← Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
Your Anxiety Toolkit - Practical Skills for Anxiety, Panic & Depression
Bonus Episode: Sleep Anxiety: The 1 Thing Everyone Gets Wrong About Sleep Hygiene
00:10:39
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:02]
A
Welcome back, everybody. I am so thrilled to have you here on your anxiety toolkit. My little family, little team Quinlan, that's what we call ourselves. We went to Sedona with the dogs. We took a road trip and it was gorgeous. The hikes, the dune buggies, the, the sand, the mountains. It was absolutely glorious. What was so fun is the eight hour trip. There is always when I do my best thinking in the car. And it helped me to get so clear about my goal here with you guys, which is to help 10 million people. It's a little crazy, I know, but I really feel like this has lit a fire inside me. I'm so freaking excited. And one way I can do that is to answer your questions. So if you come over to social media, I'm going to be posting some forms that you guys can fill out. Come over to your anxiety toolkit on Instagram or I will hopefully link here in the show notes a form you can fill out with your specific question. One way or probably the best way I can help 10 million people is to answer your direct questions. So I'm so excited for that. Do keep an eye out for links. A lot of it will be at social media, but I'll do my best to link it here in the show notes as well. And again, so, so grateful for what you're doing today. We're going to be talking about sleep anxiety, so let's get into it. You have tried everything. You've tried no screens. You've tried chamomile tea, the blackout curtains. Same bedtime every single night. But yet at 2am you're still laying awake, ruminating, anxious, feeling completely overwhelmed. And my guess is you've started to wonder, am I doing this wrong? Is there something broken in me? Why does this bedtime routine work for everybody else? But here's the truth. The harder you try to sleep, the more important possible it becomes. By the end of this episode, you're gonna learn the hidden reason why sleep routines often backfire, especially for anxious people. And what actually works instead. Welcome to your anxiety toolkit. My name is Kimberly Quinlan and I am on a mission to help 10 million of you suffer less with anxiety. Now, the good news is the New York Times actually listed this podcast and your anxiety toolkit as one of the six top podcasts to help with anxiety. And that has literally lit a fire inside me. So here is what nobody is telling you. Sleep hygiene is solid advice. It is something I practice every day. It's stuff I talk to my clients about every day. But what you're probably hearing online is not specifically helpful for folks with anxiety. If you have an anxious brain, following sleep hygiene to the letter is probably making things worse. And the reason for that is that sleep is the only biological process that resists effort. It's called the effort paradox. And what that means is the harder you try to go to sleep, the more awake you become. You've probably already experienced this. It's called hyperarousal. It's like an on and off switch. If you're hypervigilant urgently trying to go to sleep, you've actually flipped the switch of anxiety on, not off. Now, as always, here in your anxiety toolkit, I want to give you a solid foundation and strategy that you can use to help you get better sleep and manage your anxiety better. We have five specific points we're going to go through here, and I'm going to go through them one by one. So number one is paradoxical attention. This is where instead of putting our attention on the urgency and pressure to fall asleep, we put our attention on staying awake. What? That sounds weird, I know, but follow me and I'll explain to you more. And what we're going to do here is we're going to put our attention towards trying to stay awake while you're laying in bed. I'm not talking about, like getting up and going for a run. I'm saying while you're in bed, deliberately try and stay awake. Try it. What you might find is it does help reduce that anxiety because you're not putting all that pressure on. It completely removes performance anxiety and performance pressure. And when sleep isn't the goal, the sleep paradox dissolves. Now, number two is identify unhelpful thoughts. Let me give you some examples. I hear all the time in my practice. The thought, I'll be useless tomorrow if I don't get sleep. And this only does more damage. This actually makes you feel more anxious. It makes sleep feel like it's a have to instead of I can when I'm ready. Now, CBT I, which is a specific cognitive behavioral therapy intervention for insomnia, directly restructures catastrophic sleep beliefs. And you probably have way more of these than you even know. Like I said, I have to fall asleep. Bad things will happen if I don't. I'm going to screw up tomorrow. If I don't get enough sleep, I won't do well at work. I'll have bags under my eyes. Any of these thoughts that are pressuring you to fall asleep are probably getting in the way. Now, I want you to remember the room is fine. It's the story you're telling yourself that needs to change. Now as you know, I have a private practice. I have six amazing therapists in Calabasas, California. However, we do not take insurance. Now if you are looking for insurance covered OCD or BFRB treatment, I want to let you know about nocd. NOCD provides face to face live video sessions with specialized licensed OCD therapists. Now their therapists use exposure and response prevention. We know this is the gold standard for ocd. So you can be absolutely confirmed that you're in the right place there. And they have a clinical proven app that helps you stay connected to your therapist and others who have OCD between sessions so you'll always feel supported. Now the cool thing is NOCD is available in all 50 US states and even internationally and they accept most insurance plans making it affordable and accessible. We love that. Now if you think you might have OCD or you're struggling to manage your symptoms, you can book a free call. Just click the link in the show notes@nocd.com I am honored to partner with NOCD. I want to remind you that recovery is possible. Please do not forget that. Now big hugs and let's get back to the show. Now number three is change the environment. If you're laying in bed, tossing and turning, going over and over how you have to fall asleep, this is building a unhelpful relationship with the place that your environment of your bed where you really actually need it to be calm. You need that association to be with sleep and sex only, not restlessness and anxiety. So what we're going to encourage you to do is get up, go to the couch, sit and read. Do something quiet, do something that soothes you. And then when you're starting to feel slightly tired again, go back to your bed. Now we move on to number four, which is to break the 2am spiral before it even starts. Now what you're probably thinking as we're going through this so far, which is even if I'm on the couch, I'm still ruminating, I'm still stressed, I'm still anxious. And that's because you have learned to ruminate your way out of problems during the day. And so your brain's going to try to ruminate your way out of this sleep problem during the night. We know as here, we're always talking about that rumination reinforces anxiety. And so this is not about distraction, it's about actually learning skills to manage rumination. This is going to be one of the most important skills you learn in your lifetime, there is only one thing more valuable than time and money, and that is your attention. So what I want to remind you is you can learn to manage your rumination. This is something, a skill, an exercise, a practice that you can learn to overcome and master. Now if you want to learn how to manage rumination to master this skill, I'm going to strongly encourage you to head over to cbtschool.com or click the link below and sign up for the rumination reset. This is a very, very specific course I made specifically to manage rumination. Now this is for any type of anxiety that you may have. It doesn't matter what kind. Rumination does the same thing no matter what condition you have. This is what I would encourage you to do if you really want to mast at that skill. Now number five is to loosen the rules. We want to replace the I must sleep by 11pm to I will sleep when I'm ready or all I need to do is rest. That sleep is not the only way for me to rejuvenate for tomorrow. Less rigidity equals less ammunition for anxiety and this is a strategy of acceptance. It's not giving up, it's saying I will fall asleep when my body is ready. My energy only agenda is to manage my mind until I do hit the pillow and I go off into those blissful REM behaviors. Now my homework for you is Let it be messy. Please drop the need to have this sleep hygiene be perfect. That is actually getting in the way. And please don't forget the sleep will come. Anxiety has gotten in the way and that can change. Now stay tuned because you are going to love the next video on how to calm your mind before bed. This is specific skills that you can use if you're someone who struggles with anxiety at nighttime. All right, I'll see you next time. Please note that this podcast or any other resources from CBTSchool.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.