Why you wake up at 3am
it's not what you think
I didn’t sleep well as a child. My mom would put on our Chariots of Fire record (yep, it was a vinyl record - so retro and current at the same time) to help me get to sleep, but my favourite song was number eight, and so I’d lie there waiting and waiting until I heard it. Then the record would end, and I’d still be awake.
Flash forward many unrestful nights to when I had my kids. They helped me take my non-sleeping feats to record levels.
My daughter was awake five to six hours most nights for two full years. Then, when my son came along, he nursed every two hours until he turned one. Sleep (or lack of it) played a pivotal role in my life for a long time.
As an adult, I was pretty sure my kids were the issue. Then they started sleeping better. And I still didn’t.
How rude.
What I know now, after years of figuring this out in my own body (and for the women I work with), is that the conversation most of us are having about sleep is almost entirely backwards. And the backwards-ness is what’s keeping you awake and/or unrested.
The pendulum didn’t just swing - it sent people straight into anxiety
If we backtrack as a society to a few years ago, the badge of honour was: Look how little sleep I got because I’m so busy and doing so many important things, but I’m amazing because I can still function.
Now, the pendulum has swung to the completely opposite extreme: you absolutely must get eight consecutive hours, or you will not heal, your cortisol will be destroyed, and your telomeres will shorten. (Noooo! Not my telomeres!)
I understand why that second message landed so hard. People were exhausted and looking for answers. But here’s what happened: if you’re someone who sometimes wakes in the night, you’re now lying there running stress calculations about your own healing trajectory. You’re not sleeping poorly. You’re sleeping poorly and then panicking about sleeping poorly, and the panic is doing significantly more damage than the waking.
(There is something almost impressive about the mind’s ability to turn a problem into a worse problem. Truly stunning efficiency. Especially in the middle of the night!)
We for sure needed to shift out of the too-little-sleep accolades, but what we got was another reason to catastrophize. What we actually need is a third option, and that’s what I want to share with you today.
Nighttime is the most powerful phase of your daily cycle
There’s a framework I teach inside The BALM that maps the four phases of the natural life cycle - spring, summer, autumn, winter - onto the rhythms of a single day. Morning is spring: new energy, possibility, the system coming back online. Midday is summer: sustained, abundant, things in full motion. Evening is autumn: winding down, harvesting what the day produced, preparing to let go.
And most importantly for our purposes here: Nighttime is winter. The void.
In quantum physics, the void is not empty. It’s where everything exists simultaneously - light and darkness, all possibilities, all opposites coexisting before anything arises into form. Everything we chalk up to “coming out of the blue” comes from the void. Every creative breakthrough, every idea that arrived in the shower or on a walk or in the middle of the night - that’s the void doing what the void does.
Your soul wakes you up in the void on purpose.
Not because something is wrong. Not because your cortisol is broken. Because you’re in the most energetically potent phase of your daily cycle, and conscious breathing done at 3am (or anytime in the middle of the night) is at least ten times more impactful than the same practice done at 2pm. The void amplifies everything.
The mind doesn’t know this. The mind wakes up, looks at the clock, calculates how many hours are left, writes a small Shakespearean tragedy about what tomorrow is going to feel like, and calls that helpful.
It is so not helpful. It’s the mind doing what the mind does, and the mind mistakes the void for a problem. It’s not a problem. It’s an invitation.
What you do when the invitation arrives
When the mind shows up at 3am with its story - you have five hours left, you haven’t been sleeping well, you’re going to be so tired, why does this keep happening, what’s wrong with you - there is but one move. You redirect. Not by fighting the thought, not by white-knuckling your way to calm, but by giving the mind something better to do than asking useless questions or being all middle-of-the-night judgy.
The specific practices for that redirect live in the paid section below: the two breathing techniques I use, and the sleep intention I’ve refined over the years and hand directly to the women in The BALM.
But the most important thing to take from the free section is this: you are not broken. The waking is not the problem. The mind’s story about the waking is the problem, and that story can be interrupted. I’ve had hospital nights with my kids where I got one hour of sleep and woke up feeling rested and energized, and I can tell you exactly why. It has nothing to do with willpower. It has everything to do with where you put your attention when the void opens.
Your soul knows what it’s doing. The waking is sacred.
With profound love and luminous courage,
Christina
🕺🏻Creator of Courageous Self-Care and The BALM
🕺🏻Heading to Montréal this week for the International Jazz Festival, where I’ll be fulfilling my dream of seeing Melody Gardot live. If you don’t know about her, search for her music immediately. She is phenomenal.
🕺🏻Just spent a wonderful weekend camping near Banff at Johnston Canyon, taking the world-renowned hike there (with 1756 other people), and then lounging in the Banff Hot Springs soon thereafter. Hello Summer!
For paid subscribers: The practices that actually work at 3am 👇
