Tim Maude Hypnotherapy

Tag: #sleep

  • Sleep: Nature’s Anti-Anxiety Medication

    Sleep: Nature’s Anti-Anxiety Medication

    “Sleep on it.” This is what is sometimes said when something is annoying us, or we cannot decide what to do. Just go to bed and sleep, and somehow, when you wake up, things seem a bit better. If you have ever experienced this natural phenomenon, you may remember how you think a bit more clearly in the morning. Thinking is less fogged by the stress and anxiety you had the night before.

    REM Sleep

    REM sleep (rapid eye movement sleep) is one of the four main stages of sleep (the others are known as NREM or non-REM sleep). During a full night of sleep, we will normally get a couple of hours of REM sleep. This is the stage where most of our memory consolidation and emotional processing happens. It is also the time when our narrative dreams play out the most. see references [1] and [2].

    Somehow, our brain goes through our memories and starts sorting them out. Some, throws away and we will never remember them again. Others, it dials back the emotion before restoring it – so that when we recall it again, the emotion is not as strong. This is our natural way of dealing with stress.

    Anxiety and Sleep

    There is clear scientific evidence that sleep helps the anxious mind both in REM sleep and in NREM sleep. Somehow, the brain is more able to deal with stress when a person gets sufficient sleep. See references [3] and [4]

    The problem arises when we don’t get enough sleep. Sometimes a vicious circle is created whereby anxiety prevents us from sleeping, wakes us up in the middle of the night, or gives us nightmares that wake us and make it difficult to go back to sleep. This lack of sleep, as well as being exhausting, means that our daily stresses are not dealt with properly in the brain, which makes the anxiety worse.

    Medication

    It is possible to get medication to deal with lack of sleep. Some of the prescription sleep medication acts as a sedative. Sedation is not the same as sleep, so the normal process of dealing with stress does not take place in the same way.

    If you are prescribed medication by your doctor, then please follow the doctor’s advice and take it. My advice would be to discuss with your doctor how any prescribed medication impacts your anxiety.

    Sleep Hygiene

    There are many tips on how to get to a better sleep regime available that I will not duplicate here. I would suggest looking at this website [5] to start with.

    If You Still Have Problems …

    I help people with stress and anxiety and people with sleeping difficulties, using hypnotherapy to help them regain control of their lives. I work out of my clinic in Fleet, Hampshire as well as online. I would be happy if you want to Contact Me.

    References

    [1] REM Sleep as a source of memory consolidation and emotional regulation
    https://www.sleepfoundation.org/stages-of-sleep/rem-sleep

    [2] There is some evidence to suggest memory consolidation occurs during NREM sleep.
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959438817300107

    [3] REM sleep as a helps with anxiety
    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2847051/

    [4] Deep sleep may help treat anxiety
    https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326926

    [5] Sleep hygiene
    https://www.nhs.uk/every-mind-matters/mental-wellbeing-tips/how-to-fall-asleep-faster-and-sleep-better/

    Photo courtesy of Polina Kovaleva on Pexels

  • How to Stay Mentally Fit – the Mental Health Hygiene Triangle

    How to Stay Mentally Fit – the Mental Health Hygiene Triangle

    I spend a lot of time talking about anxiety and what happens when things go wrong, why it happens and what to do about it. Today, I want to take a different approach.

    We brush our teeth each day even when our teeth are healthy. It’s just a dental hygiene habit. But what is the equivalent mental hygiene habit? This article looks at the mental health hygiene triangle.

    Mental Health Hygiene

    The mental health hygiene triangle covers body, mind and attitude. There are things we can do in each of these areas that will support our mental health. I have divided each of the three areas (body, mind and attitude) into three categories, making nine in all.

