Anxiety and Sleep Disturbance

By now it’s no secret that I’ve been dealing with a plethora of issues increasing my anxiety. I tend to first realize I’m dealing with high anxiety when my sleep starts to suffer. That’s one of the primary complaints I hear when people come to counseling services for anxiety, as well. Let’s take a look at the dos and don’ts of sleep hygiene to try touch on what might be helpful in treating anxiety-related sleep disturbance.

The Anxious Sleeper Do’s

DO:

Write a List

My number one go-to for anyone suffering from disturbed sleep due to anxiety is creating a list. The list will have everything that could possibly be on your mind either right at that moment, later in the evening as you lay awake trying to fall asleep, or when you wake up in a panic from sleep. This could include the tasks you have to get done at work the next day, the errands you have to run on your lunch break, the housework you plan on completing, the people you have to reach out to in the morning, the interview you’re going on next week, your family member’s health, your future goals…the list goes on and on.

Write your list while you sit on your bed, preparing to lie down. Once you have your list written out, ask yourself what you can do about each item. Some you may be able to do something for, others you may not. For those you cannot take an action to resolve, write yourself a note to let them go for the night. For those you can do something for, write down what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. The when is important because you’re reminding yourself you’re not doing that action while you’re trying to sleep.

I’m usually awoken from sleep with tasks for the next day or week swirling in my mind. When I use this method of writing down my potential worries before bed, I have better sleep. It really helps me let go.

Care for Your Sleeping Space

This one may be tough if you’re living in a dorm, crashing on a couch, staying in a shelter, etc. I think it’s still worth mentioning that if you can, give your sleeping space some care by de-cluttering, putting away clean clothes, regularly cleaning sheets and blankets, habitually dusting and vacuuming, minimizing electronics and lights that could disrupt sleep, and, if needed, turning on white noise to cut your sleep space off from the rest of the world. More about the sleeping space later, when we get to the “don’ts.”

I know I’m bad at caring for my sleeping space. I don’t put my clothes away regularly and it’s usually one of the last spaces to be cleaned because I’m more worried about the shared spaces others tend to see. However, that’s not making my needs a priority, so it’s definitely a growing edge.

Have a Wind-Down Routine

Most of us lead busy lives which means going, going, going, morning to night. The problem with doing your schoolwork five minutes to bedtime or cleaning the day’s mess just before hitting the sheets is that you’re keeping your mind in work mode.

Your mind is alert and task-oriented. You’ve had no time to process the day and wind-down from it. You may not even know what’s bothering you until you lay your head down and have the stillness to project into. By then you’re tired and more vulnerable to anxiety because a tired mind can’t rationalize as well as a wake mind.

I’m usually good about this. I shower and take at least a half hour to play a game, read, or watch TV to clear my mind at night. It should be noted, listening to music I haven’t heard in a long time apparently amps me up too much to go to sleep because I’m just that weird. So watch out for that if you’re also extra for no reason.

The Anxious Sleeper’s Don’ts

DON’T:

Do Everything in Your Sleeping Space

Tying into caring for your sleeping space, be mindful of removing you’re regular daily activities from your sleeping space. Again, this may not possible for everyone due to living situation. If you have the ability, don’t spend hours watching TV, completing homework, practicing hobbies, exercising, and so on, in your bedroom. When you bring regular daytime activity into your sleeping space, you will begin to associate it with activity rather than rest, leading to difficulty sleeping and more room for anxious thoughts to fester while lying awake.

Do What Brings You Anxiety

If you’re worried about the state of the world, don’t read or watch the world news right before bed. If a certain person brings you panic, don’t talk or text with them in the evenings. If horror movies leave you thinking of all the ways a bad guy can attack you in the night, save those for the morning of your day off to give you plenty of time to recover from the effects.

Bottom line—don’t do what you know will increase your anxiety anywhere near bedtime. Take a look at your evening habits and ask yourself if any of those could trigger anxious thoughts, nightmares, or mid-sleep panic attacks. Remove what you identify and replace it with something soothing.

 Use Caffeine Before Bed

Caffeine is known to bad for anxiety because it’s an “upper.” If you’re like me, you may not feel like you gain energy from caffeine, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still putting your brain and body in alert mode. Caffeine is found in coffee, many teas (including green tea!), chocolate, most sodas, energy drinks, and some medications such as those for headaches.

Try to cut out anything with caffeine for the evening time so that your body and mind aren’t more restless and jittery than they necessary. I’ll admit I’m not good at this one, either. I love chocolate and sometimes I just need an evening cup of coffee. Growing edges!

The Anxious Sleeper’s Maybes

MAYBE:

Try a Relaxing Tea

There are plenty of teas marketed for sleep from the basic chamomile to teas made with roots and herbs believed to help sleep. I consider this a “maybe” because using these depends on the person and their unique sensitivities, medications, preferences, and overall genetic make-up. If you do decide to try a tea to help with sleep, it may give you an opportunity to put in place a wind-down routine because you’ll have to set aside time to make and drink it.

