Why won’t my anxiety let me sleep?

The impact anxiety has on you and what symptoms you have are as individual as you. We all experience anxiety in different ways, in different intensities and for different reasons. But one of the common side effects of anxiety is problems with sleeping.

You might find it hard to drift off, you might be waking a lot during the night, or you might even find that you just don’t feel tired. However anxiety is affecting your sleep, you might find it useful to understand why it’s stopping you from getting the rest you want.

Anxiety is part of the human ‘fight or flight’ response. This response is completely normal and we will all experience it throughout our lives. The fight or flight response is our mind's reaction to anything it thinks may be a threat to our safety. When our mind goes into ‘fight or flight mode’ it will release hormones into our body that help us become more alert (so we can act faster) and make our heart beat quicker (so that blood can get to our muscles quicker and help us move with speed). Once our mind feels that the threat has gone, it will release other hormones to help us calm down and relax so we can get back to normal.

Anxiety becomes problematic when we enter the ‘fight or flight’ response too often, and our bodies have too many of those hormones that make us alert and make our hearts beat faster. When our bodies have too many of these hormones running through them it then starts to affect our sleep because we’re in ‘fight or flight’ mode, not in relaxed or sleep mode. Being in an almost constant state of ‘flight or fight’ takes a lot of energy, and is exhausting; so it makes us feel more tired and it can become a vicious circle.

Anxiety isn’t a conscious thought, we don’t have time to make a conscious decision about whether to react to a situation in an anxious manner or not. If there is a threat present, our mind wants us to react and get us to safety as quickly as possible. So we, therefore, don’t realise that our mind is choosing to react in an anxious way. The section of our mind that controls this is called our ‘subconscious’ and this is the part of our brain that does things for us, without us having to think about it (it also controls things like breathing and blinking).

So if you’re finding that anxious thoughts and worries are keeping you awake at night and stopping you from getting a good night's sleep, it’s not your fault, you are not broken, and this doesn’t have to be forever. With help and support from a qualified professional you can start to understand the cause of your anxiety, what triggers your mind into ‘fight or flight’, and then use therapeutic tools to help adjust how your mind reacts and what it sees as a threat.  

Hypnotherapy can be very effective at managing and overcoming anxiety because it works directly with your subconscious mind and uses positive suggestions to adjust how your subconscious mind reacts and what actions it takes. Your hypnotherapist should spend your first session exploring your anxiety in a lot of detail, whilst getting a good understanding of your experiences; this will help you uncover what the true cause of your anxiety is and where it comes from. This will be what triggers your subconscious into the ‘fight or flight’ reaction.

The rest of your treatment plan with your hypnotherapist should then focus on working with your subconscious and teaching it a new reaction that allows you to live happier and healthier with much less anxiety.