    Body

    1. Sleep Well – When we are asleep, particularly during the dreaming phase, our brains sort out all the stresses of the day. If we don’t get enough sleep, ours brains do not have time to sort it all out and so we wake up with stress that still needs to be sorted out.
    2. Eat Well – There is growing scientific evidence that eating poorly effects our mental health. In particular, eating a wide variety of plants (vegetables, fruit, nuts, grains and so on) has a positive impact on the gut biome, which in turn gives us a better mental outlook.
    3. Exercise Well – We don’t have to go down to the gym for hours each day (unless you really want to). Even going for a short walk round the block has a positive impact on our mental health.

    I know that not everyone can do all these things, but the more you can make changes to keep the body in shape, the better mental health you will have.

    Mind

    1. Mindfulness – Mindfulness is about focusing one the here and now. Focus your attention on everything you are experiencing right now – for example, the feelings of your arm moving as you raise a cup of coffee to your lips, the change in temperature of your face as the hot air from the coffee hits your face, the light reflected in the surface of the coffee, the taste of the coffee as it hits your tongue and so on. Just practicing mindfulness for a few minutes each day trains your brain to be able to focus on the here and now.
    2. Focus – Train your brain to be able to focus on one thing at a time – get absorbed into watching a film or reading a book, or playing a sport or whatever you like to do. If you notice the odd stray thought enter your mind, just notice it and bring your attention gently back to whatever you are doing.
    3. Reflection – Spend a few minutes each day reflecting on how things are going for you. In particular, notice the things you have experienced that have been good for you, things you have enjoyed – because those are the things you should do more of.

    You need to set aside time each day to practice these things. For me, it’s first thing in the morning over a cup of tea. For you it may be something different.

    Attitude

    1. Positive Thinking – We have a natural tendency to focus our thinking on the stuff that is going wrong in our lives – and this just creates a little bit more stress. So change the balance of your thinking – notice the good things in life when they occur – things that give you those little nuggets of joy in your life – things you are grateful for.
    2. Positive Action – Ask yourself, “What small thing could I do to make my life a bit better?” Then get out and do it – no matter how small. Small positive actions may seem to be trivial in comparison with whatever else is going on in your life, but those actions have a direct impact on your mental health.
    3. Positive Interaction – Spending time interacting with other people in a positive manner has a big positive impact on mental health. It could be chatting with the person at the checkout in the supermarket, a good chat with your friends over a cup of tea, or simply being with others going for a walk.

    Keeping your body healthy; training your mind so that it can be mindful, focused and reflective when you need it to be; and adopting a more positive attitude to life are three major tools you can start using today to improve and then maintain a good state of mental health.

    And Finally …

    If this is not enough for you to get your anxiety under control, and get you into a good mentally healthy state, you may need help. I help people with anxiety get their lives back in control using hypnotherapy from my clinic in Fleet, Hampshire. I can also serve people online. Give me a call or contact me if you want a chat.

  • Sleep and Anxiety

    Sleep and Anxiety

    Getting a good night’s sleep is very important if you suffer from anxiety. The problem is that people who suffer from anxiety can suffer with sleep problems – not being able to get to sleep, not being able to get back to sleep once you have woken up, and waking up too early can all lead to sleep deficit. The brain and body need more sleep, but they are not getting it.

    Anyone who has had a baby or toddler who wakes up in the night demanding attention – they know the problem of sleep deprivation. Lack of sleep makes you more likely to snap at little irritations, makes you more stressed, and it becomes easier to drift into that malaise of not bothering with the normal patterns of life. All these negative emotions come from the primitive part of the brain that needs sleep to keep it under control.

    Sometimes, circumstances stop you getting enough sleep – your partner snores, you work unusual shift patterns, you have a child who needs you in the night, or you are in physical pain. These are things you cannot help and you have to choose – either live with it or find ways of working round the problem.

    As well as giving the brain a chance to sort out the emotional memories, sleep also helps the physical body restore itself. Sleeping well helps an individual maintain their physical health, and long-standing poor sleep is associated with a wide range of health problems.

    Why is sleep so important when you have anxiety?

