The 1:00AM Greatest Hits

It’s 1:00AM (or 2 or 3 or maybe even 4) and you have just felt yourself be bolted awake in an anxious or panicked state thinking about something that has happened or is going to happen.  And then you get this playlist of thoughts about all of the things that make you feel anxious/guilty/bad and maybe even every mistake that you have ever made in your entire lifetime.  And now you are absolutely wide awake and unable to return to sleep and your body feels like it could go run a marathon and still have energy to burn.  While you are also registering a sense of being exhausted and really wanting to fall back to sleep.  This is the experience of the 1:00AM Greatest Hits.  And not hits like a music group’s best songs, but hits like a punch in the gut.  Over and over and over and over again.

This is no fun, very frustrating, and a sure sign of anxiety or stress or both.  This happens to everyone sometimes, but it tends to happen to people experiencing chronic stress or anxiety more often and with greater intensity.  So, what can you do about it?  Several things, actually.  Let’s go through a few of them together.

Accept that sometimes, this is going to happen.

There are going to be nights when it is hard to sleep.  This happens.  When it does, if you start having thoughts about “I have to get to sleep” and “I have to get up in (insert number of) hours” these are thoughts that are going to put added pressure onto you to fall back to sleep.  These thoughts and the pressure they create will not help you fall back asleep, and actually will only serve to increase the stress response that you are experiencing.  Helping yourself to take a breath and let go of the pressure of having to fall back asleep will help you be able to allow yourself to go back to sleep.

Use a body-based coping skill such as grounding or breathing.

Body-based coping skills help your body to relax and get you out of the thought loops that are going to make falling back to sleep harder.  Focus on the coping skill that you decide you are going to use, and put your full attention on it.  There are a lot of breathing strategies from taking basic belly breaths to square breathing that can help your body calm and your brain quiet.  Grounding is a strategy that uses the information your senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell) are bringing into your brain to be able to put your attention squarely in the moment rather than getting stuck heading down the anxiety rabbit hole with a billion possible worry thoughts.  Other strategies that are body based include progressive muscle relaxation, meditation, and engaging with comfort objects such as a weighted blanket or a favorite stuffed animal or blanket/piece of fabric.

Change your body position.

Changing your body’s position interrupts the thoughts in your brain and gives you a chance to calm down.  This change in position can be as simple as rolling onto your other side or rolling onto your back/stomach.  If you roll onto your stomach, taking some deep breaths can enhance the calming effects of both breathing and changing your body’s position.  The added pressure as your lungs and chest expand and push into the mattress sends additional signals to your brain.  If you are feeling a high level of anxiety or stress, getting up out of bed is a high-level change in position that can really interrupt the stress response.  Get up, stretch a little or walk around.  If you are still feeling anxious, try walking out of your bedroom and into another room.  Maybe find a place to sit for a few minutes or take a couple laps around your living space.  When the stress response hits, we often have the urge to move.  This comes from the flight part of the flight-fight-freeze reaction.  When we can recognize the urge and give our body what it is saying that it needs in a way that is slow and rhythmic, we help meet our needs while also getting ourselves back to calm.

Throughout your day, ask yourself: “is this                    going to help or get in the way of sleep tonight?

From the time you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night, every action that you take is either going to help you be able to fall asleep or is going to get in your way.  I know this can be a bit of a radical thought shift because often when we think about a bedtime routine, we are only thinking about the last hour or so of our day and what we can do with that time that will help us to be able to fall asleep.  By thinking about our whole day this way, we are creating lifestyle changes that can be really positive for over-all stress management in addition to helping us to be able to sleep well at night. 

Put all of these things together.

When using coping skills, we often need to use them in layers.  Find the combination of the strategies talked about here that works for you.  And then, use them and use them consistently!  Know that as you experience fluctuations in your stress and anxiety levels, the amount of coping that you have to use will also fluctuate.  Finding a baseline of things that you do on a regular/daily basis as part of your over-all health and wellness self-care routine will be really important to make sure that you are running on a baseline that has stress management as its norm setting.