Why Anxiety Peaks at Bedtime — and How to Help Your Child Feel Safe Enough to Sleep
How Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy Helps Anxious Children Sleep Better
Learn why anxiety peaks at bedtime and how CBT-based hypnotherapy can help children feel safe, calm, and ready for sleep. Therapist tips and practical tools inside.
If bedtime has become the hardest part of your day — endless questions, tears, and “just one more cuddle” — then this is for you!
When the house finally goes quiet, anxious minds get louder.
Many children who cope just fine in the daytime struggle most at night. When the brain slows down, all the unprocessed worries from the day have space to bubble up.
It’s not defiance — it’s anxiety showing up as a need for safety and reassurance.
The good news? Calm can be taught.
That’s exactly what I help families do through Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy (CBH) — teaching the body and mind to recognise that bedtime means rest, not danger.
🧠 Why Anxiety Shows Up at Bedtime
During the day, children are busy — school, friends, screens, activities. Their minds are distracted.
But when the world gets quiet, their nervous system finally has space to process everything that’s been building up.
That’s when unprocessed worries rise to the surface.
This isn’t bad behaviour; it’s biology.
The body moves from “busy” mode into a kind of alertness, scanning for safety before it can rest.
In children with anxiety, that safety signal doesn’t switch on automatically — which is where Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy is at it’s best.
🌿 What Is Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy (CBH)?
Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy (CBH) combines the evidence-based strategies of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) with the focus attention of clinical hypnosis.
It’s a practical, compassionate way to help families understand anxiety — not as something to eliminate, but as something that can be managed through calm, structure, and gentle exposure.
In my clinic and through my digital resources, I work with both parents and children to rebuild a sense of safety and control around bedtime. Together, we:
Establish calm, predictable evening routines so the nervous system begins to associate bedtime with rest, not worry.
Use gradual exposure techniques to help the child gain confidence sleeping on their own, step by step.
Practise CBT tools such as the Bedtime Ticket System and Worry Box, which help children reduce reassurance-seeking and learn emotional independence.
Use therapeutic audios and relaxation skills (breathing, guided imagery, and gentle hypnosis) to help the body and mind release tension and switch into rest and digest mode.
CBH empowers both child and parent to understand what’s happening in the anxious brain and to respond with calm, consistency, and compassion — creating lasting change that goes far beyond bedtime.
So the question is — how can we help anxious minds feel safe enough to rest?
That’s exactly what inspired me to create the Calm Nights Bedtime Bundle — a gentle, evidence-based toolkit that brings these strategies into your home.
🌙 Introducing the Calm Nights Bedtime Bundle
After helping so many families in here at The Nest — and navigating my own parenting nights with four children — I created the Calm Nights Bedtime Bundle so parents could bring these same gentle, practical techniques home without the need for one to one sessions.
It’s a complete, therapist-designed toolkit that blends everything I use here, CBH principles with practical bedtime structure:
🎧 Five Calming Audios
– Magic Breathing for Bedtime – teaches the body to slow down and release tension
– Gentle Nightfall – a soothing relaxation for letting go of the day
– Starry Skies Sleep Story – guided imagery to quiet busy minds
– Body Scan for Sleep – helps the body feel safe and comfortable
– Sweet Dreams Affirmations – gentle confidence-building suggestions before sleep
📘 Parent Guide Flipbook
A CBT-based guide explaining the link between anxiety and sleep, how to create a restful environment, and step-by-step strategies such as gradual exposure and the bedtime ticket system.
🪶 Printable Resources
Bedtime Routine Chart · Calm Ticket System · Worry Box Instructions · Ladder of Success Template
Together, these tools help children understand that bedtime = safe — a message their nervous system quickly begins to believe.
💛 Why It Works
The Calm Nights approach is grounded in nervous system education.
Children learn that anxiety isn’t a monster to fight — it’s just the body’s alarm system doing its job too often.
Through repetition, breathwork, imagination, and positive reinforcement, the brain learns a new pattern:
Calm → Safe → Sleep.
Parents tell me that after a few weeks, their children fall asleep more easily, wake less in the night, and start sleeping independently again.
And as calm returns to bedtime, the whole family begins to rest better- win win!!!
🌙 A Therapist’s Perspective
As a Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist, former teacher, and mum of four, I know first-hand how anxiety can ripple through the whole family.
When one child struggles to settle, everyone feels it — evenings become tense, sleep gets disrupted, and parents are left feeling helpless and exhausted.
Through CBH, I help families rebuild calm from the inside out — combining the science of how the brain learns safety with the compassion and practicality that real family life requires.
We focus on small, consistent changes: structured routines, gentle exposure steps, and tools that make bedtime predictable and safe again.
When parents learn how to regulate their own nervous system and model calm, children instinctively begin to mirror it.
Bedtime shifts from a battle into a moment of connection instead— a chance to restore trust, confidence, and closeness.
And that sense of safety doesn’t just change nights; it transforms days too.
If your child’s anxiety is showing up at bedtime, please remember — that with gentle, evidence-based tools, the brain can absolutely be retrained to rest. 🌿
✨ Start Your Calm Nights
For structured support, you can download the Calm Nights Bedtime Bundle and access the full set of audios, guides, and CBT-based tools instantly.
And if you’d like a quick dose of calm for yourself, my free Parent Reset Audio is waiting for you via the link below.
🪶 Learn More
Explore the Calm Nights Bedtime Bundle