Why You Can’t Turn Off Your Brain at Night (Even When You’re Exhausted)
You’ve been going all day - mentally, emotionally, and physically. You’ve answered emails, made decisions about dinner, remembered things for other people, and kept a hundred tiny spinning plates spinning in the air. You were so excited to rest tonight. You did your routine, and got into bed…and your brain is wide awake.
Suddenly, you're replaying conversations, thinking about whether or not you sent that one email, reviewing tomorrow’s schedule, calculating how many hours of sleep you’ll get if you fall asleep right now, and remembering something embarrassing from six years ago.
As a psychologist who works with high-achieving, anxious women, I hear this exact story regularly. Feeling calm all day and spiraling at bedtime is far more common than most people realize. And the explanation is not that you're “bad at relaxing.”
Let’s talk about why your brain suddenly turns up the volume the moment you lay down - and what you can do about it.
Nighttime Overthinking Isn’t Random - It’s Delayed Processing
Throughout the day, you’re busy. You’re juggling work tasks, social obligation, and future planning (not to mention emotional caretaking and other invisible and mental labor).
When your brain is occupied, there’s no space for internal processing and reflection. So your system puts it off for later. And when do you think later is? Yup - nighttime. And then it tries to process everything at once (your brain is efficient, if anything).
Many women tell me they feel fine all day, but when they get into bed, they feel “everything.”
To be frank, that’s not a defect - that’s a backlog.
Now that there’s no task to focus on, no email to respond to, no “next thing” to handle, what’s underneath comes rushing forward - and yes, that includes embarrassing moments from years ago.
This is why the quiet feels loud - it is.
The Biology of Why Your Brain Spirals at Night
Your body has two dominant nervous system states:
Sympathetic: activated, alert, preparing
Parasympathetic: resting, digesting, decompressing
High-achieving, anxious women often spend 90% of their day in the sympathetic state - even if they appear calm, internally the motor is running.
During the day, adrenaline and cortisol keep you functioning. As these chemicals begin to drop at night, your body shifts, allowing room for feelings, thoughts, and sensations that were suppressed during the busyness of the day.
Imagine trying to hold a beach ball under water all day. When you finally loosen your grip - even slightly - it shoots up with force. Your emotions work the same way.
The Weight of “Unfinished Emotional Business”
Here’s the part most people never talk about: High-achieving women spend their days managing tasks to avoid feeling things. Not by choice, but by necessity.
School rewarded composure. Work rewarded competence. Family rewarded stability.
You didn’t learn to spend time in your emotional world, and you likely weren’t shown how to regulate or balance your emotions with getting things done.
So the body waits until the end of the day, when you’re finally still and the screens are gone.
That’s when the parts of you that didn’t get airtime earlier show up, emotional baggage in tow. You might cycle between exhaustion, fear, sadness, regret, guilt, irritation, and more.
These feelings aren’t new - they’re unprocessed.
Why Nighttime Is the First Time You Even Notice Anxiety
For many high-achieving women, nighttime is the first time they notice anxiety. They’re not having panic attacks or feeling constantly distressed. They often actually feel productive, and even calm.
Throughout the day, your mind is busy with other things. When you lie down, there’s no longer a to-do list to outrun yourself with. That’s when you meet the anxious parts you’ve been too busy to notice.
This doesn’t mean you’re “avoiding your emotions.” It means your life structure suppresses them until you slow down enough to feel them.
How Therapy Helps Calm Your Mind at Night
You don’t need someone telling you to “just relax,” or “try deep breathing,” or “cut out caffeine.” You need space to understand your mind and learn what it needs to slow down.
Therapy can help with nighttime anxiety by addressing the root causes.
1. We identify the protective parts that turn on at night
These might be parts of you that:
fear losing control
worry about disappointing others
track safety
manage emotional fallout
Understanding these parts reduces their urgency.
2. We build a relationship with your nervous system
We help you remember that your body isn’t the enemy. Nighttime anxiety is your nervous system asking for attention., and learning to speak its language using nervous system tools can help it downshift.
3. We make space for the emotions you don’t feel during the day
We slowly and intentionally make space for emotions (and your internal spiral about the 6th grade science fair). You learn to feel them safely and slowly, so you can reduce the backlog regularly rather than adding to it.
4. We shift the belief that rest is unsafe
This is one of the biggest barriers for high-achieving women. Through therapy work you can begin to learn to name and release fears of falling behind, being unprepared, or failing.
5. We work through the childhood patterns that fuel nighttime overthinking
The roots of nighttime anxiety are often deeper than daily stress, and we work through patterns and beliefs learned in childhood and adolescence.
You’re Not Alone - And Nothing About This Makes You “Too Much”
If your nights feel louder than your days, that doesn’t mean you’re failing.
It means your body is trying to catch up to everything you had to push through just to get here. Your mind spirals because it learned to protect you. Your nervous system activates because it is trying to keep you safe. Your thoughts feel loud because you’ve had so little space to hear yourself during the day.
You deserve rest that isn’t a battle.
If you’re ready to explore therapy - at your own pace and in a way that feels personalized - I’m here to support you through Anxiety Therapy for High-Achievers.