Feature Friday: How to sleep when you're anxious
Welcome to Feature Friday on Tammy Talk TV.
Every Friday we feature content by another creator related to our own mission of inspiring personal growth, health, and happiness.
This week we feature a video by Emma McAdam on her YouTube Channel, Therapy in a Nutshell.
"How to sleep when you're anxious: Sleep anxiety and insomnia"
It can be hard to fall asleep when you're anxious, and insomnia can make anxiety worse.
But you can train your brain to worry less and to sleep better when you're anxious by using the skill of Deliberate Worry. In this video, Emma talks about how worry and anxiety can make it hard to fall asleep and teaches you how to train your brain to stop worrying at night. "Our brains and bodies are naturally good at sleeping, they like to sleep, so if we’re not sleeping then it’s often because we’ve developed some habitual way of keeping our brain turned on and gotten in the way of our sleep response," says McAdam."Having a consistent routine before bed, like wearing a sleep mask or doing other sleep hygiene routines, can help your brain start to turn on the sleep hormones (like melatonin) and that’s because our brain likes to make paired associations: Bedtime routine = feel sleepy," she says, "just like when you watch an ad with a delicious hamburger and your mouth starts to water. What we do right before we sleep can help our brain turn on that sleep response."
"One thing that often happens with insomnia is that people have developed the habit of thinking through their day when they lay down. When you do this repeatedly, instead of associating your bed with sleepy time, your brain associates bed with worry time," she says. " We’ve practiced it over and over and now the brain thinks- “Laying down? Let’s get to work”. We develop a trained response, we’ve taught our brain through habit that the time to worry is bedtime. But good news, your brain is built to re-wire itself; it’s built to pair and un-pair these associations. So all we have to do is retrain our brain to associate the bed with sleeping.
Visit Therapy in a Nutshell on YouTube Visit the Therapy in a Nutshell online
For more tips and tools to promote #SuperSleep, check out the Super Sleep Series on Tammy Talk TV.
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