How To Cure Panic Attacks While You Sleep
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010One 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.
***Method #1. No More Negative Thinking In The Bedroom***
You experience far 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 calm.
I’d feel confident guessing that worrying in bed bothers you most when you’re trying to fall asleep when you first get into bed, in the middle of the night if you wake up, and first thing in the morning before you get up.
To stop these situations, you need to stop as much of your “worrying in bed” time as you can. The simplest one to cure is the one where you’re lying in bed in the morning after you’ve awoken. All you need to do is get up as soon as 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.
While you’re up, maybe it would be good to have a shower or a bath – whichever you find more calming. Or just spend some time doing something that relaxes you, even if it’s just sitting down in the living room with a warm drink. After your little 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 much more likely to drift off to sleep without any problems.
***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 quickly 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.
I bet you know that feeling that you’re totally burnt out, right? Well, that is frequently 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.
The third method to get better 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 admit 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. Obviously this is a bad 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.
It may sound a bit obvious to give this kind of advice, but how many of us really give ourselves time like this? Even those of us who do don’t do it 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.