Excitement floods your brain with the same wake-promoting chemicals that keep you alert during the day, making it genuinely harder to fall asleep even when you’re tired. The good news: your nervous system has a built-in off switch, and several techniques can help you flip it. The key is shifting your body from a state of activation to one of calm, which you can do in as little as five minutes.
Why Excitement Keeps You Awake
When you’re excited, your brain releases noradrenaline and dopamine, two chemicals that broadly activate your cortex and suppress sleep-promoting systems. This is the same arousal mechanism that helps you focus and perform during the day. At night, it works against you. Your heart rate stays elevated, your thoughts race, and the natural buildup of sleep pressure gets overridden by a nervous system that thinks something important is happening.
Serotonin, which normally helps signal that it’s time to sleep, gets drowned out by this wave of activation. The result is a frustrating gap between how tired your body might be and how wired your mind feels. Closing that gap requires lowering your physiological arousal, not just telling yourself to relax.
Use Breathing to Slow Your Body Down
Controlled breathing is the fastest way to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the branch responsible for calming you down. One well-studied method is the 4-7-8 technique: inhale through your nose for 4 seconds, hold for 7 seconds, exhale slowly through your mouth for 8 seconds. Research on healthy adults found this pattern significantly lowered heart rate and blood pressure in nearly all participants, while boosting parasympathetic activity. The long exhale and breath hold work together to increase oxygen saturation and reduce the chemical signals that keep your body in an alert state.
Another option is cyclic sighing: two short inhales through the nose followed by one long, slow exhale through the mouth. Stanford researchers found that five minutes of cyclic sighing lowered resting breathing rate more effectively than mindfulness meditation. Participants whose breathing slowed the most also reported the biggest improvement in mood. The principle behind both techniques is the same: extending your exhale relative to your inhale tells your nervous system it’s safe to power down.
Write Down Tomorrow’s Plan
Excitement often comes with mental rehearsal. You’re replaying what happened, planning what’s next, or imagining how things will go. A surprisingly effective fix is spending five minutes writing a specific to-do list for the following day. In a study using polysomnography (brain wave monitoring during sleep), participants who wrote to-do lists fell asleep significantly faster than those who journaled about things they’d already done. The more specific and detailed the list, the faster they dropped off. The more items they wrote, the quicker sleep came.
This works because unfinished tasks create a low-level mental tension that keeps your brain engaged. Writing them down externalizes that tension. You’re essentially telling your brain, “This is handled, you can let go now.” Keep a notepad by your bed and write out everything you need or want to do tomorrow, in as much detail as you can.
Try Cognitive Shuffling
If your mind keeps looping back to the exciting thing, you need to give it something else to chew on. Cognitive shuffling is a technique that works by flooding your brain with random, emotionally neutral images, mimicking the fragmented way thoughts behave right before sleep. Here’s how it works: pick a neutral word like “garden.” Take the first letter, G, and visualize as many objects starting with G as you can. Grape. Guitar. Goat. Globe. Picture each one clearly before moving to the next. When you run out, move to the second letter, A, and repeat.
The key is choosing boring subject matter. Animals, grocery items, and household objects work well. Avoid anything connected to work, relationships, or whatever you’re excited about. The random, meaningless nature of the images prevents your brain from building a coherent narrative, which is exactly what keeps you awake when you’re excited.
Cool Your Room, Warm Your Body
Your core body temperature needs to drop for sleep to begin. When you’re excited, elevated arousal can keep your temperature slightly higher than ideal. Two things help: a cool bedroom and a warm bath beforehand.
Keep your bedroom between 60 and 67°F (15 to 19°C). Anything above 70°F makes falling asleep harder because your body can’t shed heat efficiently. If you don’t have air conditioning, a fan pointed at your bed or lightweight, breathable sheets can help.
A warm bath or shower 1.5 to 2 hours before bed triggers a rebound cooling effect. The warm water draws blood to your skin’s surface, and when you get out, that heat dissipates rapidly, pulling your core temperature down. Research found that a longer soak of about 15 minutes produced the largest temperature drop between bathing and bedtime, and bathing 2 hours before bed was more effective than bathing 30 minutes or 1 hour before. If you know you’ll be excited at bedtime (the night before a trip, for example), plan your bath accordingly.
Put Screens Away Early
Scrolling through details about whatever you’re excited about is a double problem. The content keeps your mind activated, and the light from your screen suppresses melatonin, the hormone that signals your brain it’s time to sleep. Blue light is particularly disruptive. In one experiment, blue light suppressed melatonin for about twice as long as green light and shifted the body’s internal clock by 3 hours compared to 1.5 hours for green light.
Put screens away two to three hours before bed. If that feels extreme, at minimum switch to night mode and stop looking at anything related to the thing you’re excited about. Reading a physical book on an unrelated topic is a good replacement, especially something mildly interesting but not thrilling.
Consider Magnesium
Magnesium plays a direct role in calming neural activity. It interacts with receptors for GABA, the brain’s primary inhibitory chemical, strengthening the signals that quiet excitable neurons. It also helps lower cortisol, the stress hormone that stays elevated when your body is in an aroused state. The mechanism involves magnesium’s effect on a transporter at the blood-brain barrier that influences how much cortisol enters the brain.
Many people don’t get enough magnesium from their diet alone. If you regularly struggle to wind down at night, a magnesium supplement taken in the evening may help over time. Forms bonded to glycine tend to be better absorbed and gentler on the stomach. This isn’t a quick fix for tonight’s excitement, but it can lower your baseline arousal level over days and weeks.
A Quick Routine for Tonight
If you’re reading this in bed right now, unable to sleep because of something exciting, here’s what to do in order. First, put your phone face down after reading this. Take 6 to 8 rounds of 4-7-8 breathing: inhale for 4, hold for 7, exhale for 8. Then grab a pen and paper and write out a specific to-do list for tomorrow, spending about five minutes on it. Finally, lie back down and start cognitive shuffling with the word “table.” By the time you reach the second or third letter, your brain will likely be producing the kind of fragmented, drifting thoughts that precede sleep.
The excitement will still be there in the morning. For now, your only job is to bore your brain into letting go.