When you live with an anxiety disorder, having a disrupted and inconsistent sleep schedule is the norm. Poor sleep is one of the hallmark symptoms of anxiety and can quickly lead to worsening symptoms, a greater degree of daily impairment, and undue stress.

Learning a couple of tips to help you fall asleep with anxiety can mitigate many of these harmful effects and can even help you start your own path to recovery from an anxiety disorder.

Why Anxiety Disturbs Sleep

Anxiety disorders are one of the most common mental health challenges in the United States today. People who live with an anxiety disorder may experience any number of troubling symptoms, including:

  • Restlessness
  • Anxiety
  • Trouble concentrating
  • A sense of impending danger
  • Sweating
  • An inability to control worry
  • Rapid breathing
  • Sleep disruption

The reason why it’s so difficult to fall asleep with anxiety includes physiological, emotional, and mental factors.

First, anxiety disorders are associated with heightened sympathetic nervous system activity during periods of stress. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the “fight-or-flight” response, and heightened sympathetic nervous system activity triggers feelings of alertness, raises your heart rate, and prepares your body for action.

Scientists looking at people with chronic anxiety conditions found that exposure to stressful situations caused a larger increase in sympathetic nervous system activity compared to non-anxious controls.

Importantly, participants in this study who had a chronic anxiety condition experienced this spike of activity before the stressful event ever took place. Simply knowing that they might experience a stressful situation soon caused a surge in sympathetic nervous system activity.

This increase in activity is directly tied to your inability to fall asleep with anxiety. When your body is preparing itself for danger, falling asleep can feel impossible. So if you start to worry about tomorrow before getting into bed today, your body and mind activate systems that interfere with your ability to fall asleep.

But paradoxically, not getting enough sleep can itself be seen as a stressful event. This can quickly become a destructive spiral of poor sleep quality, where:

  • You worry that you won’t get enough sleep to feel rested tomorrow
  • Your concern about sleep triggers an increase in sympathetic nervous system activity
  • That sympathetic nervous system activity blocks you from falling asleep or staying asleep through the night
  • Poor sleep leads to even more pressure on you to get better sleep the next night

With these chains of automatic, often unconscious responses all working together to hinder sleep, it’s no wonder that so many people struggle to fall asleep with anxiety.

Prevalence of Sleep Disturbance in Anxiety Disorders

Unsurprisingly, these difficulties with sleep lead to a substantial majority of people with anxiety disorders reporting sleep challenges. Researchers estimate that two out of every three people with an anxiety disorder report experiencing insomnia, with an even higher percentage reporting sleep disturbances or restlessness.

9 Tips to Help You Fall Asleep if You Have Anxiety

As difficult as the challenge of falling asleep with anxiety can be, there are several tools you can implement into your life to help. These include lifestyle changes, specific behavioral strategies, and professional treatment services.

Finding what works for you can take some trial and error, but improving your sleep quality will undoubtedly help you reduce your anxiety symptoms and start feeling better.

1. Keep a Regular Sleep Schedule

One of the best things you can do to help regulate your sleep and make it easier to fall asleep with anxiety is to keep a regular sleeping schedule. Go to bed at the same hour each night, even on the weekends, and try to wake up at the same time each morning.

By keeping a consistent sleep schedule, you are essentially setting your body’s internal clock. Scientists refer to this as your circadian rhythm, which is directly tied to sleep-promoting hormone release at night and wakefulness hormones in the morning.

Further, a regular sleep schedule keeps you consistent and establishes a healthy pattern of sleep behavior that’s easier to maintain. This can help you determine whether your strategy for improving your sleep is working or whether you may need additional support to improve your sleep quality.

2. Make Sleep a Priority

Part of the challenge for many people struggling with sleep is that they prioritize other tasks above sleep. It’s not uncommon for people to delay sleep so that they have a longer time to pursue tasks such as:

  • Work assignments
  • Schoolwork
  • Finishing a movie or TV show
  • Exercise
  • Spending time with friends and family

While many of these activities are an important part of daily life, letting them extend into your sleep hours can cause a host of worsening physical and mental health consequences that could otherwise be avoided.

Learning the benefits of healthy sleep may help you shift to making sleep a priority. Among countless other benefits, a healthy sleep schedule can help you:

  • Regulate your appetite
  • Focus on important tasks
  • Have enough energy for the day
  • Facilitate muscle repair and growth
  • Improve several cognitive and memory markers
  • Regulate your emotions

And perhaps most importantly, a healthy sleep schedule can substantially reduce the intensity and frequency of anxious episodes. Understanding the importance of sleep in nearly every aspect of life, prioritizing your sleep should become a key part of your plan for recovery.

3. Reduce Stimulating Activities at Night

In today’s technological world, people have instant access to a wide range of exciting, rewarding, and stimulating activities at all times.

