Can't Sleep?
Anxiety’s Impact on Sleep
Most sleep experts recommend that adults get between 7 and 9 hours of sleep each night.
Unfortunately, many people’s sleep is cut short by anxiety.
The simplest way to explain anxiety is that your mind wanders into the future, and you follow it.
This means many of the best ways to counteract anxiety, and as a result get really high-quality sleep, include a practice of focusing on the present moment.
It’s important to experiment with what sort of mindfulness practice works best for you.
The Sensation of Your Fingers Can Guide You to Sleep
I think this picture is really interesting:
The “Cortical Homunculus”
It shows what proportion of the human brain’s mass is dedicated to processing stimuli in different parts of the body. It’s a great visual representation of what a massive amount of our brain’s area is solely focused on feeling touch in our hands. This explains why humans have such excellent fine motor coordination compared to all other animals.
It highlights one effective way of focusing on the present moment so that you can relax: Pay close attention to how your hands feel.
Mala prayer beads have been used in India for thousands of years to help people meditate and stay present. During the Crusades, Christians who traveled to India learned about how these can be a tool to unhook the thinking mind, and they created their own version in the Catholic rosary.
If you have prayer beads (or a beaded necklace), you can use this trick to get to sleep:
Pick a simple, calming prayer, like “I relax and rejuvenate now,” or, “I align with the ebb and flow of life.”
You can choose a different phrase each night depending on what sort of affirmation or healing feels good at the time.
Then, repeat the sentence or phrase once per bead, bringing your whole attention to:
The physical sensation of the bead in your hands
The feeling of your body relaxing
The sensation of sinking into the bed
The way the words resonate through your body
When I do this, I never make it around all 52 prayer beads because I always fall asleep pretty soon after I start. It’s quite effective.
If you don’t want to use prayer beads, another thing you could do is pick a four-word phrase that helps you to relax, like, “I am at peace,” and touch your thumb to each of your other fingers as you say each word.
1. “I” (touch your thumb to your index finger, like an ‘okay’ sign)
2. “am” (thumb touches the middle finger)
3. “at” (thumb touches the ring finger)
4. “peace” (thumb touches the pinky)
Repeat as needed, focusing as completely as you can on the physical sensation of the pads of your fingers making contact with one another.
Practicing meditation throughout the day is a great way to lower anxiety in general. Some people say, “I’m bad at meditating, because my mind never stops.”
The problem is not that your mind keeps going — because that’s what minds do. Your heart beats, your lungs breathe, and your mind thinks. The mind is doing its job.
The problem is that you believe what your mind says. You take it seriously and get really psyched out by the horror movies it makes up.
Practicing Daily Mindfulness
Practicing meditation, and also speaking with a therapist who specializes in treating anxiety, are both great ways to start to not believe every thought that crosses your mind. Getting a little bit of emotional distance can make all the difference in the world. It takes practice to begin to be able to watch “the antics of the monkey mind” as they say in Buddhism — without getting involved in the dance.
Using Your Breath
The simplest form of meditation is to pay attention to your breath.
Counting breaths can be a great way to stay really rooted in what is real, and not get lost in those worry thoughts.
When doing deep breathing, always be mindful of breathing into your diaphragm — which is essentially breathing into your stomach. It feels like breathing into the space two inches above your belly button.
The lungs are pear-shaped — much larger at the bottom than at the top. So your stomach should inflate when you’re breathing completely.
When we breathe shallowly into our chest, we create anxiety by signaling to the body that there is a threat. When we breathe deeply into our stomach, on the other hand, we activate the parasympathetic nervous system that calms the body and mind.
Here are a couple versions that I have found to be effective:
Breathing Into Gratitude
Breathe in to the count of six, and breathe out to the count of six. Repeat while focusing on bringing lots of air through your heart and into your stomach.
After a couple rounds of breathing, call to mind an image from your history that you associate with the emotions of gratitude, caring, kindness, or appreciation.
It could be a beautiful sunset, a moment of connection, or a beloved child’s smile. Choose an image that fills you with good feelings.
Continue to hold this image in mind as you breathe in to the count of six and out to the count of six. This will bring your head and heart into alignment so that you are not only practicing mindfulness — you are actually practicing heartfulness.
Mimic Your Body’s Natural Pattern of Breathing While Sleeping
When we sleep, our out-breaths are naturally much longer than our in-breaths. We can signal to our body that it is time to sleep by creating this pattern intentionally.
