How to Process Your Thoughts When They Feel Unreal

The Night Mind

There is a certain quality to thoughts that arrive late at night. They don't feel like daytime thoughts. They can be fragmented, circular, or strangely abstract. Sometimes they feel urgent. Other times they feel completely disconnected from reality, like watching a movie you don't remember starting.

This is a common experience. The part of your brain that acts as a manager, the prefrontal cortex, gets tired. It spends all day making decisions, organizing information, and keeping impulses in check. At night, its influence wanes. Other parts of the brain, those dealing with emotion and memory, start making connections more freely. The result is a stream of thought that is less logical and more chaotic.

It is tempting to see this as a problem to be solved. A bug in your thinking that needs to be fixed. But what if it isn't a bug? What if it's just the nature of a tired mind? Trying to force these thoughts into orderly boxes is often a futile exercise. It is like trying to organize a dream while you are still in it.

The Trap of Wrestling With Fog

The mistake most of us make is that we engage these thoughts on their own terms. We take them seriously. An absurd worry about something you said three years ago suddenly feels like a pressing issue that must be resolved right now. A strange, looping image demands to be understood.

Trying to argue with these thoughts is a trap. You are trying to apply daytime logic to the night mind. It doesn't work. The thoughts are not built on logic, so they cannot be dismantled by it. Wrestling with them only gives them more energy. It pulls you deeper into the fog, making you feel more overwhelmed and tired.

The real problem is not the thoughts themselves, but your engagement with them. You are treating them as signals that require action, when they may just be noise. The byproduct of a brain that is winding down and processing the day's events in its own strange way.

Giving Form to the Formless

So what can you do? The goal is not to silence the thoughts, but to change your relationship with them. To move from being inside the storm to watching it from a safe distance. And the most effective way to create that distance is to externalize them.

To get them out of your head.

Writing is one way. But speaking is often more direct. There is a fundamental constraint to speech. You can only say one word at a time. This forces a kind of order on the chaos. A jumble of feelings and images has to be translated into a linear sequence of words. The act itself is a form of processing.

When you speak a thought, you give it form. It is no longer a vague, oppressive feeling. It becomes a specific set of words. And once it is a set of words, you can look at it more objectively.

The thought that felt so powerful inside your head often sounds surprisingly hollow when said aloud.

The Practice of Voicing

This does not have to be a formal process. You don't need to craft a perfect narrative. The point is not to tell a good story. The point is to empty the container.

Start talking. Describe the thought exactly as it is. If it's a strange image, describe the image. If it's a looping worry, state the worry. If it makes no sense, say that it makes no sense. Let the words be a direct translation of the mental noise.

This is a release valve. You are letting the pressure out. By giving the thoughts a voice, you take away their power. They are no longer a part of you. They are something separate, something you have produced. Something you can now observe.

Often, the simple act of voicing a thought is enough to make it dissolve. You say it, you hear how strange it sounds, and you realize it is not the urgent truth it pretended to be. It was just a fleeting product of a tired mind. And with that realization, you can let it go.

Don't try to find a solution or a grand insight. Just speak. Get the thoughts out into the open air. You will find that the unreality you feel is not a sign that you are broken, but simply a sign that your mind is tired and needs to unload its cargo before it can rest.

Try it for yourself with the prompt below.