Trouble Sleeping? These Symptoms of Anxiety Could be the Cause
Can’t sleep? Anxiety symptoms can interfere with healthy sleep. Let’s look at what might be wrecking your ability to rest:
Worrying about the future
If you suffer from anxiety, you will be familiar with this symptom. You likely find it difficult to tolerate uncertainty but the future is of course always uncertain. Your mind is racing through the possibilities.
So many things can happen. That alone can keep you up at night.
But with anxiety, you usually linger on the negative possibilities. And since they are possibilities and not fact, they seem endless. The longer you worry about the future, the more you become afraid of it.
Overstimulation
Acute fear is a stimulant that also keeps you awake.
It makes sense if that fear is fear of something real, like a tiger or thunderstorm. The human stress response keeps you alert until the danger has passed. But in anxiety’s case, there is no real danger. The tiger is inside your head, where it keeps you awake.
The problem is that the heightened stress hormone levels have nowhere to go. You are not running, you are not fighting. You are lying in bed…petrified.
Overwhelmed with everyday concerns
Anxiety can be fed by smaller events as well. Every day, a few things go wrong. Every day there are many sources of worry and uncertainty.
As you lie awake at night, small incidents grow into potential disasters. Bedtime is often an opportunity for your anxiety to catastrophize everything.
Cumulative stress
Anxiety is often related to cumulative stress. Stress that always floats around somewhere in the air. But each separate incident seems to be tolerable. It’s just that there are too many such incidents. Continuous stress accumulates in the background and when it’s all quiet and dark at night, anxiety symptoms come out and keep you awake.
Somatized anxiety – physical symptoms
Recurring symptoms of anxiety can establish physical conditions that then persist independently of the original anxiety. Shallow breathing, indigestion, tension in your chest and stomach and even heart palpitations, all indicate an elevated stress response. If that stress response never gets a chance to switch itself off, your body changes.
Not to mention that some of these physical symptoms can be quite frightening and therefore induce another level of anxiety. You can lie awake all night, listening to your fearful heart.
Muscle tension
Tension that has accumulated in your musculature over the day. Tension that has not been released through physical activity or conscious relaxation such as meditation or yoga can impede relaxation and sleep.
Over-interpretation of ambient sounds
Anxiety can make you see intruders and ghosts. At night, they lurk in the shadows both of your bedroom and of your mind. Once you are hyper vigilant, every sound can signal disaster. If disaster is imminent, you can not sleep…
Quiet and darkness can paradoxically heighten anxiety.
During the day, you can manage your anxiety better. But when you are trying to fall asleep, all your anxious thoughts come out again.
Now, that they no longer have competition from the processing of daytime events, they fill the dark quiet space with your personal fears.
If you can’t sleep because of some of these anxiety symptoms, you may eventually end up adding the fear of not being able to sleep to those symptoms. Even worse, insomnia and sleep deprivation can induce a sense of hopelessness. The famous 3AM despair.
In extreme cases, patients report nightly panic attacks from over-monitoring the processes inside their own bodies, particularly breathing, and heartbeat.
Such over-monitoring of autonomic functions can induce panic attacks all by itself as a result of bio-feedback.
But if you suffer from anxiety, you always have plenty of fears and worries at the back of your mind. They can rise up and convince your autonomic nervous system that your life is in danger.
If your anxiety and insomnia have reached this level of disturbance, it might be a good idea to seek help from a professional counselor.
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