Personally, I tried two different types of these teas and found myself having worse sleep with the tea than without. However, I’m one person with exceptionally odd reactions to many foods and medications, so why not tea, too? I’ll leave this at a “maybe” because it may or may not work.

Talk To Your Doctor

Sleep is vital to functioning and going without it for long periods of time can be dangerous. Listen to your body and seek a medical opinion if it seems like the right choice for you. Your doctor may recommend seeing a therapist or psychiatrist, taking medications, running tests, changing your lifestyle, or other possible interventions.

As always, I’m not providing medical or clinical advice but think it’s worth noting how vitally important sleep is. Sometimes, we need some extra support to get sleep back on track. Maybe that means talking to a doctor and maybe it doesn’t. You know you best. I know I haven’t breached this with a doctor yet, because I still feel my sleep issues are temporary and situational.

I still have some work to do and some options to manage my anxiety-interrupted sleep. How about you? What do you do to make sleep possible when you’re anxious? What do you want to work on that you haven’t yet? Let me know in the comments below!

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Managing Negativity Bias So It Isn't Overwhelming

I'm Guilty of Feeding Into Negativity Bias

When I was planning on what to write about for this post, I was thinking about writing on decision-making because that’s what’s coming down the road for me. However, when I got on here to write, my computer wasn’t connecting to the internet. Immediately I thought, “great, just one more thing.”

“Just one more thing,” was a phrase heard often at my house growing up, along with; “if it’s not one thing, it’s another.” Indeed, that’s how life often feels. When problems start arising, they seem to keep piling up, or if you manage to get ahead of one, another is just behind it.

Well, as soon as the thought developed, I knew I’d have to re-direct with my internal therapist voice. It was not just one more thing. This is life and life can’t always go exactly how we expect or plan. However, it does actually go how we expect more often than it doesn’t.

Think about it. Day to day, how many regular tasks go off the rails? I can’t think of many. I head to the bathroom first thing after I get up and, though there are many things that could go horribly wrong on the way, I make it there and complete the morning routine like clockwork without interruption. I find clothes fairly easily and dress just as easily. The coffee pot keeps running morning after morning, the drive to work remains predictable and relatively smooth, and even in a profession that can sometimes present major hiccups, I keep coasting through the work day.

My point: very few things are actually going wrong in the grand scheme of my day to day life. So why do I, and you, and so many people I’ve worked with, return to the mindset that each hiccup is, “just one more thing?”

Negativity Bias

I suspect part of it lies in how we’re wired. As humans evolved, they had to learn to survive and survival was tough in early human times. Evolutionarily speaking, it made more sense to remember and watch for the threats (wild animals) than to put mental energy into what was not a threat (the beauty of flowers). Like the appendix to bodily function, we’ve evolved beyond the strict need of this thinking pattern that focuses so heavily on threats.

Most of these issues that pile up and become overwhelming are not strictly threats in the sense of what early humans may have faced. Instead, they are challenges we have the ability to overcome, such as unplugging the router and shutting down the computer to fix the temporary internet issue. Even when they are more difficult to face, such as a job loss or change, most of what we fixate on is not a life-threatening situation, but yet our brain hones in on it as though it is because evolution tells it to.

Yes, I think this evolution-based negativity bias has a great deal to do with how we think about our misfortunes. The other part of this issue comes from whether or not we choose to do something about the negativity bias. Because I know it is there and I work to help make others aware of it regularly, I know it can be changed by the power of perspective.

I want to pause and say I’m not invalidating anything I said in my last post or how you feel when things are going wrong. True, I have not been doing well lately. Sleep has been poor and stress has been high. And it’s still okay for me not to be okay and it’s okay for anyone going through something to no be okay.

Changing Perspective

That having been said, back to the power of perspective.

The mind is powerful tool, it can make us believe intensely unreal things. Logically, it can also do the opposite. How we think about an issue leads to how we feel about it, not the other way around. Then based on those thoughts and subsequent feelings, we act accordingly.

I was tempted when I thought, “just one more thing,” to start listing out all that’s been going off the rails recently, leading me into feeling pity and sadness. If I’d done that, I probably would have taken a nap, neglected this blog and my other paying work, then had negative thoughts about myself later for not doing my writing, leading to more sadness and some new guilt…and so on. Instead, I reminded myself it’s not just one more thing. It’s just a fluke that’s happening now, it is fixable, and it is not the universe piling up inconveniences against me.

Thus, I sat down to write this. I did fix the internet connection, with the help of my husband’s suggestions, and I’m not ruminating on all the things I haven’t gotten the opportunity to fix yet. I’m choosing a perspective that doesn’t feed into the negativity bias and you can, too.

It’s hard to do when all you seem to want to do is pile every rotten mishap onto the last to create a heap of unrelated garbage. You went from having single pieces of trash, easily tossed in the bin, to a landfill molding the individual pieces into an insurmountable blob. Bottom line, it gets way harder to sort through the landfill blob than deal with each piece on its own.

I’d like to follow up on this with more tips and tricks on changing thoughts to manage feelings. If that’s something you’d be interested, leave a comment or use the check boxes below!

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