How To Cure Panic Attacks While You Sleep
Posted on August 15th, 2010 by admin
One of the best ways to cure panic attacks is to improve the quality of your sleep, and here are 3 methods for doing just that.
The first way to get better sleep is to stop all negative thinking while you’re in bed.
You experience much more worrying and anxious thoughts when you’re awake in bed than you do in any other situation. That’s a weird situation to be in when you think that your bedroom should be the place where you are most relaxed.
You’ll probably find that this problem is at its worst at 3 specific times: when you’re lying awake immediately after you go to bed, in the middle of the night after you’ve woken up, and maybe in the morning too, when you’ve woken up but you haven’t got out of bed yet.
So the key here is to eliminate as much of this “worry in bed” time as possible. The easiest one to solve is the worry in the morning, when you’re awake but you haven’t got up yet. The simple solution here is to get up the moment you wake up!
This is a very simple idea, but it’s amazing how much anxiety this will remove from the start of your day. Getting up before your mind has a chance to remember all the things it could be anxious about will give you a better start to the day than you’ve had in a long time.
Okay, now to stop those times 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 double 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.
So instead of lying awake for hours you get up for a bit, and then finally when you return to bed you treat it as if you’re going to bed for the first time. This is much more natural for your body to accept than it is to lie there for hours when you can’t sleep. It’s far more likely that you’ll get back to sleep doing this than simply lying there.
Okay, now time for the second way to get the kind of sleep that cures panic attacks, and this one is about creating and sticking to a consistent routine.
By sticking to the same routines and times, you’re sleeping will improve, whatever the cause of your sleeping problems.
And yes, by doing nothing more than going to bed and getting up at the same times, every single day, your internal clock will return to normal and your sleeping cannot fail to get better. You’ll also correct any problems with things like irregular hormone release, which can be affected by bad sleep habits.
I bet you know that feeling that you’re utterly burnt out, right? Well, that is sometimes a result of your adrenal glands being out of whack. One of the few ways to correct a problem like that is to get some good sleeping habits sorted out.
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 careful not to undo your good work by sleeping in late on weekends or on days when you don’t need to be up early.
***Method #3. No More Stimulants Before Bedtime***
Many of the problems that I had sleeping were because of what I was doing before I actually went to bed each night. I was often watching TV in bed right up until the moment I turned out the light and tried to sleep. This is a very bad idea! The same goes for any loud or heavy music, and even for reading if the subject is heavy or extreme.
What I did, and what I suggest you begin doing too from today onwards, is to stop doing anything stimulating for an hour before your bedtime. Couple this with a brand new routine that you stick to before you retire, full of things that you know will caml you.
So go out of your way to take it easy. Behave like you’re on a vacation without a care in the world. You know what relaxes you, so do that! Have a favourite bed time drink, do some light reading, sit outside in the fresh air if it’s warm. Anything to relax.
These kinds of suggestions might seem simple, 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.