Why Waking Up at 3AM Might Be Perfectly Normal — Katherine May (10% Happier)

2026-10-27 · Health · podcast sleep wellbeing · Source: Watch the episode

In brief — 5 key takeaways:

3AM waking is historically normal: historian Roger Ekirch found centuries of records of segmented sleep — first sleep, a waking "watch" in the middle of the night, then second sleep. Waking in the night isn't a malfunction; the panic about it is the modern problem.
"Wintering": down seasons — illness, grief, burnout, loss — are inevitable and valuable long-term, though "hideous" short-term. Like quicksand, scrambling makes it worse; acceptance opens space to move. Katherine May's own winters: depression at 17, her husband's cancer, carer burnout.
Control is the illusion; agency is the real lever: "we believe we have control, which we just don't." Agency comes from seeing things as they are. Compassion = empathy + agency — feeling with someone plus doing something.
News and social-media hygiene: the news industry runs on danger signalling. Choose one source, read it once a day, act within your own sphere, then put it down. And beware performative wellness culture — "we ring the joy out of these things."
Store up the soft parts of life: awe, wonder, poetry, children's books, a stone in your pocket ("I'm never without a rock"). Wintering well means building small rituals now that carry you through the next cold season — like trees that look dead in winter but aren't.

Summary — "Why Waking Up at 3AM Might Be Perfectly Normal | Katherine May"

Source: https://youtu.be/pzFy8uMtjog — 10% Happier podcast (Dan Harris, verified channel), posted 2026-10-26, ~1h17m, ~2.1k views. Guest: Katherine May, British author of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, and the newsletter/podcast The Clearing. Method: Full auto-caption transcript fetched 2026-10-27, read end-to-end by two reader passes and merged. Speech-to-text — proper nouns/numbers quoted as heard; full transcript saved alongside this file.

The headline (the 3AM title claim)

Waking in the night, especially in winter, is historically normal, not insomnia to fix: - Historian A. Roger Ekirch's book At Day's Close (captions heard "E. Roger Ekirch") documents the pre-electric pattern: ~4 hours "first sleep" → a waking stretch called "the watch" → "second sleep". The waking hours were honoured — prayer, meditation, quiet conversation, even sex. - Modern low-light re-immersion studies: people fall back into that pattern naturally; mid-night blood chemistry resembled a lactating mother's (even in men) — "primed for a very dreamy, meditative state of mind." - May's practice: "I just get up and read instead." Dan's takeaway: "don't problematize it" — do something pleasant (not Instagram), return to bed when ready. Sleep wristbands "scare us." "Most of us are not going to die from lack of sleep."

"Wintering" — the core concept

Dual-purpose word: how animals/plants survive winter, and "how we endure the times in life when we feel like winter has arrived… when we feel frozen or out in the cold."
Down seasons are normal and ultimately valuable, "in the short term, they're hideous" — not personal failure, though they feel isolating.
Anti-"upward graph": Dan names the fallacy of life as "an escalator of uninterrupted progress"; May: such a life "would actually not be learning… none of us get through this life without experiencing grief."
Quicksand metaphor: "the clawing and scrambling makes it a lot worse, but of course it's human to do it." Acceptance opens space.
"Pristinely sad" (her phrase Dan loved): "I'm strangely happy in this place. I feel calm and comfortable and kind of pristinely sad" — allowing sadness to be a safe space, trusting it.
Alan Watts (she self-flags as bad at quotes): "running from fear is fear, running from pain is pain."
Not a self-help promise: "nobody comes out of their wintering unchanged" — and not always improved; some winters (health decline) can't be "beaten," only met with acceptance of "the life that we are given right now, rather than the life that we're wishing for."
Happiness = "knowing who you are and what you are at this point in your life. A kind of calm contentment."
Mirrors/invisibility: we lack visible representations of carers, the chronically ill, disabled people ("AI-generated images of a much more perfect, smooth world"), so when we become them we struggle — the fix is looking at real streets and neighbours, "the mirrors."

Her story

Grew up an "undiagnosed autistic girl"; depression so serious at 17 she "didn't know how I'd come back into the world again"; met her survival instinct quietly — "clinging on when life felt almost unendurable."
"Multifactorial debacle" (Dan's phrase she adopted): while writing Wintering — meant as a look back "from the high ground" — she quit a stressful job, her husband's burst appendix and severe sepsis, her own disabling illness, her son unable to cope at school. "The disaster family for quite some time." The book was "written from the eye of the storm."
This year: her husband's cancer, and she cared for him through extended serious illness — which opened her eyes to how society treats carers: "nothing in our world made space for me to rest… an abandonment by the society around me that just took my intensive labor for granted." "It's ordinary life" for so many, even though "we're supposed to say it was a privilege."

Nature models

Trees that look dead are "the heart and soul of the forest": roots holding ground, hosting hibernators, buds already in place before leaves drop — "even when all of our leaves have blown off… we're still doing important work."
The hibernating dormouse she held: 4°C body temp, "ice cold in my hand but still alive" — "pull in all of your unnecessary parts… we survive it by slowing down."
Her own practice: daily outside time, walking, sea swimming near her front door.