    Lack of sleep can make anxiety worse. When you are asleep, the brain processes the emotional experiences you have had during the day – in particular, it processes the stressful memories. The bad things that have happened will either be forgotten or processed, so that the emotion associated with those memories is removed or dulled down.

    Most people will have experienced a time when they got angry about something or other, and then they wake up in the morning wondering why they ever got cross about it. During the night, your brain processes those stressful experiences leaving you with less stress on your plate the following day. You wake up wondering why you got so upset by it all.

    So if you don’t get enough sleep, and you have a lot of unresolved stresses, your brain does not get a chance to process them all at night. The next day you wake up still carrying the stresses from the previous day. For people that have highly stressful experiences, such as a serious accident, a close friend or relative passing away, or the sudden loss of their job … for these people, the stress can take days, weeks or months to be processed. PTSD sufferers may have years of putting up with unresolved stress. People who are sleep-deprived don’t deal with the stresses of everyday life well – as they haven’t had a chance to deal with the stress that they have already experienced.

    Sleep is important for everyone, but it is particularly important if you have anxiety – because it puts you in that vicious cycle of lack of sleep increasing the anxiety, which in turns disrupts your sleep. If you do suffer from anxiety – look at your sleep patterns and see what you can do to make sure you get as much sleep as you need.

    Photo of baby awake in bed by Michal Bar Haim on Unsplash

  • Sleep and Anxiety – the Ongoing Conflict

    Sleep and Anxiety – the Ongoing Conflict

    Increasing anxiety can mean you sleep badly – sleeping badly can increase anxiety. On the other hand lowering your anxiety can improve your sleep – and improving your sleep can help reduce anxiety.

    Many people who have anxiety and stress issues will recognise the experience of waking up in the night and then finding it difficult to get back to sleep – with all those anxious feeling and worries going through their head. And this compounds the real problem, because regular nights of good sleep helps sort out anxiety.

    Sleep Phases

    When we sleep, we go through phases – some of the time we have deep sleep and at other times we are sleeping very lightly. These are important in order to keep your body and mind healthy. One of the stages of sleep is known as REM (rapid eye movement) – the stage when we dream. REM sleep accounts for around a fifth of our sleep patterns, although most people rarely remember much of it.

    During REM sleep, our brain consolidates our memories. It looks at things that have happened recently and processes them, getting rid of unwanted stuff and reconfiguring the rest. You may have heard the expression, “Sleep on it.” If there is something that is worrying you – put it aside and look at it again in the morning and you will view it differently. Why? Because during the night, while you are in your REM sleep, you process that bit of memory and so a lot of the emotion is taken out of it.

    How Sleep Helps with Anxiety

    So a good nights sleep will give you around an hour and a half of REM sleep in which to process all your worries and regrets so that they don’t look so bad the next day. This means that the fight-flight-or-freeze centre of the brain is less likely to be triggered and less likely to generate as much anxiety.

    And I know that it’s all very well telling someone with anxiety, “just get enough sleep,” but that doesn’t help when you wake up in the middle of the night worrying and cannot get back to sleep again.

    Sleep Tips

    There is no one answer that can guarantee a good night’s sleep. What works for one person may not work for another. So the trick is to have a go at different things – just see what works for you. Remember – if what you are doing at the moment doesn’t work, then try something else.

    Let’s start with some “don’t”s

    • Don’t try to go short on sleep and catch up on the weekend
    • Don’t drink alcohol just I order to help you get a good night’s sleep
    • Don’t drink caffeinated drinks before bedtime

    And some “do”s

    • Do have a wind-down routine before bedtime
    • Consciously relax every part of your body as you lie in bed
    • If you have anything that’s worrying you – write it down so that your brain doesn’t have to keep reminding you to deal with it

    Sleep is so important to our lives, and these few tips do not do do it justice. I will come back to fully exploring sleep tips another time.