A simple way to do this is to breathe in to the count of four and breathe out as slowly as you can — perhaps to the count of six or eight.
If you have a noisy mind, you can actually occupy your mind by counting out a more complicated pattern.
Breathe in to the count of 3, and out to the count of 4.
Breathe in to the count of 4, and out to the count of 5.
Breathe in to the count of 5, and out to the count of 6.
Continue this pattern of breathing out for one more second than you breathe in.
Repeat until you are breathing out to the count of 10.
Then you can either breathe normally or start the process again.
This works great for a busy mind because it’s basically impossible to think of any anxious thoughts at the same time as counting this somewhat complicated pattern. It takes the mind’s entire focus to keep up with the pattern.
There are many meditation apps these days that have vast libraries of sleep meditations of all sorts. Just to name a few:
Calming music
Guided relaxation
Imaginative stories
Yoga Nidra
Binaural beats
There are even meditations for ‘when you wake up in the middle of the night and want to get back to sleep.’
I use and highly recommend Insight Timer. They have tens of thousands of free meditations.
Waking Up in the Middle of the Night: Cultivating Acceptance of “The Second Sleep”
If you do wake up in the middle of the night and aren’t able to get back to sleep for an hour or so, know that this is completely normal. This is called “the second sleep.”
It is thought that before the invention of electricity (and the all-nighter), a normal sleeping pattern was:
Go to sleep at sunset
Sleep for four hours
Wake up for one hour
Go back to sleep for another four hours
It seems that many people still naturally fall into that sleep pattern.
The problem comes when people wake up in the middle of the night — usually around 3 or 4 AM — and think, “OMG, why am I awake right now?! There must be something wrong!”
Then they panic, lie awake, and spend about an hour trying unsuccessfully to get back to sleep.
(Much like trying to have an orgasm, trying to sleep usually doesn’t work very well.)
The solution could be to just accept that this is a natural thing your body does sometimes.
Some anthropologists believe that in “the olden days,” people would use the time of The Second Sleep to:
Read
Meditate
Pray
Do other quiet or contemplative activities
Perhaps you could see if there is something restful that you could do during this awake time rather than just worrying and wishing it weren’t happening.
As you relax into a quiet, soothing, soul-replenishing activity (put down the phone!), your mind will relax and make it much easier to get some more shut-eye.
Create a Healthy Winding-Down-For-Bedtime Habit
It has been estimated that as much as 40% of what we do in any given day is going through the motions of some sort of habit or routine.
Of course negative habits can make us miserable when we mindlessly follow them, but putting in a little bit of effort on the front-end to create a solid positive habit can make living healthfully so much easier in the long run.
Sleep hygiene is all about creating positive habits that trigger your body and mind into starting the process of shutting down and preparing for a restful night of sleep.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I’ll go ahead and name some of the most important aspects of creating a rejuvenating sleep routine.
Always go to sleep at the same time every night, as close as you can manage it — ideally, varying no more than an hour throughout your week.
Drink a calming herbal tea. I drink Sleepytime Tea every night within an hour of sleeping, and I recommend it to all of my clients as well. Studies also have shown that valerian root tea makes a clinically significant difference in decreasing anxiety. I drink that too on my most stressed-out days. It’s basically herbal Valium.
Don’t smoke. Recent studies have shown that smoking cigarettes within four hours of sleeping is very highly linked to insomnia.
Smell lavender. Use scents to cue your brain that it’s time to start winding down. Before I start my getting-ready-for-bed routine, I place a few drops of lavender oil on my pillow and inhale deeply.
Don’t eat within two or three hours of sleeping, because digestion revs up your metabolism and gives you energy. Eat a big, fatty, protein-rich breakfast, a somewhat lighter lunch, and a small meal at the end of the day.
Get away from the computer or phone at night. Or at the very least, use the Night Shift function on your phone, which removes the screen’s blue tones that scream, “It’s daytime!” to your brain.
Don’t nap later in the day. If you can, limit naps to about half an hour. NASA found that the ideal nap time is 26 minutes.
As you can see, there are a lot of changes from large to small that can make a big impact on your ability to get a good night’s rest.
If anxiety and sleeplessness are overwhelming you, give me a call to set up an appointment or schedule your free consultation. ❤️