Six reasons you stay awake at night
The quiet inputs that keep your nervous system switched on after lights-out — and the simple levers that turn each one down.
Most poor sleep is not insomnia. It is a handful of solvable inputs stacking on top of one another until the body cannot find the off-switch. Here are the six that show up most often in the people we talk to.
1. Cortisol that never quite came down
If your evening still feels like your afternoon, your HPA axis is running late. Daylight in the first hour after waking, and a brief wind-down at dusk, do more than any supplement.
2. Blood sugar drift
A late, carb-heavy meal can spike and then dip glucose around 2am, releasing adrenaline to correct it. You wake up alert and have no idea why.
3. A warm core temperature
Sleep onset is gated by a half-degree drop in core temperature. A cool bedroom, a warm shower ninety minutes before bed, and glycine all help the body shed heat.
4. Magnesium that never arrived
Roughly half of UK adults are below the reference intake. Magnesium glycinate quiets NMDA signalling without sedation — boring, effective.
5. Light after sunset
Even brief exposure to overhead light after 10pm suppresses melatonin for hours. Lamps, not ceilings, after dark.
6. An unfinished day
An open loop — an unanswered email, an unresolved conversation — keeps the default mode network firing. A two-minute brain-dump on paper closes more loops than it should.