Sleep is so important for our general wellbeing and mental health.
Not having enough sleep or having broken sleep at night over time can impact how we view our world and cope. When people experience stress during the day, they are more likely to have trouble with sleep at night.
Being stressed and anxious about things, negative thinking, worrying, can lead to lack of sleep. Then we add the T word-tiredness into the mix. This can then mean we stop coping so well with the day-to-day things, are short tempered, start to get frustrated with ourselves, and low self-esteem can then surface.
We tend to make poor choices when we are tired and have less energy, maybe comfort-eat, stay in bed longer, make excuses to miss the gym, not go for that walk or social event. See how this picture is building up here. How, as I have said this can seriously affect our wellbeing. It’s like a vicious cycle starts to manifest, it can creep up on us too.
Stress + Worry + Anxiety = Poor Sleep = Tiredness = Overwhelm = Frustration = Low Self-worth = Poor Mental health and Wellbeing
As a Solution Focused Hypnotherapist, I talk about sleep a lot and its importance. I talk about the brain and the mind and how it works with our clients. It’s based on recent neuroscience information but I keep it simple for my lovely clients.
We have an Intellectual (Rational Mind) and a Primitive Mind (Emotional Mind).
So the primitive mind is an emotional one, it’s part of our limbic system and houses the autonomic process – like our breathing, and heart beating. It’s where our fight, flight and freeze responses are housed. If there is an emergency or crisis it leaps into action to protect us!
In this part of the brain we have our Hippocampus. In this area sits our learned habits and behaviours, sometimes inappropriate ones; it’s also where our worry, anxiety, stress ends up much of the time and remains, building up if it’s not dealt with and processed.
We liken it to a bucket filling up within the Hippocampus, a Stress Bucket lets say.
Day to day events end up inside of these buckets. The good news is we have a natural way of emptying this and that is within sleep: REM sleep, which is the part of sleep when we dream. We are processing the events of the day, taking them from an emotional memory to a narrative one. Moving them into the intellectual part of the brain, so with the emotion taken away, we cope better with life. The phrases like “you will feel better in the morning”, “sleep on it”, spring to my mind; when I think about how the brain works when we sleep. Often when we have a difficult day, we think about these events over and over.
Say you have an argument with a friend and you over analyse it, tell everyone about it, they say forget it but you can’t. You go to bed still thinking about it, when you wake in the morning it all seems better and you may have even forgotten about it.
It’s great to wake up and have gotten rid of the stress out of your Bucket and you feel no anxiety or worry.
But sometimes there is too much stress and anxiety, and this Stress Bucket overflows, and the mind wakes you up and you are wide awake ruminating. Does this sound familiar?
Often you don’t feel great, and you lie there unable to get back to sleep. If you do eventually sleep, you don’t feel much better in the morning, or you may be encouraged to sleep in and still feel exhausted. REM sleep is only 20% of sleep and stress and anxiety take lots of energy to process. So, there is not enough REM to empty this stress from your bucket.
So, it is time to take control back, think more positively, do more positive activities, have more positive interactions with others. With your mind occupied more regularly on positive things, you will have less time to focus on worry, stress and this anxiety cycle. More time doing things we like and enjoy, looking for the good things to explore, means we start emptying our Stress Bucket and cope better.
- All of this could just start with having 5 minutes to yourself with a cup of coffee.
- Having a soak in the bath, getting up 10 minutes earlier to do a morning meditation.
- No need to start with some big declaration of change.
- Do something you will enjoy and be able to do regularly.
Most of all enjoy!!
Finally, have a close look at this fabulous simple image above, you can see the other types of things that can be a catalyst for mentally healthy behaviour. Thus, start turning the taps on to empty your stress bucket.
In turn your sleep patterns will regulate, but you need to shift your focus and take small, right actions to encourage the stress to flow out of the bucket consistently.