Psalms 94:19

In the multitude of my thoughts within me. Some translations render it my anxious thoughts, others my cares, and the Hebrew carries a sense of branching — thoughts that divide and divide again.

That is an accurate description of the mechanism. The problem in an anxious night is rarely one thought. It is one thought which becomes three, each of which becomes three more, until the volume is the difficulty rather than the content. Nothing in the pile is unanswerable on its own. The multitude is what defeats you.

Against a multitude, the psalm sets a plural: your comforts. Not one decisive answer that resolves the whole structure. Comforts, in quantity, matched against thoughts in quantity.

And the verb is unexpected. Delight my soul. Not silence, not settle, not correct. Delight — which is a much stronger claim, and does not fit the situation neatly. He is not describing relief from the thoughts. He is describing something that arrives while they are still going and is better than they are.

What the psalm does not do is tell him to stop thinking. There is no instruction here to clear the mind. The thoughts are allowed to remain a multitude, and something else is brought in alongside them — which is often the only realistic arrangement available at three in the morning.