    If you have problems coping with your anxiety and stress on your own and are looking for some help, then you may wish to consider hypnotherapy. I work out of my clinic in Fleet, Hampshire helping people get their lives under control and reducing the symptoms of stress and anxiety.

    Photo by Kate Stone Matheson on Unsplash

  • Sleep – the great healer

    Sleep – the great healer

    The amount and quality of the sleep you get has a big impact on how your brain deals with stress and therefore has a big impact on anxiety, depression and anger.

    We all need a small amount of stress to function. We need to anticipate when something bad might happen so that we can do something about it. We need to recall bad things happening to us so that we can learn from them. We need to be a bit stressed when we have lots to do, because it helps us stay on track and get everything done.

    All this stress has to be processed. The memories around stressful events need to be dealt with, because we do not want to re-experience all the stress every time we recall a bad time. We need to be able to remember things in a way that doesn’t stress us out again.

    Our brains can process a lot of stressful events when we are asleep – specifically, when we dream. We dream for around 20% of our sleep, and usually remember only a small fraction of it – if any. Dreaming is the time when the brain processes all the things it has experienced during the day – and in particular, the stressful stuff.

    Most people can remember a time when they have gone to bed when they are upset about something – maybe they have had a row with their partner, or are annoyed about something that’s happened to them during the day. Then when they wake up in the morning, they think, “What on earth did I get so upset about?” What has happened is that, during their dreams, the brain examined the memory of the event and restructured the memory so that a lot of the emotion has been taken away.

    When you don’t get too much stress in your life, and you get sufficient sleep, the brain is able to process everything that has stressed you out the previous day during a night’s sleep. However, if you have a large amount of stress, or you don’t get enough sleep, then some of the stressful events hang around in your memories to get dealt with later – sometimes months or years later.

    When you suffer a large amount of stress – such as a major accident or the death of someone close to you who you love – this adds a huge amount of stress which your brain spends weeks, months or even years to resolve. Large amounts of stress can also be generated by a continuous stream of small stresses – having too much work to do – worrying about things all day – and so on.

    All this stress has to be processed, and dreaming sleep is our natural way of processing it.

    We dream for around 20% of our sleep, and this is not spread evenly throughout the night. The first part of the night has more deep sleep and less dreaming. The dreaming increases as the night progresses. This means that if you are the sort of person who “gets by” on six hours of sleep a night, and “makes up” for it at the weekend – you are probably missing out on a lot of good dreaming time.

    There are lots of habits you can develop to help you sleep better. Here are a few of them:

    Avoid the habit of getting by with a small amount of sleep and catching up later on.
    Avoid caffeine in the evening. The caffeine in a cup of coffee hangs around in your body for several hours. As a rule of thumb – it the caffeine in that cup of coffee reduces to about half in around five hours.
    Avoid alcohol in the evening. Alcohol is a depressant, and so it does help relax the body, but it also disrupts the dreaming sleep, particularly in the earlier part of the night.
    If you have “stuff” buzzing through your head – write it down. When you have something you need to remember, the brain can keep you awake as it tries to make sure you don’t forget it. So it goes round and round in your head. Write it down and the brain somehow knows you have a record of it, so doesn’t need to bother you about it any more.
    Avoid a big physical workout just before bed. A body workout does tire you out, but your body is still working for some time after a big workout – so it may be more difficult to go to sleep.
    Do exercise during the day. Make sure you get some exercise – even if its just walking round the block. It’s good for sleep.
    Develop a wind-down routine before bed. The brain will get used to the routine and know that it is time to go to sleep.

    Getting enough good quality sleep is an important part of managing stress and anxiety, so it’s worth thinking about how you are managing your sleep patterns.

    If you cannot manage your anxiety on your own, you may like to consider getting help. In my clinic in Fleet, I help people with anxiety. I use hypnotherapy to help them get back in control of their lives and get rid of the unwanted symptoms.

    Photo by Igordoon Primus on Unsplash