Have you ever had sleep anxiety?
Sleep anxiety messes with your mind and body. You've just got to ride it out.
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Have you ever had sleep anxiety?
You may not even be aware of what this is, despite the name basically speaking for itself.
It’s only when you spend weeks (or perhaps months) with it that you begin to realise that you’ve been plagued by the thought of going to bed—likewise not. It’s one of those things that you just can’t explain until it’s happened, but I also find it helps when you’re a very introspective person anyway (it’s likely that you are if there’s something keeping you up at night).
Not only is it incredibly irritating, but it also impacts you in all of the ways that a lack of sleep possibly can, starting with the obvious—tiredness.
Of course it’s easy to overlook sleep, but it’s something you never truly appreciate until you’ve spent a long period of time with poor or little-to-no sleep. Sleep anxiety will do that for you.
I can only speak from experience, but in my case it was activated by a certain level of stress about day-to-day things—adult shit—like work, money, and personal perceptions that led me down the route of thinking too much. As stresses came and disappeared, albeit over long or short periods of time, they left with them the effects of poor sleep that prolonged the trauma of not being able to nod off at night.
So what was the result of this? Firstly, poor performance at work or in the gym—the desire to do these things slowly dwindles and makes it harder to continue. Feel anxious to go to sleep can make it seem like you need to be awake, which misleads you into thinking you’ve gained all the rest you need. As a result, you continue doing what you know unbeknown to you that your effort is lower, performance improvement nil, and you’re just going round in circles.
Secondly, your mood changes, but you won’t necessarily notice this. On the other hand, those closest to you are the most likely to experience the changes that occur, which facilitates this ripple effect of poor mood and inability to truly understand the cause.
Thirdly, you put on weight. While this might not be the first concern, it’s a sure fire indicator that you’re not healthy, especially if you’re someone with a high metabolism.
Recognising sleep anxiety: Difficult but critical
So it could just be a medical reason as to why you’re not sleeping…Well, maybe.
Perhaps there are a few things you can do to determine whether your insomnia is related to stress. Ask yourself these questions:
Are you stressed about tomorrow?
Are you tired, but finding internal reasons to explain why you’re not?
Do you find that, despite a strong feeling of tiredness, you feel wake once your head hits the pillow?
What are you thinking about when you rest your head?
A typical evening involves: getting home (if you travel to work), crashing somewhere comfortable as quickly as possible, find your comfort food or activity, getting the point where your body tells you to sleep, getting into bed, and feeling a rush of thoughts, worries, and stresses that you can do nothing about at that moment in time—and then waking up late.
Snap out of it!
How do you get out of this situation?
While nobody has a secret remedy for this, there are a few things that you can do to promote healthy sleep.
Get up at the same time every day: There are no excuses. Just because it’s the weekend doesn’t mean you need to sleep longer—this isn’t helping you build a routine.
Don’t eat late: Avoiding insomnia requires you to set a physical precedent for sleep. Eating late and feeling before bed—even with healthy food—will give you a hit of energy right before you should be crashing. Treat food like you would caffeine in this instance, by setting a curfew time and leaving a sufficient gap between consumption and bed time. This brings me on to an important point.
Caffeine!: This isn’t helping you sleep at all. If you’re drinking coffee from 12pm onwards, guess what, it’s keeping your brain awake. The good old Diary of a CEO podcast made it clear that caffeine is poor for sleep and the quarter-life of coffee impacts you for around 12 hours following consumption.
Declare your worries: It’s clear that something caused this—most likely a stressful situation or a number of concerns in your life. Journalling regularly, or at least before bed, helps divest these worries and, nine times out of ten, will eliminate some of them that are just irrelevant to you anyway.
Message from Tom:
Speaking of that last point, MindJournal gave me 10% off a number of its products, which I’m grateful for—not only because it helps more people make use of it’s unique method of journalling, but the system also helped me to understand that there is more to just writing things down.
For the past few years, I’ve been trying to write down my thoughts in a hope to make sense of them myself, which can be a great form of therapy. However, it took me a long time to make it useful. The MindJournal, a book that guides you through the process, could’ve accelerated that significantly!
It’s not too late to treat yourself, or someone you love, to this useful ‘guided’ journaling method.
For more information check out the products here.
I’d love to see some more comments here about how journaling impacts you!
The need for more conversations about stress
This could all be avoided with a few conversations about how people think or feel. While the stresses are inevitable and can’t be avoided, they can be managed better with the right mechanisms.
One of the key points I mentioned earlier about how people are impacted by others, makes it an imperative to work on such things I order to be good to those around you. This starts with conversations. Whoever you’re talking to probably knows already that you’re worried about something—if that's your partner, they’re not getting any sleep either!
You naturally share the burden, so why not make sure that you are willing to discuss what’s on your mind. Not only will this help you sleep better at night, but also build trust among you.
And if that person is the one thing keeping you up at night…well…that’s a different conversation.