I. What are Good Sleep Practices for Anxiety treatment?

Tired? Moody? More anxious than usual? If your answer to these questions is a yes, then it is very likely that you are not getting enough sleep, having sleepless nights, or experiencing insomnia (whether related or unrelated to anxiety). Because of our career, family, personal commitments and responsibilities, we often forget how important sleep is for our health and wellbeing. Even moments of joy can become moments of excess if they cut into your body’s natural need for sleep.

You can make sleep as one of the pleasures to savour if you can set up the right kind of routine and environment to enable more sleep. If you are experiencing anxiety or have an anxiety disorder, the problems you have with sleeping may either be the cause of or be caused by:

• worry；
• doubt；
• preoccupation over the day’s events； or
• even the worry itself.

Whether they are the source or the cause, finding ways to improve sleep can have dramatic effects on your levels of anxiety versus positive mood. Much research has shown how important sleep is in all aspects of our health and wellbeing.

There are many techniques to improve sleep designed to help anxiety and increase positive mood. The exercises you will learn in this lesson include:

• Sleep Journals: To improve your sleep habits, it is important to first find out the different sources of sleep difficulties. Using a sleep journal will help you track these issues, which will then enable you to select the different solutions to help return your sleep to normality.
• Sleep Improvement Interventions: There are a number of sleep improvement techniques you can use, some of which include changes to your eating habits, sleep patterns, and environment in order to enhance your sleep experience. Depending on the sources of poor sleep you have identified in your journal you can try:
• Changing the bed or the bedroom
• Avoiding sleep-preventing substances
• Exercising regularly
• Using aromatherapy and herbal remedies
• Sleeping more to compensate for lost sleep
• Trying sleep-inducing methods
• Taking naps sensibly
• Sleep Lab Evaluation Parasomnias: Done at the referral of a physician, sleep lab evaluation and treatment is an intervention done after all of the above has been exhausted. It can be expensive and time consuming, but it involves comprehensive testing and observation to find out if you have a more serious sleep disorder like narcolepsy, sleep apnea or other parasomnias.

Finding the best sleep improvement techniques are based on your own personal experiences with anxiety, and lifestyle preferences. You may find your best option is by simply reading about the strategies and learn how to incorporate them in your daily life, or you may need to try some or all of them to find out which one works best for your level of anxiety. In the end, you have choices about how you want to free your life from anxiety, and these tips and tools are some of them.