Sleep and Anxiety

I'm Dr. Shelby Harris. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist, who specializes in behavioral sleep medicine. Today, I'll be talking about the correlation between sleep issues and anxiety and how they can sometimes exacerbate each other. I'll explain why our bodies react the way they do to perceived stressors and then share some tips to help ease your anxiety when it comes to bedtime. Let's dive right in. (slow electronic music) First, it's important to know that anxiety is something that can impact any person, regardless of age or gender. And having occasional anxiety is actually a very normal part of life, whether it's anticipating a big meeting or crossing a busy street. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors were able to anticipate threats by feeling a sense of fear, which served as a survival tactic to protect us from harm. Imagine if an aggressive animal comes at you. You react with a fight or flight response. Your heart rate increases, your muscles tense up, and your stomach might feel like it's in knots as it diverts energy to other systems. Feeling anxiety is very similar to this fight or flight response. The key distinction is that with anxiety, you anticipate or believe there is potential danger in situations where there might not be any. So having anxiety is your body's hardwired and programmed way of responding to any kind of external stressor. When anxiety becomes a real problem is when it starts to feel unmanageable and impairs your ability to function in daily life. There are several types of anxiety disorders that affect over 40 million people in the United States, according to the ADAA. When it comes to how anxiety impacts sleep, let's focus on generalized anxiety or having excessive worry about a number of different things. Here, you might see anxiety create two big sleep disturbances. Hyper arousal and sleep awakenings. During hyper arousal, you feel wide awake in bed because you can't quiet your brain from worrying or overthinking. So even though you're trying to relax, your body and mind are reacting the same way they would when perceiving a stressor, which in this case, is the worrying itself. Cortisol is a hormone that's produced by a complex network, known as the HPA access within the brain and it gets released into the bloodstream during a stress response. What's interesting here is that the production of cortisol and our sleep cycle regulated by the hormone melatonin, both share the same HPA pathway and follow a similar circadian rhythm. So if you're up feeling anxious and stressed at night, the HPA access might get too active and start disrupting your sleep cycle. This can cause fragmented sleep due to awakenings, or in some cases, insomnia. It's within the normal spectrum to have one or two not so great nights of sleep per week, because we all face stress from time to time. It becomes a problem when you don't sleep well routinely for weeks on end. This is...