So, how can you stop sleep anxiety? It’s a case of trying to keep overall stress levels down, so looking at your routine and making sure you have no unnecessary stresses before bed. How can I stop sleep anxiety? 12 tips to try In fact, we all naturally wake up several times a night in between sleep stages. ‘Many of us think if we have anything short of an eight-hour block of blissful, uninterrupted sleep, we’ve slept badly,’ says Dr Feld. Studies report it enhances learning and memory, and contributes to emotional resilience. ‘REM sleep is more associated with mental wellbeing,’ says Dr Feld. REM (rapid eye movement) sleep takes up 25% of the night and is the period in which we dream. The deepest of our four stages of non-REM or ‘quiet’ sleep, which makes up 75%, produces physiological changes that help us regenerate biologically, boosting immune system functioning. Unfortunately broken sleep can not only lead to long nights tossing and turning but over time it can increase the chances of some chronic health issues, as your body doesn't get a chance to rest. ‘It wasn’t that long ago, in evolutionary terms, that the night was a time of vulnerability – feelings of anxiety associated with falling asleep are perfectly natural, potentially advantageous, from an evolutionary perspective,’ says Dr Law. For thousands of years, night time was a time of danger and threat for humans. Like anxiety itself, it’s rooted in our biology. ‘You’re alone, and you don’t have distractions like Netflix to help you push negative thoughts out of your mind,’ says Dr Feld. Or, in the case of sleep anxiety, by the prospect of going to bed. It's a survival mechanism that millennia ago would have helped us to escape from predators, but now is often misplaced as it can be triggered by anything from work stresses to an over-full Central Line. 'This means that, even once your head hits the pillow, your body isn’t going to make it easy for you to switch off, no matter how comfortable your bed.' If you’re in action mode all day every day, your physical systems will be very good at staying in that mode', says breathwork practitioner Richie Bostock, aka The Breath Guy. 'The body is excellent at developing habits. psychological cause for your struggles, but anxiety - which affects nearly 10% of the UK population and is on the rise - can be triggered by any number of things.Īnxiety is caused our sympathetic nervous system creating ‘fight or flight’ reaction, which has a range of physiological effects such as a raised heart rate and shorter breaths. Not only have you got to contend with the biological vs. And women are lighter sleepers than men.'īut, when combined with anxiety, sleep issues can be a trickier to get to the root of. People often report poorer sleep with age, as the tissues in the throat become more slack, resulting in the narrowing of airways. ‘Some of it is genetic if your parents are poor sleepers, there’s a chance you will be too. ‘Sleep problems tend to be 50% biological and 50% psychosomatic,’ explains Dr Feld. It can even be the idea that one’s not sleeping enough that triggers the angst, which becomes a cruel cycle. The knowledge that substandard rest will mean we're less able to function in our lives, whether for family or work, creates a stress that can lead to a fear of going to sleep. ‘We worry that if we get less than our eight hours, we’re not going to be able to cope with the day ahead.’ This sort of stress around sleep is actually a form of performance anxiety, says Dr Michael Feld, a sleep expert at the Lanserhof Tegernsee. It is characterised by a sense of panic caused by the prospect of going to sleep, whatever the worries around it may be. Also known as somniphobia, sleep anxiety is a combination of insomnia and anxiety - specifically when the two conditions exacerbate each other, which is known as 'bidirectional comorbidity.' What is sleep anxiety?īut what is sleep anxiety? Most of us are all too familiar with the anxious feelings, but in relation to our night's rest it's less well-known. Not only that, but ‘there is growing evidence it causes serious chronic diseases, too’. ‘Lack of sleep is obviously a source of frustration and stress, which affects our work, relationships, health and mental wellbeing.’ ‘Over 20 million people in the UK have problems with sleep,’ says Dr Graham Law of Leeds School of Medicine, founder of the Sleep Research Leeds initiative. One inevitable byproduct of this is a glut of sleep anxiety in the population. According to the NHS, a third of British people will have episodes of insomnia at some point in their lives. Ever been plagued by an inability to drift off, leaving you spending days in an under-slept haze? If so, know that you are far from alone.
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