← Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
467 How to Calm Your Mind Before Bed: Anxiety Relief for Sleep‑Trouble Nights
00:17:35
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Welcome to youo Anxiety Toolkit. I'm your host, Kimberly Quinlan. This podcast is fueled by three main goals. The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety. Second goal, to inspire you. Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. And number three, and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big, big fat virtual hug. Because experiencing anxiety ain't easy. If that sounds good to you, let's go.
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How to calm your mind before bed it's bedtime. You're laying in the dark. The world is quiet, but your mind is so loud. You have racing thought. You're worried you're having tension in your chest. Maybe you're being hit by intrusive thoughts. The more you try to get to sleep, the harder it feels and the more discomfort that you have. If this is you, you are not alone. Here is what is on our agenda in this episode. Number one, I want to talk to you about how you can calm your anxious mind before bed so you can actually get some sleep. And I want to talk to you about one fundamental change that you are going to have to practice as you do this. Welcome to your Anxiety Toolkit. This is a podcast where I teach you everything I know about anxiety so that you can suffer less in your life. My name is Kimberly Quinlan. I'm an anxiety and OCD specialist. I am a cognitive behavioral therapist and my mission, as I've already said, is to help folks suffer less with anxiety and depression and other mental health struggles. Now, as you probably know, some sleep and anxiety have a very complex relationship. Often we think the solution to falling asleep is forcing. It is to sort of like, I have to fall asleep. And you push yourself to do that. But that in almost every case backfires. And let me kind of go through here with you on why that is the case. Now, I have a new approach for you, one that is gentle, that is validating, and is based in science. So let's take a look at why anxiety and intrusive thoughts get worse at night. Well, number one, there are fewer distractions at night when the lights are out. It kind of creates space for more thoughts or for the thoughts to feel at least a lot louder. There's also this added pressure to sleep which ends up causing you to have more anxiety. The more pressure we place, the more cortisol and adrenaline gets released. And then again, it's going to make it hard for our body to slowed down into sleep. And the last thing is, if you've been practicing thought Suppression or you're practicing thought suppression while you're going to sleep, you're probably going to have more of the thoughts or the anxiety that you've been trying to push down, creating a, again, a more problematic nighttime sleep routine. Now, as always with your anxiety toolkit, I try to give as many concrete skills as I can. And so today I'm going to give you four, four core things I want you to focus on if falling asleep is something that you're struggling with. So let's take a look here. I've got the four steps. They're all based in research. Number one is, again, the goal is not to sleep. The goal is for your body to rest. And that pivot is a foundation of the work that we're doing here. The more you force yourself. I have to get sleep. I'm going to be so tired tomorrow. I have to get this sleep of sleep before this time. Oh, no. I looked at my watch. Now it's only going to be five hours until I wake up. Now it's only four hours till I wake up. That mentality is making it so much worse. So what I want you to do is to redirect the goal away from sleep to just resting, even if you're not sleeping. As long as you have given your body a moment of rest where you're not resisting and wrestling and, you know, getting really angry and frustrated, we're going to be creating the most restful experience as we can, whether you're sleeping or not. And that is going to achieve the goal because really, at the end of the day, your body mostly just needs rest. Okay, well, let's take a look. Step one, as we know, is rest. Now, again, sleep isn't something you do. It's something that happens. It's not something you can force yourself to have. It's something that you fall into. And again, trying to control it increases arousal, increases anxiety. If you're having a lot of release of cortisol, adrenaline, all of those anxiety hormones, they actually alert you, you know, keep you hypervigilant in case danger arises. So it's going to make it a lot harder to fall asleep. So we want to switch this to one where we're not trying to control, but instead, again, we're