NoPanic

Tag: sleep

  • Need Some Rest?: How To Tackle Sleep Anxiety

    By Emily Pearce, Content Team contributor

    We all know we need to sleep eight hours a night to stay mentally and physically healthy, but this isn’t always possible. If you’ve ever been overly stressed about an upcoming event or a personal matter, you’ve probably found yourself tossing and turning without relief from time to time. For those of us with generalised anxiety, the pain of sleeplessness can be a much more frequent issue. We need sleep for our brain to recuperate and rationally deal with day to day problems and so if we go a night without it, any underlying feelings of anxiety can be exacerbated. This in turn creates further anxiety about not sleeping the following night and so anxiety-induced insomnia can develop into a vicious cycle of restlessness and fatigue. I struggled with this problem for several months during my first year of university but managed to find some ways to tackle it; sleep is no longer so much of an issue for me and I’ve found my anxiety has subsided as a result. For all of you suffering with sleep anxiety, here are some of my top tips to make your way to recovery.

    1. Be realistic

    Eight hours of sleep sounds ideal but it is not realistically attainable every single night. Some nights we will naturally sleep less; others you will sleep much longer. If you’re worrying about not sleeping enough, try and be more realistic about your sleep goals. You’ve survived years without sleeping a full eight hours consistently and you can survive now. Always remember that sleep is a biological process that will naturally occur– you will eventually be able to get some rest even if it is for a short period of time!

    1. Reframe your mindset

    Sleep anxiety can be make bedtime feel distressing but it’s important that you reframe your perceptions of it and transform it into a relaxing time of day. Try and look forward to bedtime as a period for your body and mind to rest, regardless of how fast you fall asleep. Bedtime can also been reframed as a time for mindfully processing the day you have just had. The Sleep Book: How to Sleep Well Every Night by Dr Guy Meadows provided me with bedtime mindfulness techniques that helped me change sleep into a time for me to let go of my worries and frustrations, which subsequently helped me sleep more soundly every night. I’d highly recommend this book if you feel a lot of pressure when trying to sleep and you want to make bedtime less stressful. 

    1. Create a relaxing bedtime routine

    We all need to wind down before bed in order for the sleep hormone melatonin to be produced. You could calm your nervous system by doing several of the following:

    -Having a hot bath/shower

    -Avoiding coffee and alcohol near bedtime

    -Watching a calming show that you love (a sitcom for example)

    -Listening to relaxing music, audiobooks or ‘Sleepcasts’ on the app Headspace

    -Avoiding scrolling on your phone 

    -Speaking to loved ones

    -Read a book! 

    1. Have a plan B

    Have a plan B for when you find yourself unable to sleep. Rather than simply lying there feeling frustrated, you should think of various calming activities to do as an alternative. If I’m struggling to sleep, I’ll read a book or a magazine until I find myself feeling tired. Other things that have worked for me include jigsaws and word searches; these have distracted me from any anxious thoughts and have helped me calm down before attempting to sleep again. It’s important to get out of bed and do something else if you can’t sleep because otherwise you may begin to associate your bedroom with negative feelings of anger, upset and distress. 

    1. Make sleep less of a pressing issue 

    As hard as it sounds, try not to centre your life around sleep. I remember spending hours agonising over my lack of sleep and boring my friends and family with my anxiety over it. To tackle my insomnia, I got into more of a routine at uni, joined societies, exercised more, and saw my friends as frequently as possible. Soon my life had become so busy that my sleep anxiety was at the back of my mind! Find ways of distracting yourself about these worries and you’ll soon realise that sleep is not the be all and end all of your life; in fact, it’s rather unimportant in the scheme of things.

  • Anxiety … ‘I Can’t Get No Sleep…’

    Fiona Gee, Content Team Contributor

    Readers who remember the 1990s will recognise the second part of the above headline as a famous line from the song ‘Insomnia’ by Faithless (beloved by clubbers everywhere!)However, even those too young to remember the song will likely resonate with the principle (although I am afraid they might have to forgive the terrible grammar).

    I’ve had anxiety all my life and I well understand the negative impact it can have on sleep. In my experience, a terrible night’s sleep caused by anxiety leads to an even more anxious brain the following day and this can quickly turn into a downward slope of days involving exhaustion, brain fog and (yes, you guessed it) even more anxiety.

    So what can we do to help this?

    Sleep anxiety for me falls into two categories:

    1) The type of anxiety caused by struggling to fall asleep straight away when you know you have to be up earlier than normal/at a specific time, leaving you spending the night clock-watching (you know the type – a night spent telling yourself you ‘need to be up in 4/5/3 hours…’ etcetc)

    2) Anxiety caused by specific worry or worries that leaves your brain unable to switch off and renders a sleepless night of spiralling thoughts

    For sleep anxiety type one, it sounds obvious but spending the day before doing exercise/some sort of physical or mental exertion is a gamechanger.  Making sure you are tired enough to fall asleep almost immediately will help prevent that first bout of anxiety and the consequent clock-watching that may then follow. 

