Curing Panic Attacks Is Not Impossible
October 122010
One of the best ways to cure panic attacks is to improve the quality of your sleep, and here are 3 methods for doing just that.
***Method #1. No More Negative Thinking In The Bedroom***
More worry and anxiety happens when you’re lying awake in bed than at any other time of the day. That’s pretty incredible when you consider it’s the place where we should be most relaxed!
This problem probably affects you at night when you’re lying awake trying to sleep, during the night when you wake up, and in the morning when you’re awake but not up yet.
To overcome these situations, you need to prevent as much of your “worrying in bed” time as you can. The simplest one to solve is the one where you’re lying in bed in the morning after you’ve woken up. All you need to do is get up as soon as you wake up!
This is a very simple idea, but it’s amazing how much anxiety this will remove from the start of your day. Getting up before your mind has a chance to remember all the things it could be anxious about will give you a better start to the day than you’ve had in a long time.
Finding a solution for the times when you worry during the night after you’ve woken up is slightly trickier, but there are still good methods. To begin with, always get up out of bed if you’re lying awake for more than five minutes. If you stay there in bed, in the dark and the silence, it’s only going to make your anxiety get worse.
Another good thing to do is to have a warm shower, or simply to splash your face with cool water. Or perhaps just wander around your home for a few moments, possibly tidying a few things away. Then just go back to bed. This approach works because it recreates a totally natural way of going to bed.
So instead of lying awake for hours you get up for a bit, and then finally when you return to bed you treat it as if you’re going to bed for the first time. This is much more natural for your body to accept than it is to lie there for hours when you can’t sleep. It’s far more likely that you’ll get back to sleep doing this than simply lying there.
***Method #2. No More Ever-Changing Schedules***
Sleeping problems of all kinds, not just those that are related to panic and anxiety disorders, can be eased by making sure you adhere to the same routine every single day.
Your own inner clock will almost immediately reset itself to the natural and healthy default if you just start going to bed and getting up at the same times each day. This will also normalise things like hormone secretion, which often depends on your sleeping cycles.
I bet you know that feeling that you’re completely burnt out, right? Well, that is frequently a result of your adrenal glands being out of whack. One of the few ways to correct a problem like that is to get some good sleeping habits sorted out.
Starting from today, then, begin going to bed every night as close to the same time as possible. And, of course, get up at the same time each morning too. Just don’t throw away all your hard work by sleeping in late on the weekends and losing your hard-earned new routine!
The third method to get better sleep is to avoid all stimulants before you go to bed.
Many of the problems that I had sleeping were because of what I was doing before I actually went to bed each night. I was often watching TV in bed right up until the moment I turned out the light and tried to sleep. This is a very bad idea! The same goes for any loud or heavy music, and even for reading if the subject is heavy or extreme.
So the first thing to do is eliminate anything stimulating for at least an hour before you go to bed. You should also not do any exercise at all for at least a couple of hours before bed. And try to develop a new pre-bed routine a “slow-down” routine, as I like to call it.
So go out of your way to take it easy. act like you’re on a vacation without a care in the world. You know what relaxes you, so do that! Have a favourite bed time drink, do some light reading, sit outside in the fresh air if it’s warm. Anything to relax.
These types of suggestions might seem simple, but do you ever genuinely give yourself time in this way? Even if you do, you probably don’t do it often enough.
If you enjoy warm baths then incorporate that into your routine. Warm baths are known to promote deep and relaxing sleep, which is just the kind of sleep that cures panic attacks and fights off panic generally. A warm bath will be an excellent addition to your new “calm down” hour before bed.