Anxiety and sleep
“Stress is stopping me sleep”. A response I’ve heard countless times both my acupuncture clinic and general life.”
Firstly, I’ve never been a fan of the word “stress”. It’s too vague. Being busy can count as stress. We need to talk about anxiety and depression. They are very different conditions and it’s anxiety I want to talk about here as that’s the one I talk about all day long in practice. It’s everywhere- and it isn’t even really anxiety it’s fear. But that’s another discussion and we’ll use anxiety as the term here!
There’s plenty of research to show that anxiety disrupts sleep. Kalmbach has used the “Response to stress test ( First)” to accurately identify individuals at risk of insomnia from a random population.
Our experience is that patients who are currently experiencing significant or severe anxiety will usually fall asleep easily- and often early. They then tend to wake up very early, typically between 3 and 4am and not return to sound sleep. They then get up in the morning feeling exhausted. If that sounds like you then you may well have unresolved anxiety. If your problem is spending hours getting to sleep then unresolved anxiety is less likely to be the cause.
Anxiety is in itself not an illness. It’s a rational response to life’s challenges and we have evolved with anxiety as a physiological response that helps us to respond to those challenges. But critically it’s meant to be a short-term process. Chronic, long term, anxiety is -literally- the killer. And the sleep destroyer.
What we’ve observed over decades of practising acupuncture is something subtly different from chronic anxiety destroying sleep. Numerous patients report that their sleep was fine until a major life event such as redundancy, divorce, illness of themselves or a loved one. Critically the disruptor resolved. They found a new job, partner or the illness resolved, but the sleep has remained poor. Life is no longer difficult but poor sleep has become normalised.
So, a pattern that seems typical is that severe anxiety initially disrupts sleep. But then poor sleep because a habit and a pattern that persists long after the cause of the anxiety has resolved.
Can we help at Better Sleep with our 3-point plan if we aren’t directly addressing anxiety? Firstly, we may well address anxiety, particularly through point 2 and it’s ability to foster a sense of nighttime security. Our success rate is 38% and the cases of continuing severe anxiety are probably not amongst the successes. The habitual and pattern repeating poor sleepers probably are amongst our successes though.
What we hope to give you are mechanisms for breaking the habit of poor sleep. It’s worked for many people but not for others. If the pattern described above sounds familiar then we would suggest giving it a go.