How To Cure Panic Attacks While You Sleep
June 30th, 2010 | by admin |A wonderful and overlooked way to cure panic attacks is to concentrate on your sleep and to improve the quantity and quality of the sleep you’re getting. Try these 3 tips to do just that:
The first way to have better sleep is to stop all negative thinking while you’re in bed.
A significant 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.
I’d feel confident guessing that worrying in bed bothers you most when you’re trying to fall asleep when you first get into bed, in the middle of the night if you wake up, and first thing in the morning before you get up.
So what’s most important in this situation is quickly stopping as much of your anxiety in the bedroom as possible, and the easiest area to solve this problem is with the worrying you do when you wake up in the morning. The solution? Get up imediately, as soon as you open your eyes.
This may sound like a very simplistic solution a lot of your morning anxiety. Getting yourself up and out of bed so that your mind can’t find things to worry about will give you an excellent start to your day.
Okay, now to stop those occasions when you worry in the middle of the night after waking up. I’ll confess, this one’s slightly tricky to cure, 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 straight away. Staying in bed won’t solve anything, and will probably triple your anxiety.
Have a warm shower or wash your face with warm water, potter around for 10 minutes doing something that doesn’t need much focus (a bit of tidying, listening to some soft music, skim-reading a magazine etc.), and then go back to bed. The key here is to recreate a “natural” going-to-bed routine.
This whole appraoch has to beat lying in bed for hours on end, with nothing to do but worry. And when you eventually go back to bed, you’re far more likely to drift off to sleep without any problems.
The second sleeping mistake to eliminate to help cure your panic attacks is to allow no more constantly-changing schedules.
Sleeping problems of all kinds, not just those that are related to panic and anxiety disorders, can be eased by making sure you stick to the same routine every single day.
And yes, by doing nothing more than going to bed and getting up at the same times, every single day, your internal clock will go back to normal and your sleeping cannot fail to improve. You’ll also correct any problems with things like irregular hormone release, which can be affected by poor sleep habits.
Do you ever feel burnt out? In many 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 do your best to go to bed each night at the same time, and get up each morning at the same time too. When you start out doing this, you may go through a couple of tough days while you get back into the correct routine, but it will be worth it. And also beware of sleeping in late on weekends, or days when you don’t have to be up early. All your hard work can be undone with a couple of late lie-ins!
***Method #3. No More Stimulants Before Bedtime***
In my own case, a lot of the problems I had with my sleep were due to what I was exposing myself to in the time leading up to bedtime. I admit that I often watched fast-paced TV, listened to loud music, and played action-packed video games right up until I turned my lights off. Obviously this is a bad idea.
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.
Consciously begin to ease back on everything for the last hour before you go to bed. Stroll around like you’re on vacation. If you like to have a bedtime drink of some kind then sip it outside if it’s a nice night and enjoy the fresh air. If it’s too cold outside, curl up on the couch and relax for 20 minutes while you enjoy your drink.
These kinds of suggestions might seem basic, but do you ever genuinely give yourself time in this way? Even if you do, you probably don’t do it often enough.
If you’re a bath-taker, then whenever you can take one right before you get into bed. Make it warm, but never too hot. A warm bath has been proven in many studies to put the body in just the right state for great quality sleep. So make this slow winding-down hour a new part of your pre-bed routine. It can work unbelievably well when you’re not sleeping.
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