Anxiety is more common at night; see how to sleep better – 03/27/2023 – Balance

Whenever I try to sleep at night, anxious thoughts and worrisome memories come to mind, preventing me from falling asleep. Why does it happen? Is there anything I can do about it?

Whether you’re checking off the next day’s to-do list or dwelling on past regrets, it’s normal for worries and fears to surface at night, according to experts.

According to an October 2022 survey of 3,192 American adults, 34% of respondents reported feeling anxious or nervous in the past month. And 32% said that stress led to changes in their sleeping habits, including difficulty falling asleep.

When your anxiety keeps you awake, not only do you miss out on the health benefits of sleep, you can start a vicious cycle of poor sleep and increased anxiety that can be difficult to break.

“Sleep loss is often a precursor to anxiety disorders, and anxiety leads to sleep loss,” says Sarah Chellappa, a neuroscientist at the University of Cologne in Germany.

Symptoms can strike at any time, but they can be most intense at bedtime, points out Candice Alfano, director of the Center for Sleep and Anxiety at the University of Houston in Texas.

“Most of us are incredibly busy during our waking hours,” she says. “But at night, while we’re lying in bed, there’s little distraction from the thoughts that make us anxious.”

Even worse, sleep loss has been shown to trigger more anxious thoughts. A review of studies done in 2019 from 13 papers published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews, researchers concluded that insomnia was a significant predictor of anxiety, among other mental health conditions.

Because better sleep helps lower anxiety, general good sleep hygiene practices — like going to bed and waking up at the same time each day and avoiding screens before bed — can help, Alfano points out.

The tips below can help you reduce anxious thinking at bedtime.

Know the right time to stop caffeine. Caffeine’s half-life is approximately five hours, which means that if you drink a cup of coffee at 4 pm you’ll still have half that amount of caffeine in your system at 9 pm. Consider drinking your last cup of coffee at least ten hours before bed.

Put your concerns on paper. If you tend to overthink at night, both Alfano and Rafael Pelayo, clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in sleep medicine at Stanford Medicine and author of “How to Sleep,” recommend writing in a diary at the end of the day.

Writing down your thoughts and to-dos can prevent the thoughts from creeping in later, says Pelayo.

Yearn for something. “If you’re lying in bed thinking, ‘I hate my job, I hate my commute,’ of course you’re not going to sleep well,” says Pelayo. But if you can give yourself something that interests you in the morning — a good breakfast, a walk — you’ll have positive thoughts that can replace some of the more negative ones that keep you awake, he points out.

Incorporating some of these suggestions can help calm your thoughts before bed, experts say, but if you wake up constantly tired, ask your doctor to refer you to a sleep medicine specialist.

Pelayo also had some comforting words: “I want people to know that they don’t have to feel that way.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Golçalves