The relationship between anxiety, stress, and sleep is a vicious cycle. First, stress can lead to anxiety. Then, anxiety leads to a lack of sleep. Finally, a lack of sleep leads to stress and more anxiety. It seems like there’s no way to break the pattern.
The effects are more than just being tired, though that’s no way to live your life. A lack of sleep can lead to additional psychiatric disorders, as well as physical problems such as heart conditions, high blood pressure, and stroke.
It’s difficult enough to handle stress and anxiety during waking hours. When they pour over into your Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sessions, the effects can be unbearable, causing issues such as insomnia, sleepwalking, stress dreams, and cognitive distortion, also known as catastrophizing.
Insomnia
Sometimes you’re not catastrophizing, dreaming, or sleepwalking—you simply can’t go to sleep. It’s not surprising that anxiety and stress make it difficult to relax enough to sleep, whether it’s from general tension, feeling overwhelmed, or excessive worrying. Anxiety and insomnia feed off of each other; when you feel worried about getting enough sleep, you don’t sleep enough.
How to Cope: Don’t spend hours trying to go to sleep if you’re stressing out about something. Get up, get a piece of paper, and start writing all your worries out to get them out of your mind and onto the page. If that doesn’t work, pick up a book or listen to a calming podcast until you feel exhausted.
Sleepwalking
Around one million adults are prone to sleepwalking, a condition that can be exacerbated by anxiety and stress. Unfortunately, sleep deprivation also increases the risk of sleepwalking, so you can see how it turns into a vicious circle again.
How to Cope: Because sleepwalking can be caused by physical conditions, too, talk to a doctor about what’s going on. Take measures to curb sleepwalking by cutting out caffeine and alcohol before bed and spending time unwinding through meditation or yoga in the evening. Good sleep hygiene can make a world of difference.
Stress Dreamsand Nightmares
Dreams and nightmares can be so stressful that you wake up feeling emotionally exhausted from the toll the sequences took on your brain. Although anxiety and stress don’t cause you to have more frequent stressful dreams or nightmares, it can intensify them.
How to Cope: Dreams, even nightmares, are your subconscious’ way of working through what’s going on in your brain. Even though it might not feel like it, dreams are part of healthy sleep. But if the stress dreams are just too much, talk to a therapist about what’s provoking them.
CognitiveDistortion (catastrophizing)
In the middle of the night, you wake up with something on your mind. It may or may not be a big deal during waking hours, but at that moment, it’s a crisis—and you can’t get your mind to stop racing. Also known as catastrophizing, cognitive distortion is a common occurrence for those with anxiety disorder.
How to Cope: If you’ve spent a few minutes lying in bed with these anxious thoughts spiraling, get up and do a mindless chore to allow your head to clear. Sure, you’re cutting out a bit of sleep by forcing yourself up, but it’s unlikely you’ll sleep any better if you keep letting your thoughts get the best of you.
