The most effective way to relieve anxiety and insomnia

The most effective core method to relieve anxiety and insomnia is never to force yourself to sleep, but to "deal with emotional overload first, and then adjust your sleep rhythm" - there is no universal solution, and all methods to get rid of the root cause of your anxiety are to treat the symptoms rather than the root cause.

I previously met a 27-year-old Internet operator Xiao Zhang in a community sleep intervention project. He lay in bed and turned over for an average of three hours before falling asleep. The sleep-aid products he tried could fill half of his desk: melatonin, steam eye masks, sleep-aid aromatherapy, and even bought a gravity quilt worth hundreds of yuan. It was useless, and as soon as he closed his eyes, his mind was filled with to-do questions: Will today’s activity data be too bad? Will the leader ask me for a review tomorrow? Did you miss a detail in the last plan you gave to your client?

It’s quite interesting to say that researchers in different fields have quite different intervention logics for anxiety and insomnia: consultants who do cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT-I) will repeatedly tell you that "you must sleep for 8 hours or you will be useless the next day" is inappropriate. Scientific beliefs advise you not to regard sleep as a task; researchers in the field of neuroscience will drag you to measure your cortisol level before going to bed, saying that when your mind is full of worrying things, the stress hormone level cannot be reduced. Even if you sit there and meditate for half an hour, you will only become more and more annoyed. Both statements are correct, they just correspond to different stages.

First solve the problem of emotional overload. In fact, there are no complicated techniques at all. I meet project deadlines by myself. When I open my eyes until 3 o'clock for 3 days in a row, I use the stupidest "two-minute note method": before lying on the bed, I take a useless little notebook and write down everything that is floating in my mind, whether it is "reply to the customer's email at 10 o'clock tomorrow" or "remember to bring food to the stray cat downstairs after get off work." Just by doing this, I lay down and fell asleep in 15 minutes after writing that day. It is better than any meditation audio.

Really don’t insist on making pancakes on the bed. The biggest pitfall I encountered before was that I firmly believed that "you can rest even if you don't fall asleep if you lie down for 8 hours." As a result, my heart beat so fast in the middle of the night when I lay down, and all I could think about was "Why am I not asleep yet?" "I will definitely collapse at work tomorrow." The more anxious I became, the more awake I became. Later, I learned that the stimulus control therapy in CBT-I has long said that you should lie down for 20 minutes before getting up before you feel sleepy, turn on a small light that does not dazzle your eyes, and read two pages of a non-nutritious leisure book, and then go back to lie down after your eyelids have sunk. The more you regard the bed as a "work field where you must sleep," the stronger your body's stress response will be.

As for supplements such as melatonin and oryzanol, which are very popular on the Internet, don’t follow the trend and buy them. If you occasionally suffer from jet lag, or adjust your schedule after a long night, taking low-dose melatonin of about 1mg is indeed helpful. However, if you have been unable to sleep due to anxiety for a long time, taking high doses will be useless - what you lack is not melatonin, but the tight string in your brain that has not relaxed. I met a female teacher in college before, but all the online methods were useless. Then she walked around the park for 40 minutes every day after get off work, watching the grandparents dancing in the square and watching the roses blooming on the roadside. After walking for two weeks, her insomnia improved. To put it bluntly, in those 40 minutes, she didn’t have to think about preparing lessons, evaluating professional titles, or students failing courses. Her brain secretly cleared away the overloaded emotions.

Another counter-intuitive point: don’t sleep until one or two o’clock in the afternoon just to “catch up on sleep” on weekends. Our biological clock has a fixed sleep phase. If you sleep too much on the weekend, it is equivalent to giving yourself a jet lag. Lying in bed on Sunday night will only make you unable to sleep even more. Getting up early on Monday morning will be extremely painful, and you will fall into a vicious cycle. Even if you stayed up until two o'clock the day before, don't get up more than an hour later than usual the next day. If you are sleepy, just lean on the sofa and squint for 20 minutes at noon, which is much more effective than sleeping all morning.

Seriously, don’t believe the nonsense about “saying goodbye to anxiety and insomnia in 7 days”. When you are awake, you have accumulated a lot of grievances and unresolved matters. It is no use counting sheep or listening to white noise when you lie down in bed. There is no method that is effective for everyone. Some people can get better through exercise, and some can get better by keeping a diary. In fact, if you can't sleep less than 3 hours a day for more than two weeks in a row, don't force yourself to go to the sleep department of the hospital to register. It is not a shameful thing.

After all, getting a good night's sleep should be a natural thing.