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Have you gotten to a place where your bed triggers anxiety? Does just thinking about your bed cause some palpitations and dizziness?

If so, it is time for change. 

Firstly, know that you’re not alone. As isolating and lonely as it may feel, there are countless others who feel like you do. More importantly, there are also countless others who don’t anymore. And just like them, you can rekindle the love between yourself and what used to be your favorite place for rest and rejuvenation. 

Let’s start at the beginning. For some reason, whatever it was, it isn’t actually important, you started having trouble sleeping. Perhaps that alone turned your bed into a battlefield and trigger for anxiety or perhaps you were served some unhelpful advice – only use the bed for sleep and sex. 

That advice came from a good place, no judgment. The thinking was that as you’ve started to associate the bed with stress, you need to change that and re-associate it with sleep. Pavlov’s dogs. Get it. The problem is, we humans are a bit more complex than canines. Most of us anyway. 

When you are told you should not be awake in your bed, that you should get out of it lest it becomes even more anxiety triggering.

The pressure to sleep fast increases which is the exact opposite of what you need. You need as little pressure as possible for sleep to happen. 

So how can you get back to a place where you were longing to snuggle under those comfy blankets? Do exactly what you’re told not to – do things you enjoy in bed!

If you feel like watching TV, perfect! A Netflix show, great! Wanna read a book or play with your phone, go ahead!

Make the bed a place where you can do anything that brings you joy. 

If the thought of doing this at night makes you feel butterflies in your stomach, you can start during the day. Spend some time in the morning or afternoon chilling and relaxing in your bed and learn that it can be a very desirable place to hang out.

Keep one thing in mind however, you can’t force any associations. Just as you can’t force an association between sleep and your bed, you can’t force yourself to enjoy time spent there. It has to feel right.

Also, the intent with spending time in bed is not to make yourself sleep more, it is just to teach yourself that the bed does not have to be a trigger for wakefulness. And strange as it sounds, spending time awake in bed doing things that bring you pleasure does just that. It teaches your brain that it’s not bad to hang out in bed and when that happens, it doesn’t get triggered by the mere thought of your bed. 

Because your flirting has taken you a big step towards where you want to be, in love again.

When you start your journey towards sleeping well, you will hit a speed bump. In fact you’ll most likely hit quite a few of them. It may seem little ones, far and few between, is the ideal way to reach your destination of peaceful slumber for the rest of your life. Nothing wrong with cruising there for sure. But, strange as it may seem, it is the bumpy road that takes you there the fastest and with most confidence. 

A speed bump is what most refer to as a setback.

It is a night of sleeping little after several good ones. Or it is that stretch of sleepless nights after a few weeks of not struggling. To understand the benefits of the bumpy road, let’s start talking about the purpose of the journey. 

Insomnia happens when you are trying to produce or control something that only happens when there’s no effort. The longer you’ve had trouble sleeping, the more things you have come to think are necessary for you to sleep. Your goal is to learn that sleep comes to you when you’re not trying, and that’s where speed bumps come in. 

When things are going well, you’re sleeping well and you’re not feeling a need to do anything to make yourself sleep, you’re cruising.

You are building sleep confidence in a slow but steady pace. That’s great! If that is your path, good for you.

However, it is when you hit a speed bump you can truly make a leap forward and learn the most important of all sleep lessons. If you have a night or a stretch of nights where you sleep little, and go on to not respond, not change anything, resist the urge to DO SOMETHING, then when sleep returns, magic has happened.

You have seen that without trying, you sleep well even after some very bumpy nights. You have gotten a lesson in the art of letting go that you will never forget.

You may totally get it after the first speed bump. Or you may need a few more for this insight to sink in. But when it has, you’ll be cruising too. 

The speed bumps will be smaller and less frequent. Not because you’re avoiding them but precisely the opposite – you’re willing to have speed bumps and you know you’ll get to the other side fine.

It’s not easy but try to look at a speed bump coming your way as an opportunity. Because when you do, magic will happen. 

One of the most common things that keep people from sleeping well, or sleeping at all, is the fear of not sleeping – sleep anxiety.

Sometimes this is mostly general anxiety that spills over onto sleep, sometimes the source of the anxiety is strictly that worry of whether or not you will sleep, how much you will sleep and what will happen if you don’t.

If you have mostly sleep anxiety, well then the good new is that it’s not too difficult to get past. Just by spending less time in bed and focusing attention on things not sleep related sleep anxiety decreases as you see that you can sleep and your sleep confidence grows.

If you have more general anxiety, or want to speed up the process of reducing sleep anxiety, then you should try focused journaling.

As you know, with anxiety comes the constant bombardment of thoughts produced by your brain. Without an outlet, it is up to you to react and respond to all the whims of an overactive mind. If all this activity on the other hand can be directed towards a designated time frame, the bombardment will cease.

Here’s what to do:

In the early afternoon, set off 5-10 minutes and grab a pen and paper. During these minutes, try to get every single worry you can retrieve from your mind written down. The more material you find, the more stressors and worries you identify, the better.

Don’t expect anything to change in the first few days. But if you keep going, just like with any exercise, you will start seeing results. When your brain has an outlet, it will bother you less and give you more peace of mind to spend on things you enjoy.

And when you have more peace of mind, good sleep is soon to follow!