moving to a model of just rest. Now instead of we're practicing allowing rest. Even if slow sleep hasn't arrived yet, we're not going to focus on when it's coming. Am I getting sleepy? Because every time you do that again, you're going to spike that anxious Arousal, making it harder to fall asleep. Now, step two is to slow down. We're already starting this in step one, but I wanted it to be a major step here that you have to remind yourself. Slowing down. I want you to imagine that you are a sleep sloth. I love sloths. They're so slow and gentle and kind and curious and open. And that's how I want you to be. Now, sloth sleep a lot, and that's probably because of how slowly they move, right? And so I want you to slow down. Your body physically actually move slower as you move towards bedtime. And once you're in bed now I also want you to slow down. Slow down your reactions to any intrusive thoughts that you're having, any difficult emotions you're having, no matter how fast they're going, even if they're popping up like whack a mole all over the place, I want your response to them to be slow. Now, this is what I mean. Let's say you're laying in bed and your brain's going the to do list. Like, oh, tomorrow you've got to do this and you've got to do that, and oh, my gosh, that test is coming and that presentation, and oh, my goodness, it's popping through, right? If your response is like, oh, my God, you're right. Holy crap, and you're like responding speedy, you're actually keeping that wheel rolling. You're really revving that machine. And so what we want to do instead is when you have those thoughts or those emotions, you want to slowly respond, right? By going, okay, I'm observing a thought. I'm going to respond slowly. I'm not going to respond with urgency. I'm not going to respond with more catastrophes or catastrophic thinking. My response to these thoughts and this anxiety is going to be low, too. And again, a part of you slowing down is actually slowing down your out breath, not your in breath. Usually when we're stressed or we're anxious, we do very shallow breaths and we do them very quick so that we can get enough oxygen in our. Into our body. But what we want to do is we want to slow that breath down as well. Especially, especially the out breath. And that sends a message to our brain that we're okay and we're safe and that we're going to slow that parasympathetic nervous system down. And that's what we're looking for, okay? We don't want to increase arousal. We want to increase that calm. Okay? Now, one thing I wanted to offer to you is if you're someone who is spending a lot of time in bed ruminating. We have an entire course called the Rumination Reset. It is a mini course. You can go to cbtschool.com and learn all about it there. That is there for you. If you really struggle not to engage in all of that thinking, that is going to be there for you. It's a three and a half hour mini course and it is just one of my favorite courses that I've ever made. So we're going to go now into step number three where we create a safe bedtime routine. Sleep hygiene is so important when it comes to sleep. Not that we're forcing sleep, we're not really. Again, we don't want, we just want to rest. But that sleep hygiene can help us slowly ease in. I had a conversation with my son the other day and he was on the iPad playing a computer game. And then I said, it's bedtime. And he went to go into bed and he was all wriggly like he was moving around and he was joking and, and I said it's bedtime, it's time for us to start slowing down. And he's like, I can't, I feel like all this jitter in my body. And I mentioned to him if you're going to play high speed games where I think he was like moving these like balls around and really quickly with his finger, that's going to create a hyper arousal in his body. It's not slow and slowing down into a gradual like relaxed day. And so we want to create a bedtime routine that really fosters this practice of slowing down and resting. And so let's take a look of what that means. So we want to limit screen exposure and high stimulation before bed. That also includes like jumping around and listening to like really, really bouncy music and having caffeine. We want to slow our actions down, limit screen time before bed. We also can, if you want, practice progressive muscle relaxation. That's where we're dropping the tension and softening our body. Often by the time we go to bed we're like very, very tense. We very clenching and shoulders hurt because we've been holding them up around our ears all day and our brows furred and we're very, very tight all over. And so doing some kind of progressive muscle relaxation can also help just slowly ease you into rest.
