What causes sleep anxiety?

Have you ever been lying there in bed at night and you know that tomorrow you have a big presentation, an important meeting, or a big project and you close your eyes and hope to drift off to sleep soon, however sleep does not come. We all know the next step here, you look at the clock and you say it's 11:00, if I fall asleep right now I can get in 7 good hours . Now it's midnight OK midnight I can still get 6 good hours of sleep, and this process plays out until approximately 5 o'clock in the morning. Does this sound like a relatable scenario to you ? Sleep anxiety is very real and very frustrating. The idea of sleep anxiety in itself seems to be counter intuitive, after all isn't sleep something that we all look forward to, isn't sleep something that rejuvenates and restores our bodies and our minds for the next day, so why are we stressed about sleep.

The unfortunate reality is that in the world today, our lives are so fast paced that sleep becomes a job. Sleep becomes a necessity in order to function and to meet all the requirements and demands that we have in our lives. As a result sleep now stresses us out as much as work and other daily life stressors.

At the heart of any type of anxiety is simply our feelings related to our perceived lack of control ,when we are unable to fall asleep we feel a lack of control, we are unable to get ourselves to do something that our body desperately needs. So now that we understand what sleep anxiety is and where it comes from..... the obvious question is what can I do about it?

We all know there are different medications that can assist with falling asleep anything from THC to Benadryl to prescription sleep aids, however is it possible to teach yourself to sleep without these? The easiest answer is yes if the only reason we are not sleeping is due to sleep anxiety and not an underlying biological issue there are things that can be done to assist us in the process.

This tools vary from counting and talking to ourselves to distracting ourselves to practicing meditation. There are also some very basic and simple life changes that we can make in order to promote better sleep. I look forward to discussing all of these with you in the next blog. Thanks for reading.

#sleepanxiety #Help