Anxiety and insomnia are frequent bedfellows… pun intended. WebMD has a nifty little list of tips that may help you regulate your sleep cycle. After doing a considerable amount of personal research on sleep, I have to disagree with #3, “Limit naps.”
It’s my personal opinion that when I’m unable to fall asleep at night, my first priority is making sure that my body and mind are functioning optimally so that I don’t get into a car accident or run into walls. Doing this often requires naps. It’s true that napping will interfere with your sleep cycle, but if you’re a chronic insomniac, getting bits of sleep here and there can go a long way in keeping your body from crashing of exhaustion. Restoring a healthy sleep cycle is often a more long-term goal that is probably best accompanied with help from your physician.
Although I don’t consider myself an insomniac, my anxiety is usually accompanied by problems falling asleep and staying asleep. When my mind is overactive, it’s difficult to slow it down enough to allow my body’s rhythm to drop into sleep. Not to mention that my overactive mind causes my thoughts to go all haywire when I’m trying to sleep, and this in turn only exacerbates the anxiety.
I eventually learned a few techniques that helped tremendously. One of the best was when I decided to try meditating myself into sleep. It works beautifully, but it creates problems during my daily non-sleeping meditation because I’ve associated watching my breath with falling asleep, so I’m often trying to keep myself from nodding off while sitting on the cushion during the day. Another method I use is visualizations. I often imagine my thoughts as a piece of paper, then I visually crumple that paper into a little ball and throw it off into the distance. When my mind begins racing again, I again crumple the paper and chuck it away. I do this until I’ve managed to slow down enough to drift off.
My biggest problem with sleep is that I always want to sleep when I shouldn’t and rarely want to when I should. As they say, the best nap is the one you shouldn’t be taking.
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January 17, 2007 at 10:14 pm
SA Dave
If I can add one more recommendations:
Take care not to consume a lot of sugar before bed. For instance, don’t be downing a bunch of chocolate while watching “Ugly Betty” and then hit the hay an hour or two later. If you drink caffeine-free herbal tea, don’t load it up with sugar or honey. My experience is that I sometimes wake up at 2:00 AM feeling a little like I’m on a sugar high. Usually, I can point back to eating something sugary earlier in the evening.
I found exercise really helped me get over my last bout of insomnia. It’s also helping me with my depression, which is great.
Dave
January 22, 2007 at 9:27 am
Jonah
My diet seems to affect my sleep tremendously. I radically changed my diet and my sleep patterns got better soon after.
I’ve also used visualization, especially for “bad” or nightmarish thoughts and images. I blow things up! I imagine that the instigator of my fear is blown up like in the Cartoons or in a Monthy Python schetch. This really helps because it creates a humourus situation which is much easier to handle.