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Give yourself plenty of time to fall asleep. If you know I'm someone who needs eight hours. Like I get teary and emotional, I kind of turn into a mess and anything less than six hours and so I need to make sure that if I have to be up, let's say at 6 o' clock in the morning, I'm not going to go to bed at 12 because it's going to take me some time to wind down. I know I'm not giving myself enough time for that wind down period. For some it takes up to a couple hours. And so what I want to remind you is give yourself plenty of time. If you need to be in bed BY let's say 10, make sure that you're giving yourself time starting maybe at nine where you start start to slow things down. You are starting to brush your teeth, you're starting to turn down your bed, get into your pajamas, maybe having a shower, like you're getting that going. You're not starting the routine when really you wished you would get starting to like go into sleep mode. Okay. And the last thing is if you can't fall asleep, if you are in bed and you are wide awake and you cannot fall asleep, it's totally okay to get up, remove yourself from the bed, go and do something quiet, read a book, listen to gentle audiobook or gentle music, have you know, a cup of non caffeinated tea if you need a warmed milk, whatever feels good to you and then try again. The reason you don't want to associate your bed as a stressful place where you pressure yourself to fall asleep. So you go back into your bed. Given another shot, if you're still wide awake, you can get up again. Maybe I remember I went through a season where I wasn't sleeping, I would do jigsaw puzzles. So I'd get up, I would do like 10 pieces. I go back to bed, try, see how it goes. If not, I get back up. But I wouldn't be angry. Now that brings me to step four, which is to be gentle. We've talked about going slow, but now we want you to be gentle. And what that means is you're going to be kind to yourself, and we're going to be kind to the situation. If you are starting to notice a lot of frustration and I should be going to sleep, and I've got so much to do tomorrow, and this isn't fair. Like, I should be sleeping. This is. I'm going to be a mess tomorrow. That was literally me when I had babies. So afraid of not sleeping. Because it's true when I don't sleep, I'm an emotional mess. It's true. But what I found was when I practiced not sleeping and when I didn't sleep and if I was really tired, but I promised myself I would take care of myself when I was tired and I wouldn't judge myself for any emotions that arose, Being tired wasn't scary anymore. A lot of my clients and students report they're really afraid, afraid of being tired. They're afraid of the exhaustion that they'll feel when those are not dangerous emotions and sensations. So let's talk about it. Number one, no matter how hard it gets, we are committing to focusing on kindness as our only goal. Right as we're trying to rest, we're also committing to kindness unconditionally. We're also going to soothe any distress we have. So as anger arises, we're going to soothe, do that and go, yeah, I understand this is really frustrating, but we're not going to get all aroused and upset because that's only going to make it harder to fall asleep. We're just going to slowly lay there and let that discomfort rise and fall, Rise and fall, rise and fall. Oh, I'm starting to feel scared about tomorrow. We're going to soothe that fear. We're going to allow that fear. We're going to acknowledge it, and we're going to validate and then say, I'll be there for you tomorrow no matter what. We're also going to be committing again to that tired you tomorrow. So I remember when I had kids, I Maybe I got three hours sleep, maybe 30 minutes in some evening, I would say, okay, because I didn't get enough sleep. I'm not going to abandon myself or bully myself into Doing all the things I was going to do. I'm going to give myself lots of grace and I'm going to do what I can and I'm going to let people know. I didn't sleep very much last night. I might be a little groggy. I mightn't be totally on it. And I found that the world had a lot of grace for me in those times. And now, even when my kids are grown and teenagers, if I know I'm not sleeping, I know that tomorrow I will take care of myself. I will nourish myself. I will take water, I'll take a walk, get some sun. And I'm going to try not to make it worse so that tonight is hard. Okay, now let's review what we've learned today. Number one, the goal is not sleep. The goal is rest. Number two is you must slow down. It's so important that in your body language is slowing down. Number three is we want to find a routine that works for you. You, not for Auntie Martha, not for Uncle Joe, but what works for you. And that will be you experimenting with when you need to turn tech off, what really helps you, what music, what sounds, what smells, what bed attire, what temperature you sleep best in. Find a routine that works for you. And then number four is unconditionally be gentle with yourself. Whether you sleep or not, whether you're tired or not, whether you do well with this or not, just do your best to to be an observer to those thoughts. And as you're trying to sleep, if there are a lot of intrusive thoughts, have a solid plan of how you handle those and that you can practice during the day. Now, as I mentioned to you before, we do have the rumination reset. If you're someone who ruminates a lot and wants to strengthen that during the day so that you can use those tools at night, head over to cbtschool.com and we will be there to help you with that and get you enrolled and everything. It is an on demand course. You can watch it as many times as you want. You have unlimited access to it. It has a whole workbook. I think you'll really, really love it. Now, as always, thank you for being here with me. I know your time is very valuable and so I'm so honored you chose to spend your time with me. I hope you found this really helpful and I cannot wait to see you next week. All right, take care, everybody.
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Please note that this podcast or any other resources from CBT school.com should not replace professional mental health care. If you feel you would benefit, please reach out to a provider in your area. Have a wonderful day and thank you for supporting CBTSchool.com.