Whether that’s watching your favorite streaming service late into the night, playing video games, or scrolling social media, these activities can all lead to heightened awareness and stimulation, which can, in turn, lead to negatively impacted sleep.

If you’re focusing on improving your ability to fall asleep, consider cutting out these highly stimulating activities in favor of more relaxing and calming activities an hour or two before bedtime. This calm time helps you avoid getting too stimulated before bed and provides a space for you to wind down and start to relax.

4. Cut Out Caffeine After 2 P.M.

Caffeine is another stimulating factor that can both increase your anxiety symptoms and make it more difficult to fall asleep. If you regularly drink coffee, tea, or energy drinks, consider both limiting your overall intake and cutting out caffeine after around 2 p.m.

Caffeine has a half-life of approximately five hours. This means it takes five hours for your body to eliminate half the caffeine you consumed and another five hours to reduce the remaining 50% to 25%. If you drink a cup of coffee at 4 p.m., for instance, you’ll still feel half of the stimulating effects at 9 p.m.

This is particularly important for sleep, as the way caffeine functions within the brain is to block adenosine receptors. Adenosine is a neurotransmitter directly associated with the urge to go to sleep, and drinking caffeine can block your body from producing this important chemical to help promote good sleep habits.

5. Start an Exercise Routine

Exercise has long been found to be an effective way of reducing anxiety symptoms. Another benefit of exercise is that it can make it easier for people to fall asleep, stay asleep, and get better quality sleep.

As such, starting an exercise routine can be a powerful tool for helping people fall asleep with anxiety. This doesn’t have to mean intense physical workouts either — it could just mean taking a long walk through your neighborhood or riding your bike through the park.

6. Build a Relaxing Nighttime Ritual

A soothing nighttime ritual can help keep your anxiety at bay, get you prepared for a good night’s rest, and help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Your nighttime ritual could include anything you find calming, but some common soothing activities you could start to incorporate include:

  • Light yoga or stretching
  • A meditation practice
  • Reading a book
  • Skin care routines
  • A hot shower or bath

These calming routines can help you calm down before bedtime, not feel overly stimulated when you get into bed, and fall asleep faster.

7. Consider Talk Therapy Approaches

If your anxiety continues to interfere with your sleep, regardless of the lifestyle changes you make, it might be time to seek out the help of a mental health professional. Working with an in-person or virtual therapist can not only help you start to resolve some of your anxiety symptoms but can improve your ability to fall asleep as well.

There are several evidence-based talk therapy approaches used in the treatment of anxiety. Some of the more common approaches that have a robust evidence base include:

  • Cognitive behavioral therapy
  • Dialectical behavior therapy
  • Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing

These styles of therapy specifically focus on helping you identify the driving forces behind your anxiety, challenge and change the thought patterns that are anxiety-provoking, and learn new behaviors to help manage your symptoms when they occur.

There are specific talk therapy options for sleep as well. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia provides targeted interventions focused on sleep directly and can help you build healthier sleep habits and routines with the help of a trained professional.

8. Medication Management

Medication management provides another path to anxiety recovery. A number of psychiatric medications can help treat anxiety disorders and, in turn, help you fall asleep.

However, medication management provides much more than a simple prescription. It connects you with a psychiatrist to work with directly for an extended period, helping you try different medication options, adjust your dosage, or change the timing of your medication to provide you with better results.

This extended approach helps people find the best medication options that work for them and have long-lasting support on their journey to anxiety recovery.

9. Alternative Treatment Options

As effective as talk therapy and medication approaches are, they don’t always work for everyone. Thankfully, a number of new, exciting, and evidence-based treatment options have been developed to help people overcome their anxiety disorders, even if traditional treatments have had no effect.

This includes treatments such as:

  • Ketamine-Assisted Therapy: Using ketamine to accelerate the talk therapy process
  • Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: Provides targeted electrical impulses to regions of the brain associated with anxiety, providing lasting relief
  • Stellate Ganglion Blocks: Deliver a local anesthetic to the stellate ganglion, reducing sympathetic nervous activity and reducing anxiety symptoms

All of these treatment options and several more are available with the trained medical health experts at Plus by APN.

Start Anxiety Treatment With Plus by APN

When you are ready to start getting the best anxiety treatment available, reach out to the experts at Plus by APN. Call us at 424.644.6486 or fill out our online contact form for more information.

References

  • Staner, Luc. “Sleep and anxiety disorders.” Dialogues in clinical neuroscience vol. 5,3 (2003): 249-58. doi:10.31887/DCNS.2003.5.3/lstaner
  • Wenner, Megan M. “Sympathetic Activation in Chronic Anxiety: Not Just at the “Height” of Stress. Editorial Focus on “Relative Burst Amplitude of Muscle Sympathetic Nerve Activity Is an Indicator of Altered Sympathetic Outflow in Chronic Anxiety”.” Journal of Neurophysiology, 2018, https://doi.org/JN-00220-2018. Accessed 21 Jul. 2024.