Anxiety comes in all shapes and sizes. For some people, it’s a terrible clinical disorder, while for others, it’s a pain that ebbs and flows during everyday life. It’s important that patients with clinical anxiety find help with qualified practitioners, but for everyone else, even small life adjustments can help to reduce anxiety. This Brainlift is all about the latest science behind anxiety management, with a special focus on the importance of sleep.
Why a lack of sleep makes you anxious
Sleep and mood and tightly linked, but it’s not only because fatigue makes you feel grumpy. Scientists recently studied the brains of sleep-deprived people while they looked at unpleasant images. When people had a good night’s sleep, the areas of their brain involved in emotional control (i.e. the medial prefrontal cortex) were good at regulating the activity of areas involved in expressing emotions such as stress or anxiety (i.e. the amygdala). This healthy regulation prevented negative emotions from getting too high. But a lack of sleep weakened the connection between these brain areas, leading to poor emotional control. People’s anxiety levels then spiraled beyond their typical range. Deep sleep—especially slow-wave sleep—was particularly important in repairing these emotional centers of the brain. The more deep sleep people had during the night, the less anxious they felt in the morning.
How to battle anxiety
A lack of sleep makes your brain overreact to stressful events, because your emotional control centers are less able to regulate your emotional expression centers. Boost the priority of good-quality sleep at the end of your day to avoid this problem, even on good days where you haven’t experienced much stress. Good days rapidly turn into bad days without proper sleep between them.
Helping others is better at boosting your confidence than others helping you. So spend at least a little of your day offering help and advice to friends or family who may need it. When it comes to reducing anxiety and boosting confidence, helping others is a great way to help yourself.
Conversation is life’s happy drug! Meaningful conversations with other people have been linked to higher life satisfaction. So when you’re feeling a little worried about a problem in your life, or struggling with self-confidence, meet a friend and chat about whatever’s on your mind.
Sleep stages during the night
As I mentioned above, deep sleep is particularly important for restoring the brain’s ability to control emotional reactions. The graph below shows what sleep stages look like across the night:
The deepest phases of sleep (labeled stages 3 and 4 in the graph) occur early in the night after you fall asleep. Those first few hours are therefore crucial for your emotional wellbeing. That’s not to say that the other stages aren’t important—getting your full 7-8 hours every night is ideal. But when you have problems with anxiety, it’s particularly important to ensure that the first few hours of your sleep remain uninterrupted.
That final quote
As John Steinbeck put it in his novel Sweet Thursday:
“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”
Calling sleep a “committee” is actually a surprisingly apt metaphor. Sleep provides the brain with an opportunity to process and reorganize its content. Valuable information is stored in memory while any mess is pruned away. When the mess all gets too much following sleepless nights, it’s perhaps unsurprising that we begin to feel anxious. So get some good sleep tonight and allow the committee to do its work.
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