Five Ways to Outsmart Anxiety for Restful Sleep

Many of the clients I see with anxiety tell me that they are not resting well. They have trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, and sometimes wake up sooner than they intended. Because they are already wired to be worriers, they often have a lot of concerns about it. Most find that the more they pay attention to their sleep problems, the worse they become. Here are some tried and true tips to interrupt the anxious cycle.

1.      Learn the facts about healthy sleep. Most clients tell me that they want to sleep deeply for 7-8 hours a night. I agree that this sounds amazing. But the truth is that healthy sleep is not solid or uniformly deep. We have four stages of sleep, ranging from very light to very deep. We move through those stages in predictable ways. Every night we move through the stages of sleep in cycles that last about an hour and a half. The average person goes through something like four to six sleep cycles in a night. It is normal to wake up as many as six times per night. We usually just fall right back to sleep and don’t even remember this happening. But for people who are anxious, they sometimes rouse briefly and immediately anxious brain kicks in. Why am I awake? Oh no, I really needed a full night of sleep! What time is it? Oh geez, only three hours until the alarm. These anxious thoughts wake you up and make it harder to go back to sleep. It is important to recognize that you will wake during the night, even on the best night of sleep possible. It’s normal, healthy and does not mean you won’t be rested. If you wake up in the middle of the night, repeat healthier self-talk to yourself. This is normal. I can trust my body to know how to sleep. My anxiety gremlin is just trying to trick me into worrying.

For more information about sleep cycles check out this article. (https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/stages-of-sleep)

2.      Get out of bed. If you can’t fall asleep after twenty or thirty minutes, get up and go into another room. Your bed should be for sleep and sex only. If you lay in bed and worry about not being able to sleep, your body will learn that your bed is the worry place and anxious thoughts will gleefully kick off when you get into bed. Break the association between worry and being in bed. Once you go into another room, keep the lights dim, and do something boring until you feel sleepy again. Reading a book is a good choice. Once you are sleepy again, head back to bed and give it another try. If you can’t sleep after twenty minutes or so get back out of bed. Rinse and repeat.

3.      Make sleep hunger work for you! Most people hear the advice to get out of bed and imagine they will spend the whole night just laying down for 20 minutes and then shuffling back to the living room. This doesn’t usually happen, but if it does it’s totally okay. In fact, it’s a good thing! Have you ever been so full that you turned down an amazing looking dessert because you just weren’t hungry? Have you ever been so starved that you ate something kind of crappy and it tasted amazing? Hunger changes our behavior around food. In the same way, sleep hunger changes the length and quality of our sleep. In order to have a good night’s sleep you need to have been awake for at least 15 hours (give or take a few). If you have rotten night of sleep, your body is going to crave rest the next night. You will fall asleep faster and sleep better because your body was hungry for the sleep. If you sleep 12 hours one night, your body just isn’t going to be hungry for sleep when you usually go to bed. So, you are going to have trouble falling asleep, or your sleep will become fragmented and restless. This is why we advise that you do not nap when you are having sleep troubles. We also strongly recommend that you limit the amount of time you spend in bed. I often have clients tell me that they need 8 or 9 hours of sleep to feel rested. But they also never seem to feel rested. When we limit the time they are in bed to seven hours, they fall asleep faster, sleep in more consolidated chunks and feel more rested in the morning. Ten hours of drawn out, fitful sleep when your body only needs seven will make you more tired than sleeping fewer hours. Weird, huh?

4.      Avoid screens when you want to be sleeping. Most screens emit frequencies of blue light that mimic sunlight. Our brains recognize this blue light and decide that the sun is coming up. Remember, human bodies have not changed much since prehistoric times, and they don’t know we have cell phones and TVs. So when we see blue light at night our bodies try to be helpful by waking us up for the day.  Our melatonin production decreases, our body temperature goes up and our heart rate increases. Those are the last things you want at 3 AM when you are hoping to catch a few more hours of shut eye! I take this a step further and try to start dimming the lights in the house around an hour before bedtime. I also use a blue light blocker on my phone and try to limit screentime around an hour before sleep.

5.      Put worry in a box. I already mentioned that you don’t want your bed to become the worry place. Whenever we pair two things repeatedly, we come to expect that if we encounter one of the things, we will encounter the other one. If we develop a habit of worrying in bed, we will automatically start to worry when we are there. This connection can be broken by not worrying when you are there. How the heck do you just not worry in bed? One of my tips is to make a worry box. Worry boxes are imaginary boxes that sit in ordinary space. Make yours as simple or elaborate as you please. Maybe yours is a pirate chest, or an elaborate Victorian armoire. My worry box is about two feet square, wooden, and has a cool lock on it. It sits by the door to my office. When I am having worries and it is not the right time or place for them, I imagine myself physically opening the box and placing the worry inside. Yes, it escapes sometimes, but you can just put it back. Picture closing the lid and locking the lock. Your job is to take the things out of the worry box and make a very solid effort to worry about them as hard as you can at a pre-appointed time and place. For instance, you might choose 7:30PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays as your worry time. Give yourself 20 full minutes. Imagine going to the worry box and pulling out your stored worries. Worry about them as hard as you can for the full twenty minutes. Then put them back and lock the lid. If you practice this regularly, something strange will start to happen. You will get better at putting worries in the box, and faster at catching them and putting them back when they escape. You will also find that twenty minutes starts to become a long time to worry. You might have to really stretch it out to last the full twenty minutes. But keep going. Slowly and surely over time the worries will start to lose some of their power.

Give the tricks above a try! If you are still struggling with sleep or worry, consider seeing a therapist. This article only covers a few of the tools we have to offer to help you feel less anxious, more rested, and live your best life!