I’m so excited to be sharing with you another Guest Blog post for WorryTree! Joanna Kippax is a certified Sleep Practitioner and founder of Wyesleep, offering support and evidence-based treatment to treat insomnia and improve our sleep! Follow Joanna on Instagram.
Have you ever tried sleeping with a bear in your room?
Not a teddy bear. Not a beautiful Paddington bear. A great big growling, grizzly bear.
Chances are, you’re not going to get much sleep! Why would you?
Every system in your body is in a state of high alert, doing its best to keep you safe.
So that is exactly what happens with anxiety. Anxiety is a normal, self-protective mechanism that is designed to keep you safe. There is nothing abnormal about it, but when the anxiety ‘switch’ stays on too long or comes on when there is no danger, that’s when the problems start.
The body starts to release more adrenaline (the fight/flight hormone) and cortisol (the stress hormone).
These two hormones are exactly the ones that need to be low at night, for us to sleep. So, not sleeping becomes a physiological problem. After one bad night, we immediately wonder if we will have problems the next night, and so the cycle continues, and sleeplessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Enter Insomnia.
To complicate matters, during part of our sleep cycle, we regulate our emotions. This is done in REM sleep (rapid eye movement sleep) when we dream. If we have not slept well, our brains are less able to regulate how we feel, process information, and make calm, balanced decisions.
Ever woken feeling fuzzy-headed after a bad night? This is why.
So, this makes working out how to feel less anxious, more difficult.
So, what can we do to break this cycle?
Can you hear your friends and family say, “don’t worry” at this point?! Helpful? Err ………. Nope!
We need to be much more proactive than that, but IN THE DAYTIME!!!
Leaving it until night-time is too late. This is the time when the logical, sensible part of your brain, the frontal cortex, is tucked up in bed, sleeping. It is your hippocampus, the emotional, fear-fuelled, illogical part of the brain that is up partying, reminding you that the world will end if you haven’t put your washing out by 2 am. The hippocampus is responsible for the crazy but sometimes brilliant, ideas you get at night.
So, as you can see, the night-time brain is not the most reliable!
Daytime is the time to address anxiety. By scheduling in time to think through your problems in a calm, logical way, and find solutions to them, helps to take back control of a negative thinking style.
This system works and using an app like WorryTree that guides you to recognise your worries, through to making a plan to manage them, is both empowering and proven to be effective.
There are many other techniques that change the bear from a grizzly, scary bear to a soft cuddly safe teddy bear. Notice here, that ‘the bear’ remains, it’s how you perceive it and how it affects you that is different. Sometimes certain situations in our lives cannot be changed or removed, but the control we have over our thoughts can always be changed.
So, schedule your worry time with WorryTree and sleep well!
more help and support with your sleep questions
We were so happy to interview the lovely Jo at length about all your sleep questions on our podcast and you can listen to that (or read the transcript) here.