A great and overlooked way to cure panic attacks is to focus on your sleep and to improve the quantity and quality of the sleep you’re getting. Try these 3 tips to do just that:
Okay, method number one is simply to eliminate negative thoughts that you experience in your bedroom.
A large percentage of all your worry takes place when you’re in bed, which is hard to believe considering it’s probably the place where most people are at their most relaxed.
You’ll probably find that this problem is at its worst at 3 particular times: when you’re lying awake right after you go to bed, in the middle of the night after you’ve woken up, and possibly in the morning too, when you’ve woken up but you haven’t got out of bed yet.
To stop these situations, you need to prevent as much of your “worrying in bed” time as you can. The simplest one to solve is the one where you’re lying in bed in the morning after you’ve awoken. All you need to do is get up as soon as you wake up!
This is a very simple idea, but it’s amazing how much anxiety this will remove from the start of your day. Getting up before your mind has a chance to remember all the things it could be anxious about will give you a better start to the day than you’ve had in a long time.
Okay, now to stop those times when you worry in the middle of the night after waking up. I’ll confess, this one’s slightly tricky to solve, but there are solid methods you can use. Right away I should tell you that if you’re ever awake for more than a few minutes, get up right away. Staying in bed won’t solve anything, and will probably triple your anxiety.
While you’re up, perhaps it would be good to have a shower or a bath – whichever you find more calming. Or just spend some time doing something that relaxes you, even if it’s just sitting down in the living room with a warm drink. After your quick relaxation period, go back to bed. By getting up and waiting a while before going back to bed, it’s all much more natural and like the original time you went to bed.
So instead of lying awake for hours you get up for a bit, and then finally when you return to bed you treat it as if you’re going to bed for the first time. This is much more natural for your body to accept than it is to lie there for hours when you can’t sleep. It’s far more likely that you’ll get back to sleep doing this than simply lying there.
***Method #2. No More Ever-Changing Schedules***
If you’re suffering with a sleep problem for any reason, not just one that’s caused by anxiety and panic, then sticking to the same schedule every day is great advice.
Your own inner clock will almost immediately reset itself to the natural and healthy default if you just start going to bed and getting up at similar times each day. This will also normalise things like hormone secretion, which often depends on your sleeping cycles.
Do you ever feel burnt out? In lots of cases, that will be because your adrenal glands are active at times when they shouldn’t be, and this is often caused by irregular sleeping cycles. If you can get your sleeping habits into a predictable routine, problems like this will often disappear all on their own.
So try your best to get to sleep every night at the same time, and also get up in the mornings at the same time. Be careful not to undo your good work by sleeping in late on weekends or on days when you don’t need to be up early.
Right, now the third and final way to get better sleep, and this one is all about stopping all stimulants in the lead up to bedtime.
A lot of the problems that you currently have with your sleep could be to do with what you do right before you go to bed. Fast-paced TV, loud music, heavy reading, and playing video games are all very bad ideas in the last hour or two before you try to sleep.
So the first thing to do is eliminate anything stimulating for at least an hour before you go to bed. You should also not do any exercise at all for at least a couple of hours before bed. And try to develop a new pre-bed routine a “slow-down” routine, as I like to call it.
Go out of your way to slow everything down for the last 60 minutes before heading off to bed. If you have a favourite bedtime drink, this is the time for it. If it’s hot outside, maybe drink it in the fresh air. If it’s cold outside, curl up and drink it inside. But the bottom line is, relax.
It may sound a bit obvious to give this kind of advice, but how many of us really give ourselves time like this? Even those of us who do don’t do it enough.
If you’re somebody who likes hot baths, then take one an hour before you go to bed. A warm bath always helps to ease your body into just the right state for deep and relaxed sleep. Incorporate this warm bath with the bedtime drink and use these new habits to construct your own slow-down hour before bed, and see the wonders it can work on your sleep, and your panic attacks.
overcome anxiety