Control vs agency, compassion, not-knowing

"I always differentiate between control and agency… one of the things that makes us miserable is believing that we have control, which we just don't." Agency "can only come from seeing the world as it is." Feeling powerlessness first is the precondition for real action; otherwise you're "just not engaging with the situation at all."
Dan's Buddhist framing: compassion = empathy + agency — acting in your own sphere lets you "metabolize feelings and not be swamped."
Sartre: "even in the most confined circumstances there's always choice… those choices may be minute."
Zen Peacemakers' "philosophy of not knowing": the first stage of meaningful action is returning to not-knowing so you can truly listen. Dan: "everything about our modern world is pushing us toward knowing." Beginner's mind as method — her writing trick: "what if I didn't know anything about this at all, where would I go?"
Sharon Salzberg riff (via Dan): the certainty we grasp is usually apocalyptic — "we think we know how things are going to go and they will suck." Not-knowing is "where the real freedom, creativity, agency lies."
May: "we always think we're at the end of history." Her heroes aren't hopeful people but "people who are just taking the next step forward… those are the people holding the world together right now." The "hidden work" of carers, social services, hospitals, schools.

News hygiene & danger signaling (practical)

Danger signaling (from evolutionary storytelling — a flashing white rabbit tail sets off "chains of running rabbits" that don't know what they're running from): social media rewards danger signals; "nobody's really interested in safety signals… we're passing on these chains of fear. And then we're exhausted." Prescription: break the danger signaling, return to life at arm's length.
Her rule: "choose my sources of news… look at it once a day" — the old newspaper model "where there was an end to the news." Unless it's on your doorstep, once a day is enough; decide your agency, act, "and also put it down."
Dan on leaving news: processed horror "from a very clinical standpoint" plus scoop-competition; Trump and Iraq broke through the shell; without the shell "I'm more freaked out." May's analogy: remote drone operators, whose trauma "hits much later… because they're playing a video game." Dan: "I was kind of playing a video game with the news."

Enchantment — what comes after wintering

Written mid-lockdown; "okay I'm coming out of my wintering, what next" — reconnecting with awe and wonder "right outside your door."
Diagnosis of the moment: people feel rest and a spiritual life are self-indulgent "given the state of emergency," so they run ragged instead of resourcing themselves. A big symptom: people can't read — "our attention keeps sliding off… onto worry all the time."
Her argument: unless you're on the front line, "the work is to store up those soft parts of life… maintaining a vision of the world as it should be" against the mainstream "bitterness, selfishness, snatching, anger." Beauty-tending is the work — "and activism."
She "wrote such a spiritual book" after ~15 years of treating meditation as "a neurological tool" — she came to need "what was bigger in the world than me."
The stone: a few steps to grasp its age, geology, ancestry, folklore of your place. "I'm never without a rock." Kids pick things up; parents say "put that down, we're trying to get to the shops."

Performative rest & wellness critique

"Yoga girl": "beautiful thin blonde woman in unrumpled yoga clothing… looking like she's accessing prana — I'm so tired of her." Real rest "is really messy… rarely looks or feels enlightened, but the value accumulates." Rest is often in motion, guilt-ridden, needs distraction.
"Yoga boy": "the douchebag with a man bun… spiritual music under Instagram posts of his abs" — Dan: worse lately, "a large dose of biohacking" on the male side.
Cold swimming (she refuses "cold water immersion"): Finnish sauna culture "founded in pleasure and not biohacking." "We ring the joy out of these things… make them into work and individualistic self-improvement." Cold-plunge posts function as danger signals: "you are not fighting hard enough against your mortality."
"The resilient edge of resistance" (Barbara Carrellas, as heard — likely garbled): the line just before pleasure crosses into unpleasantness; a cat shows you the line, then bites. Better than "set a timer and put it on Instagram."
"All of us have to accept that we are not going to live forever" — immortality-seeking is another illusion. "I'm surprisingly grumpy… I just want people to have a nice time cold swimming."

Ritual and rites of passage

Winter was survivable because of "beats through winter": Halloween (crossing into winter), the solstice (light "at its furthest extent and barely rising"), early February — Imbolc / St Brigid's Day / Candlemas (early spring marker).
Hold ritual lightly (many of ours felt "dictatorial… heavy on liturgy"): "a good ritual is a simple space that we bring ourselves to as we are." Solo: watch a sunrise, light a candle "that can be enough." Social: her solstice gatherings grow yearly; invite style — "I've found the last few months really hard… will you come with me? We'll have hot chocolate and light a bonfire."
Join existing ceremonies: the annual blessing of the hops at Canterbury Cathedral — Morris dancers by the altar, animals allowed.
We're bad at marking passages beyond birthdays/marriages/funerals because "we don't really want to acknowledge the death part" — grief's progress, a child becoming a teenager, adulthood signposts. (Dan: his son is "only a quarter Jewish" so no bar mitzvah; he wanted one "just for the money mostly.")

Reading as support

"Not enough people read poetry anymore" — a well-chosen poem "can be the most enormous support," returned to again and again.
"We're not reading to get through that TBR pile displayed on social media. We're reading to comfort and reassure ourselves and to sink through a problem."
Children's books matter for adults: they use winter to show "how we scramble in difficult times and come into our own when we're most challenged"; she rereads her favourites when overwhelmed.

Practical takeaways checklist

3AM waking is the ancestral default, especially in winter — don't problematise it; get up, read, return when sleepy; ditch the sleep-tracker anxiety.
News once a day, chosen source, then put it down; act inside your actual sphere of agency.
Break the danger-signalling chain in your own posting and scrolling.
Let yourself be "pristinely sad" instead of scrambling; acceptance is the space where effective response becomes possible.
Store up soft things — walks, sea swims, rocks, poems, children's books, solstice gatherings with friends — rest counts as maintenance work, not indulgence.
Mark the hard passages with small rituals, invitation-style.

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Garble watch (auto-captions)

Author name spelling, Ekirch's initial, the Watts quote (self-flagged approximate), "Barbara Carrellas", "Elena" the producer, "David Heart" in credits, The Clearing podcast name — all quoted as heard; check against the books before quoting formally.