Ending Stress For Better Sleep: Where To Start?

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While my favorite subject is more sleep and insomnia, I absolutely cannot ignore the impact of anxiety on sleep quality, nor their inter-causation.

“Anxiety deteriorates the quality of sleep and when it is poor, sensitivity to anxiety increases. You might as well say that we are in a vicious circle that tightens its grip as time goes on.

You have to take a stand, you cannot do things by halves, the quality of your days depends on your relationship with those around you, family and professional, your desire to move forward in your life, to achieve your goals. ambitions, in short, either you take the time to deal with the problem or you will slowly sink into it.

So, I propose to tackle anxiety first, in that it is the root of the first vicious circle.

If I were to give the hard time in your first quest for better sleep I would say, as the title suggests (and you didn’t have a hard time guessing), start by working on your anxiety.

In, to start your approach against anxiety and sleep disorders I suggest you start with the 2 D fundamentals:

– The guilt

– Dedramatization

When I talk to people who have difficulty sleeping well, I find that more often than not, people do not take their anxious judgment of the events they are going through seriously.

They find it ridiculous, even laughable. They feel that even though they tend to experience stress on a daily basis to such an extent that it hinders their sleep, they are not entitled to complain.

Indeed, they tell me that they are rather happy in their life in general, not really to complain and that frankly “there is much worse”.

As if you admit that they are stressed, that is to say that they are not comfortable with their situation and that that would be a confession of weakness, of helplessness in the conduct of their lives.

It’s about changing your outlook on your anxiety, on insomnia, on how you feel about it.

Self-guilt: accepting your feelings of anxiety

So obviously what these people say to whom I speak is not true, stress is a normal physiological reaction in any individual, it leads to action, it is like an electric current, without it you would be apathetic. three quarters of the time.

However, in one day you are subjected to a lot of external stimuli that generate this stress: you face different situations, with different issues, in different contexts. It is the successive triggers of stressful situations that cause anxiety.

So is stress wrong? Do we all have to become a digital nomad and go to the Philippines or Thailand to sip coconuts?

Respectively no and if you want but you do not have to to solve this problem. What you can and should do, however, is to start by breaking down your judgment of your own feelings of anxiety.

Remember, we all have different lives, we don’t all do the same thing, we don’t all experience the same things either. So how do you expect everyone to appreciate what is and what is not stressful the same?

How do you expect a confident business leader to deal with stress in the same way as a student who is just starting to enter the workforce?

To exonerate yourself is to admit your feelings and to take away your own moral judgment, it is neither good nor bad to be anxious, it is just real and it is by appreciating reality as it is, without carrying it unnecessary judgments that you will be most successful in undoing this anxiety.

Dedramatization: taking a step back from the events

Likewise, the events you are going through are not anxiety-provoking in themselves.

As Nietzsche said:

“There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of the phenomena”

And as Marcus Aurelius said, in essence there are no happy or unhappy events, events only happen, it is you and only you who interpret these events as such.

Ending Stress For Better Sleep: Where To Start?

As soon as you consider the events as far as possible from judgment, you will halve the stress that emerges from them. Freeing yourself from all your opinions on the situation which will usually make you feel anxious will allow you to refocus on the real and to better manage the situation, to tame the chaos.

I know what you are thinking, “Okay, that’s cool but easier said than done”. To be honest yes you are right, it’s hard, it requires a lot of effort and especially willpower but precisely, I suggest you take reality as it is (and not as you see it) in full face, in other words to fight against anxiety.

It’s about taking a mini leap into the void each time you are faced with a stressful situation, before a very big day that will surely put you on your knees or you will have to run all over the place. trying to maintain your social relations, i.e. without sending everyone who gets in your way to graze, before going to talk to the person you like, before going firmly to ask your employer that you have really need your afternoon this Friday.

This little jump is every time you are not going to ask yourself questions, that you will take the situation as a challenge instead of undergoing it.

If I had to metaphorize this approach to anxiety which imprints a little (or even a lot?) In Nietzsche, I would take a thriller or a horror film in which the protagonists, tired of fleeing from the beast that pursues them, tired of hiding, decide to turn against him and kill him. In this way, the warrior’s rest will be more accessible to you.