People with anxiety induced insomnia often experience uncertainty about their ability to fall asleep or stay asleep. During waking hours, they often think and worry a lot about not being able to sleep. Anxiety symptoms typically worsen when person gets into bed. Research shows that approximately 36% people with anxiety disorders experience insomnia because anxiety has direct affect on sleep-wake cycle.
Typical episode goes down like this.. You lay your head on the pillow, and the doubt about being able to sleep start slowly creep in. Suddenly, you begin to experience anxiety symptoms — you feel hot and sweaty, your heart rate increases, and you feel restless. You toss and turn, get out of bed, but still can’t find a way to fall asleep. Don’t worry, follow through, I have solution to fix your brain and undo anxiety trick that gets into the way of falling asleep.
How does anxiety affect sleep?
When you experience anxiety, your body naturally produces neurochemicals such as adrenaline. Adrenaline works similarly as caffeine, it has an inhibiting effect on sleep. Your body naturally produces adrenaline in the morning to you wake up. Without a significant increase of adrenaline levels in your bloodstream, you probably wouldn’t wake up in the morning.
Basically, anxiety causes your body to feel awake. Inconsistent spikes of adrenaline during the night can disrupt your sleep quality. You may have trouble fall asleep, you may wake up in the middle of the night or early morning, or struggle to fall back asleep after waking up.
Sleeping problems
Everyone can experience anxiety, stress caused sleeping problems at some point in their life, but usually they resolve on their own after stressor is gone. However, people who suffer from anxiety, or worry a lot, have trouble with racing thoughts at night, are at a higher risk of developing chronic sleeping problems. This is where insomnia can take hold of someones life.
When anxious people encounter insomnia, they often worry that there is something wrong with their ability to sleep. You may not even realize that thinking and worrying about sleep is the worst thing you can do to yourself. It creates a vicious cycle, where thinking, worrying about ones ability to sleep becomes the source of anxiety. That often leads your body to distress and it naturally produces even more adrenaline that disrupts sleep and prolongs insomnia episodes.
Your body regulates sleep autonomously
Before we 4 steps how to overcome anxiety induced insomnia, you have to understand how sleep works.. Great anology I have, is — sleeping is like breathing, it happens autonomously.
You don’t really think about breathing because your body regulates breathing by itself and you don’t have to put conscious effort in order to breathe. Now, try to put conscious effort into trying to breathe or worse, think that there is something wrong about the way you breathe.
Your breathing will quickly get out of sync and you will feel a little bit out of breath, panicky. Suddenly there will be tension in your body and you will experience resistance to taking a breath. The more you focus and try to control your breathing the harder the task gets.
Sleeping is kind of the same. Your body regulates it autonomously. When you feel good after a night’s sleep you don’t really pay attention or think about how you slept. Usually people have a few bad nights here and there, but they don’t pay attention, or think of their ability to sleep. Bad nights happen, but their sleep isn’t broken. Not much of a thought about regulating one’s sleep has been put in, person naturally goes back into sync of having good nights sleep.
Sleep confidence
Every person has sleep confidence — internal belief of one’s ability to have a good night’s sleep. When a person has a high sleep confidence thinking about one’s sleep isn’t the problem. Sleep confidence can become challenged when a person experiences poor quality of sleep.
Of course, not everyone is equel. Some people will not pay attention to their sleep quality even after a couple of bad nights. On the other hand, some folks will get worried, panicky even after one night of bad sleep. Usually those are the people who are more anxious, suffer from anxiety.
Sleep and anxiety have a bidirectional relationship. Poor sleep can make you feel more anxious than usual. This newfound anxiety can spark even more worry about sleep, making you feel like there is something horribly wrong with your ability to sleep.
For example, anxiety can trigger worst-case scenario thoughts like, “What if I can’t fall asleep tonight?” If you believe them for a second, your mind can go into overdrive. Anxiety and panic may follow immediately. In general, anxious thoughts, about sleep, destroy your sleep confidence and lead to anxiety induced insomnia.
4 steps how to overcome anxiety induced insomnia
1. Stop thinking about sleep
Thinking about sleep sends a message to your brain that something is wrong. When your mind perceives danger, anxiety increases, setting the stage for a failure. To fall and stay asleep, your mind needs to be free from thoughts of not being able to sleep. Anxious thoughts, worries makes your body alert and awake. Avoiding thoughts of failure, uncertainty is difficult, but essential for overcoming sleeping problem.
2. Stay positive
Even if insomnia persists, try to maintain hope that things will improve, get better. Catastrophic thinking decreases sleep confidence and heightens anxiety, which only makes sleeping more difficult. A positive outlook on problem sends calming signals to your brain, allowing your body to naturally relax and de escalate from entering the fight-or-flight response.
3. Fake it until you make it
Generally your goal should be always aimed to increase your sleep confidence. The way you do it is by acting, mimicking behaviors of a person who sleeps like a baby and has high sleep confidence. Do people with high sleep confidence worry about not being able to sleep? Do they think a lot about how good their sleep was? Answer is no. When you act like a sleep confident person you slowly become one. It can take time for your body to catch up to a good night’s sleep but eventually it will happen.
4. Avoid seeking reassurance
Try to avoid seeking reassurance. When you don’t sleep well it’s only natural to reach out to family members, close friends and tell how you truly feel. When things aren’t going great you want to hear positive things, have support from others. Insomnia in that sense is tricky. When you tell others that you have sleeping problems or you label yourself as insomniac, you also tell yourself that you have a problem. This goes back to the first bullet point. Talking about your sleeping problems keeps you focused on it. That is something you actually need to avoid in order to get better, recover. Your goal should be focusing on not spending any time thinking or talking about your insomnia.
Authors note: This article was written by Clinical Psychologist Matīss Kozlovskis. I offer anxiety coaching and anxiety counselling online. On this website you can also find resources on how to overcome anxiety, and even free anxiety tests. Feel free to share them with others, I would appreaciate that!