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 exactly 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 difficult to believe considering it’s probably the place where most people are at their most relaxed.
This problem probably affects you at night when you’re lying awake trying to sleep, during the night when you wake up, and in the morning when you’re awake but not up 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!
I know this seems like an ultra simplistic answer, but you will be astounded how much worrying this eliminates from your life.
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 methods. To begin with, always get up out of bed if you’re lying awake for more than 10 minutes. If you stay there in bed, in the dark and the silence, it’s only going to make your anxiety get stronger.
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.
***Method #2. No More Ever-Changing Schedules***
By sticking to the same routines and times, you’re sleeping will improve, whatever the cause of your sleeping problems.
Your own inner clock will almost immediately reset itself to the natural and healthy default if you just start going to bed and getting up at similar times each day. This will also correct things like hormone secretion, which often depends on your sleeping cycles.
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 frequently 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.
Starting from today, then, begin going to bed each night as close to the same time as possible. And, of course, get up at the same time each morning too. Just don’t throw away all your hard work by sleeping in late on the weekends and losing your hard-earned new routine!
***Method #3. No More Stimulants Before Bedtime***
A lot of the problems that you currently have with your sleep could be to do with what you do directly before you go to bed. Fast-paced TV, loud music, heavy reading, and playing video games are all very bad ideas in the last hour or two before you try to sleep.
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 worry 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 types 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 enjoy warm baths then incorporate that into your routine. Warm baths are known to promote deep and relaxing sleep, which is just the kind of sleep that cures panic attacks and fights off panic generally. A warm bath will be an excellent addition to your new “calm down” hour before bed.
tips for panic attacks