“In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.” – Psalm 4:8

A few nights ago, I woke up at 2:12 a.m. Immediately, my mind began to race—rehashing issues from the day before and rehearsing tasks for the day ahead. I couldn’t fall back asleep. Waking at 2 a.m. is the worst. It’s too far from my normal waking time and not far enough from when I went to bed to feel rested. I knew right away: my sleep had not been sufficient.

And at 2:15 a.m., I realized something else—there was absolutely nothing I could do to resolve the things that were troubling me. No emails could be sent. No phone calls could be made. There was no path forward except to wait.

This is why John Chrysostom coined the phrase “The Dark Night of the Soul” to speak about the spiritual anguish many of us go through. Night has always been a place of vulnerability, anxiety and unrest. Though we try to hold it at bay with the glow of LED lights, computer screens, video games, and shots of caffeine—every night, darkness descends.

I’ve been listening to Prayer in the Night by Tish Harrison Warren. Her section on sleep (shared in full here) offers one of the clearest, most compelling descriptions of sleep as a spiritual discipline. I’ve long believed that sleep is the most profound daily spiritual practice we perform—because it declares, every night, that we are not in charge and the world will keep turning without us.

The Spiritual Discipline of Sleep
Excerpt from Prayer in the Night by Tish Harrison Warren

“We are all helpless when we sleep. No matter how important our job is, no matter how impressive we may be, in order to live we all have to turn off and be unconscious for about a third of our lives.

“Every day, whether we like it or not, we must enter into vulnerability in order to sleep. We can be harmed. We can be robbed. We can wake up in a new world of loss that we could not have imagined the night before…

“Sleep reminds us of our helplessness. Asleep, we have nothing to commend us; we accomplish nothing to put on our résumé. Because of this, sleep is a counter-formative practice that reminds us that our assurance is not the sum of our productivity, prowess, or power—or even in our ability to stay alive.

“In the Christian tradition, sleep has always been seen as a way we practice death. Both Jesus and Paul talk about death as a kind of sleep. Our nightly descent into unconsciousness is a daily memento mori—a reminder of our creatureliness, our limitations, and our weakness. When we go to sleep, we get as close as we who are alive and healthy come to the helplessness of death. And we do it every night.

“Because sleep is so vulnerable, we sometimes have a hard time embracing it. We stay up late, staring at screens, working, or vegging out, lightbulbs buzzing softly into the night. We resist our bodily limits in every way we can…

“God designed the universe—and our bodies themselves—so that each day we must face the fact that we are not the stars on center stage. We are not the primary protagonist of the earth—or even of our own lives. Each night the revolution of planets, the activity of angels, and the work of God in the world goes on just fine without us.

“For the Christian, sleep is an embodied way to confess our trust that the work of God does not depend on us…James Bryan Smith [writes] ‘You cannot make yourself sleep. You cannot force yourself to sleep. Sleep is an act of surrender. It is a declaration of trust, admitting that we are not God (who never sleeps), and that that is good news. We cannot make ourselves sleep, but we can create the conditions necessary for sleep.’

…There are times when we cannot sleep because we feel so small. We are afraid of death, of failure, of being alone. We worry. These are the tender moments when our vast illusion that we’re in control goes up in smoke.”

As I have been working through this book, her focus has been on the nightly prayer called Compline.

Compline Prayer

The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect death.

Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night,
so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life
may rest in your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night,
and give your angels charge over those who sleep.
Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary,
bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted,
shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake.

Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping;
that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.
Amen.

As James Bryan Smith pointed out – you cannot make your sleep. All you can do is create environments for sleep to emerge.

In our always-on culture, where late-night doom-scrolling and binge-watching have become routine, the invitation to cultivate the spiritual discipline of sleep feels countercultural.

For me, instead of falling asleep to Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me! or a true crime podcast, I’ve spent the past week drifting off to a nightly Compline service through this podcast:
Compline: An Evening Liturgy for Anxious Souls

It’s simple but it speaks peace over a restless mind.