When we are anxious it can make falling asleep seem impossible and what is even worse, the night time struggles can make amplify anxiety during the day. This leads to a downward spiral that may seem to make your anxiety and sleep worse bit by bit, every single day.
In this video, I will explain how anxiety can lead to insomnia and severe fatigue and show you my tips and mindset changes that have enabled me to break free from this cycle.
During my 5 years dealing with anxiety, especially health anxiety I was entirely in the grip of my worries. Every waking minute my thoughts would go back to possible diseases that I could be suffering from and that just no doctor found out yet. All I could think of all day was my symptoms and what they could be a sign of. However, a few years into anxiety I have learned to manage my thoughts and could stop them from spiralling completely out of control and into panic attacks.
That is until night time… it was at night, right before bed, that my thoughts seem to be uncontrollable. I would lie there in my quiet room and my mind would automatically start scanning my body and focus in on physical sensations. For the most part it was my heart beat. Just listing in and soaking in every beat and how it felt like in my body made me cringe and at some point it was so intune with my body that I could even feel every single beat in my fingertips.
Other things that very very noticeable:
- I seemed to have breathing difficulties during the night
- burning skin sensations
- numbness in my fingers
- and the worst ones were these kind of brain zaps. They felt like short one second long electric shock sensations that ran down from the back of my head into my entire body and jolted me awake just as I was about to fall asleep.
The problem here is that we with anxiety feel these sensations in bed and start to excessively worry about them. When we do this repeatedly, instead of associating the bed as a safe place and sleep, our brain associates it with dread and worry time. We have imprinted this over and over again into our brains that whenever we lie back down into bed we jump right back into the high-alert mode with all its physical symptoms.
The great news is that the brain is able to unlearn and unpair these associations. We can retrain our brain and get that sleep we all need to have the energy to recover from anxiety.
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As always I hope that this video helps you understand what is going on during these very normal anxiety recovery steps.
Hopefully you will feel more at ease and can concentrate on the more important parts of anxiety recovery. Which I describe in more detail here in this playlist:
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Rhodesia by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license ([ Ссылка ]) Artist: [ Ссылка ]
