Why Am I At My Lowest In The Middle Of the Night?

The Causes of 3am Catastrophising

When Van Gogh couldn’t sleep, he painted a masterpiece. Cool productivity hack.

Catch-up service:
Seven Features Of Post-Literate Politics
Joe Rogan vs Douglas Murray
How To Write a Book
Podcast: James Marriott on Britain’s Elites
Nine Principles For Success In the Age of AI
What ‘Adolescence’ Doesn’t Tell Us About Boys

• On July 9, I’ll be talking John & Paul in Dublin, at the Pavilion Theatre, with Tom Dunne and Paul Howard. Tickets on sale now.

• Signed and dedicated copies of John & Paul have gone out to Founding Members (who pay the highest rate). They should be with you in the next few days (maybe longer for American subscribers). Thank you for your support!

• This week: the causes of nighttime anxiety, plus a very sprightly rattle bag, including the best podcast on the Ukraine situation; how to eliminate confirmation bias; how to think about racism; why we don’t have litter-collecting robots yet; my appearance on Front Row, and the oddly compelling backstory of a Dire Straits song.

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  “Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them.”
  Martin Amis, The Information

I fall asleep fairly easily at night but often find myself awake at 3am, synapses crackling. In these hours, I subject myself to what Philip Larkin called an “arid interrogation”. Larkin’s night-time questions focused on his own demise (“how and where and when I shall myself die”). Mine are more diffuse. I dwell on my failures and cultivate my resentments. I monitor every ache and twinge in my body, making wild diagnoses. I consider the prospect of world war, or AI destroying everything I cherish. I reach inescapable conclusions about how profoundly awry the world is, or I am, or both. Eventually, I fall back asleep, and when I wake in the morning nothing seems quite so bad. My default state of mindless optimism reasserts itself (there are worse conditions).

I used to think this was just me but when I looked into the research on sleep and mood I discovered that a near-universal feature of human psychology is that we get sad at night. “Positive affect” (feelings of pleasure, happiness, optimism) peaks during the day and reaches its nadir between 1am and 4am, at least if we’re not doing anything that counterbalances its decline. Negative affect (anxiety, sadness, anger) surges just as positive mood bottoms out. Evidence comes from multiple angles. Once you adjust for the proportion of people awake at any given time, suicide risk nearly quadruples between midnight and 6am. Posts on a Reddit suicide support forum peaked between 2am and 5am.

Why are we nighttime depressives? To answer that we need to start with the broader question of middle-of-the-night insomnia, since we have to wake up in order to feel sad, at least consciously.