Anxiety keeps us awake at night. This information is nothing new, a people experience it all the time. We stay awake and worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow, it’s quite a common feeling. We worry about work, family, health and sometimes even trivial things like what we should wear tomorrow. The result of this worry is sleep deprivation, which in itself is harmful to the body physically and emotionally. However, this phenomenon is easily explainable as one of the typical symptoms of anxiety.
Anxiety causes chemicals to be released into our body. It’s a response of the nervous system to the emotions welling up inside of us. The chemicals released into our body include adrenalin from the amygdala. Adrenalin, as we know, is a chemical that pumps us up. It leaves us energized. Why does anxiety cause our body to release energizing chemicals? Anxiety is our natural response to a potentially dangerous situation (emotionally or physically), and so we need energy to escape the situation. As we feel anxious, adrenalin courses through our body to give us energy to escape the danger we feel, this is the cause of the sleep deprivation.
Sleep is the body’s way or regaining energy. Without it, the body suffers from fatigue, and people feel irritated, and they have slow reflexes. Our brain is undergoing so much activity that we cannot relax or rest. And without sleep the brain is sluggish. The sleep deprivation impairs emotional responses and makes us tired and irritable. People are unable o respond to situations correctly and rationally. As we become more irritated and befuddled, we get more anxious. So the anxiety that affects our ability to sleep is also aggravated by the sleep deprivation. We lose sleep, we get more anxious, and then we lose more sleep. It’s a cycle that doesn’t end.
Some use sleeping pills to combat the situation and generally they work. However, artificial means to sleep is just a short term solution. A healthier long term solution would be to deal with the anxiety itself, to find the cause of the anxiety and treat it.
