also one of the first places where you notice the benefit when you tackle it. Financial self-care here does not mean you have to have everything under control. It means giving your worries a place during the day, so that they do not need to call out at night. Every letter you open, every bill you have a plan for, makes the night a little quieter.

Would you like to know how much money stress you are experiencing at the moment? The money stress thermometer gives you an honest picture in a few minutes and helps you decide where best to start.