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 thoughts while you’re in bed.
A large 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!
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.
As for the times when you wake up during the night and start to worry/panic well, this one’s slightly trickier. But there are things you can do! First of all, if you’re awake longer than a few minutes and you feel your anxiety increasing, get up out of bed. Being in bed in the silence will just make any anxiety you feel seem even worse.
While you’re up, perhaps 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 brief 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.
By getting up when you’re awake, and going back to bed in this way after you’ve been doing something for a while, it’s far more like you’re going to bed for the first time. This is far more natural for your body, and you’re going to be able to get back to sleep much quicker than if you’d just stayed in bed the whole time.
Okay, now time for the 2nd way to get the kind of sleep that cures anxiety attacks, and this one is about creating and sticking to a consistent routine.
If you’re suffering with a sleep problem for any reason, not just one that’s caused by anxiety and panic, then sticking to the same schedule every day is great advice.
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 can’t fail to get better. You’ll also correct any problems with things like irregular hormone release, which can be affected by poor sleep habits.
Do you ever feel burnt out? In lots of 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.
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 wary 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 way to get better sleep is to avoid all stimulants before you go to bed.
A lot of the problems that you currently have with your sleep could be to do with what you do right 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 start 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 relax you.
Consciously begin to ease back on everything for the last hour before you go to bed. Stroll around like you’re on vacation. If you like to have a bedtime drink of some kind then sip it outside if it’s a nice night and enjoy the fresh air. If it’s too cold outside, curl up on the couch and relax for 20 minutes while you enjoy your drink.
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 somebody who enjoy hot baths, then take one an hour before you go to bed. A warm bath always helps to ease your body into just the right state for deep and relaxed sleep. Incorporate this warm bath with the bedtime drink and use these new habits to construct your own slow-down hour before bed, and see the wonders it can work on your sleep, and your panic attacks.
tips for panic attacks