Tips to relieve anxiety and insomnia

Don't force yourself to "go to bed quickly". First relax your brain and then send sleep signals to your body. This is 10 times more effective than drinking hot milk or counting 1,000 sheep.

When I was working on a quarterly project last year, I kept my eyes open and staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m. for 22 days in a row. The more anxious I was to sleep, the faster my heart beat, and I even started to break into cold sweats. I tried cognitive behavioral therapy prescribed by a sleep doctor, thinking adjustment methods shared by mindfulness bloggers, and traditional methods passed down by my elders in the family. I encountered many pitfalls and discovered many truly useful methods.

First of all, let me give you a piece of trivia that many people don’t know. Doctors in the sleep department have repeatedly emphasized to me: 90% of anxiety-related insomnia is caused by you setting up wrong conditioned reflexes in your brain. You lie in bed still checking work news, thinking about tomorrow's KPIs, or even lying in bed to review eight hundred times after you quarreled with your partner. Over time, your brain will think that "the bed is a place for work, anxiety, and quarrels" and will not trigger the sleep switch at all. Their common solution in the industry is the "20-minute rule": if you haven't fallen asleep after lying down for 20 minutes, don't stay up, just get up and go to a dark place to stay, don't turn on the lights, don't touch your phone, and wait until sleepiness sets in before going back to bed. Last time I lay awake for half an hour and was still awake enough to recite the PPT outline I made last week. I simply put on a coat and got up, leaning on the balcony to enjoy the evening breeze, watching the stall selling late night snacks downstairs closing down. The delivery man rode a small electric donkey and turned into the alley. I stood there for about seven or eight minutes, and sleepiness suddenly came over me. I fell asleep in less than ten minutes after I went back to lie down. It was much better than lying down for two hours with a headache.

Speaking of this, some people may ask, I also know that the bed is not used for work, but when I lie down, I lose control of my mind. What should I do if all the messy things happen? At this time, the method taught to me by friends in the mindfulness circle is very useful. It is not the anti-human "don't think about it", but the "thinking packing method": you just imagine that you have a file box of your favorite color on hand, and stuff the annoying things that come up one by one, such as After stuffing all the plans that need to be submitted tomorrow, the children that need to be picked up, and the client information that needs to be returned, snap the lid shut and put it on the cabinet at the door of your bedroom. Tell yourself, "I will deal with these things the first thing I do when I get up tomorrow. Now the box is locked and no one can touch it." I tried it once before. When I lay down, my mind was filled with the plan to report to the client the next day. I was worried that the data was wrong, and I was worried that I couldn't answer the questions asked by the client. However, this method is not a panacea. My friend who is doing back-end development said that the more packaged he is, the easier it is to think of bugs in the code. Instead, it is suitable to use the 5-4-3-2-1 sensory grounding method, which means naming 5 things you can see now, 4 There are three things that can be touched, two that can be heard, two that can be smelled, and one that can be tasted. He said that the last time he corrected the bug, his brain almost exploded at 2 o'clock. By the time he counted the third thing that could be touched - the mat, the air-conditioning quilt, and his exposed arms, he was so sleepy that he couldn't open his eyes.

I have stepped into a big pit before. I heard people say that insomnia means that the energy has not been exhausted. After get off work, I went to dance for 40 minutes with Pamela. I took a shower and lay on the bed. My heart was beating so fast that I opened my eyes until four o'clock. Later, I asked doctors from the orthopedics and sleep departments to find out that high-intensity exercise 3 hours before going to bed will make the sympathetic nerves extremely excited, making it harder to fall asleep. If you really want to move, just do a 5-minute stretch, or try progressive muscle relaxation - starting from the toes, clenching and tightening for 10 seconds, relaxing for 20 seconds, and gradually working your way up to the top of the head. My mother has suffered from menopausal insomnia for almost half a year, and now she does it every day before going to bed. She said it is more effective than the soothing and brain-boosting tubes she took before.

Oh, by the way, there is also the melatonin that everyone is always stocking up on. I have bought several bottles before. Later, my friend from the endocrinology department specifically told me that this product is really not suitable for everyone. It is only suitable for people who suffer from jet lag, or who have gone to the hospital to check that their melatonin secretion is insufficient. If healthy people take it for a long time, it will inhibit their own melatonin secretion, and may also cause headaches and dizziness the next day. I have a friend who took it for more than half a month, and every morning when he woke up, he felt like he had been slapped in the head.

Actually, there is no universal trick to help you sleep. Some people around me rely on advanced mathematics classes to help them fall asleep. Some people have to hug a cool pillow just taken out of the refrigerator to fall asleep. Some people even have to put an old blanket they used to cover when they were young next to their pillows to sleep soundly. After all, everyone's anxiety points are different, and their body habits are also very different. If you try a few, you can always find one that suits you. After all, being able to get a solid night's sleep is the most cost-effective way to maintain health for us ordinary people, isn't it?