When you want to cure panic attacks, one of the best things you can do is improve the quality of sleep you’re having, and here are 3 good ways to achieve that.
Okay, method number one is simply to eliminate negative thoughts that you have in your bedroom.
A large percentage of all your worry takes place when you’re in bed, which is difficult 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 specific times: when you’re lying awake right after you go to bed, in the middle of the night after you’ve woken up, and maybe in the morning as well, when you’ve woken up but you haven’t got out of bed yet.
So what’s most critical in this situation is quickly stopping as much of your worrying 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.
Finding a solution for the times when you worry during the night after you’ve woken up is slightly trickier, but there are still good options. To begin with, always get up out of bed if you’re lying awake for more than 5 minutes. If you stay there in bed, in the dark and the silence, it’s only going to make your anxiety get stronger.
While you’re up, perhaps it would be good to have a shower or a bath – whichever you find more relaxing. Or just spend some time doing something that relaxes you, even if it’s just sitting down in the living room with a hot drink. After your brief 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.
This entire 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.
***Method #2. No More Ever-Changing Schedules***
Sleeping problems of all kinds, not just those that are related to panic and anxiety problems, can be eased by making sure you adhere 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 can’t 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 lots of cases, that will be because your adrenal glands are active at times when they shouldn’t be, and this is frequently caused by irregular sleeping cycles. If you can get your sleeping habits into a predictable routine, problems like this will usually 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 wary not to undo your good work by sleeping in late on weekends or on days when you don’t need to be up early.
The third method to get improved sleep is to avoid all stimulants before you go to bed.
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 confess 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. Clearly this is a terrible 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.
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.
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.
tips for panic attacks