How To Sleep Like A Baby with Anxiety

Has your anxiety made it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep? If the answer is yes, then you're in good company. For most anxiety sufferers, sleep does not easy to come by. So, in today’s episode, you’re going to learn how to dramatically improve your ability to get a good, restful night sleep. That will improve your energy levels and help put you on the fast track to a full recovery from anxiety.

First things first, if you’re not already, you need to get on the path to recovery from anxiety. For that, I have my 5-Step Cure to Anxiety and Panic Attacks in the link below. That will give you the step-by-step guide to recovering from anxiety forever. By following that guide, you will get rid of your anxiety so you won’t ever have to worry about the strange and bizarre symptoms of anxiety ever again. 

Alright first, I want to talk about energy levels. Our energy levels are a really important part of recovering from anxiety. That’s because higher energy levels not only help alleviate certain anxiety symptoms, such as brain fog, depression, and panic, but they also improve your mood and outlook so you can be more resilient while experiencing the up and down waves of anxiety. 

A significant way to improve energy levels during recovery is by getting good sleep. However, despite being exhausted and desperately wanting and needing a good night’s sleep, sleep does not come easily for many anxiety sufferers. As the day winds down and everyone else heads off to sleep, you can find yourself lying wide awake in bed as your mind races with anxious thoughts:  

What if I can't sleep tonight? 

What if I'm exhausted again tomorrow? 

What if I can’t go to work tomorrow? 

You try to clear your mind of these thoughts and tell yourself it’s time to get some sleep. But not ten seconds later your brain is again flooded with these thoughts. Once more, you try to get rid of these thoughts so you can begin to relax, but it doesn’t work. Your brain is determined to cycle through a seemingly endless number of these anxious thoughts. 

Some of these same anxious thoughts are also present during the day, of course. But at nighttime, there is nothing to distract you, and your dark, quiet room presents the perfect environment for your anxious mind to run wild with fear. Unfortunately, you can begin to feel like you have no control over your brain. And that’s a problem, because your brain needs to be free of this anxious chatter if you are going to fall asleep. 

Therefore, you must learn how to quiet your brain and be free from these thoughts. To do so, you must dismiss these anxious thoughts, which is Step #1 of the Fearless Approach that I teach. As you are lying in bed, you are going to dismiss anxious thoughts by saying “Who cares! And following it up for a reason for your indifference. Here are some examples: 

What if I can’t sleep tonight?

Who cares! I’m just happy to lay in this comfortable bed. 

What if I’m exhausted again tomorrow?        

Who cares! I will make it through tomorrow like I have so many times before!

What if I can’t go to work tomorrow?

Who cares! I always manage to find the energy to get through the day and I will again tomorrow too. 

After you dismiss these anxious thoughts, here’s the key, you must have a focus. It sounds counterintuitive, but you need to have a focus in order to fall asleep. That’s what keeps these intrusive anxious thoughts at bay.   

But unlike during the day, your focus cannot be task-oriented while lying in bed. The focus must be mindless, such that it does not provoke other thoughts. So, after you dismiss the anxious thoughts, your focus is going to be on a consistent, gentle noise in your bedroom. This can be made by a small fan, noise machine, or even an app on your phone that creates a similar sound. 

It’s important to test out a few sounds until you find the one that works for you. It needs to be something you can easily tolerate and be at a comfortable volume for sleep. 

This noise is going to be your sole focus as you go to sleep. You are going to concentrate on this sound and nothing else. What we’re doing is leveraging your brain’s inability to multitask - it cannot do two things at once. You cannot, for instance, both read a book and listen to a podcast at the same time. So when you place your entire focus on something like the noise of a small bedroom fan, your brain can’t simultaneously create the anxious thoughts that are keeping you awake. You won’t be able to worry about whether you’ll fall asleep, if you will have anxiety tonight, or if you’ll have a panic attack tomorrow. You stop the intrusion of anxious thoughts by preventing them from ever being created. 

OK, I’m telling you that you can eliminate anxious thoughts before sleep simply by concentrating on a noise. Sounds easy, right? Well, it is – in theory. But, like everything else, it’s going to take practice. You are going to find that maintaining your concentration on this noise is going to be challenging in the beginning. What’s going to happen is your fearful mind will eagerly want to drift back to these anxious thoughts. This means that if you lose focus of the noise — even just for a split second  —  your brain is going to again be bombarded by anxious thoughts.  

When this happens, and I assure you it will, do not become discouraged. Instead, simply dismiss these anxious thoughts and return your focus back to the noise. You'll become better and better at this with practice. Just trust the process, and I promise sleep will come.