    If that does not work/isn’t possible and you still find yourself not asleep and starting to clock watch, some simple relaxation techniques often help me (eg deep breathing, mindfulness, simply trying to relax your body as much as possible in the hope your brain follows suit). It’s a bit of a vicious circle as your anxious brain is telling you to check how much sleep you’re going to get if you fall asleep in the next ten minutes – but also, try and actively avoid looking at clocks.

    Sleep anxiety type two is, for me, trickier. Lots of people have offered advice to me over the years – or suggested there are ‘rules’ (eg that if you’re spiralling and struggling to get to sleep, you MUST get up as that is better for your mental state). My view is that there are no rules; you need to do what works for you (and for me, getting out of bed rarely improves my chances of a relaxing night’s sleep as I am just rendered fully awake – at least in bed I often stay slightly drowsy with a hint of sleep possibility). 

    Chances are, the same thing might not work every time and quick fixes rarely exist. However, depending on the anxious thought, some techniques might be more effective than others in certain situations and a few of them might just turn a bad night’s sleep into a slightly better one. 

    Here are a few ideas to help:

    1) Write a ‘to do’ list. This is obviously particularly effective if your anxiety is caused by ‘brain spill’ or jumbled up thoughts related to a specific task or work you need to do 

    2) Visualise an open, empty box (I always visualise a silver mirror-balled one just to add a touch of glamour – but a cardboard one will do). Tell yourself you are going to pack away your thoughts in that box and visualise yourself doing that. Then, visualise yourself closing the lid tightly and saying that the box will not be opened until the following day – a literal attempt to try and pack away the anxious thoughts

    3) Try deep breathing and mindfulness techniques (also helpful for sleep anxiety type one). I’ve actually found this to be one of the most helpful – trying to make myself completely aware of my surroundings and focusing onmundane things like eg what the duvet is made from,what the duvet feels like, what the sheet feels like has proven quite effective in bringing me back to the here and now instead of wherever my anxiety has taken me – and sleep then often follows as a result

    4) Get up, read a book or do some other task as a distraction. Yes, I am going to suggest this one – as I say above, there are no rules and I have heard that this does work for some people. Even if it ultimately doesn’t always aid sleep, if your anxiety is severe it may at least help ease/distract from those spiralling thoughts

    And finally – remember, the sleepless nights will not last forever. Anxiety is usually ebbs and flows of good and bad – but unlike in the song Insomnia, the chances are that, eventually, you will get some sleep.

  • When to Do the Breathing Exercise: Sleeping and Waking

    This is the final part of a three-part series on the No Panic breathing exercise. In this series, we are focusing on when to do the breathing exercise. It’s all about the timing.

    Anxiety can cause people to lose sleep night after night. All that sleep deprivation mounts up, so they are too tired to do what they want to do, and even too tired to manage their anxiety.

    I want all of you to sleep well every night, so I will explain how you can improve your sleep just by doing the breathing exercise.

    We recommend people have a calming routine before they go to bed. This can include the breathing exercise. It is a good idea to do the breathing exercise just before you go to bed, so you go to bed feeling calm.

    Some people have lots of anxious thoughts chasing each other around their minds when they go to bed. They may not be as good at maintaining a pre-sleep routine; they might not bother with a pre-sleep routine.

    A great thing about the breathing exercise is that you can do it anywhere, and you don’t have to be sitting up. Just as you can do the breathing exercise while walking around a busy shopping centre, you can do the breathing exercise while lying in bed. You can do the breathing exercise to focus your mind away from all those anxious thoughts, and to slow everything down until you drift off to sleep.

    So now you’re asleep.  Suddenly you’re woken up in panic. Perhaps you had a nightmare, or anxiety decided to wake you up like children who doesn’t want to wait for their parents to get out of bed. Either way, you’re awake, and feeling anxious. You may even be having a panic attack.

    At this point, the mistake people make is to try to get back to sleep. It is natural to want to go back to sleep, but you are unlikely to get back to sleep quickly.

    To limit how much sleep you lose, you can get out of bed to spend 30 minutes or so calming your anxiety. While out of bed, you can do the breathing exercise. The best times to do the breathing exercise are after you get out of bed, and just before you go back to bed. Even if you wake up a few times, this way you are limiting how much sleep you lose, and that should make a difference over time.

    It is common for people to wake up in the morning feeling anxious. The anxiety they have through the day can stem from the anxiety with which they awoke. It is important to get on top of this anxiety as quickly as you can. One way to do this, is to start doing the breathing exercise as soon as you wake up. If you want to spend 10 minutes doing the breathing exercise when you wake up every day, you could get up slightly earlier.

    If you already do the breathing exercise at a different time as part of your morning routine, you can still do it at that time in addition to doing it when you wake up. If you don’t usually do the breathing exercise in the morning, other good times to do the breathing exercise may be after you get dressed and after you’ve had your breakfast.

    Doing the breathing exercise may not help you sleep perfectly, but I hope doing the breathing exercise helps you sleep better. Then you’ll have more energy for going out, and managing anxiety throughout the day, including at mealtimes.