How to Sleep When Stressed Out

Are you lying awake at night, stressed out, mind racing in circles? For many Americans, this is a nightly routine that prevents sleep and leads to poor sleep habits. Rumination and stress can, together, severely inhibit the ability to get a good night's sleep.

Beyond the stress that actively keeps you up at night, the demands of modern life – parenting, work, school, health, finances, chores – can also make sleep feel like a secondary necessity. The day gets so busy and at the end, you feel like you haven't done anything for yourself. This can lead to you staying up an extra hour to relax and do something enjoyable like watching television, cruising the web, or watching a movie, which further inhibits sleep.

Also, all of us are different and can deal with varying amounts of stress, be they short-term or long-term stressors. Understanding stress is about understanding stress for you – how you react, how it impacts your life, and how it impacts your sleep.

Understanding Your Stress Levels

If you are wondering or concerned that stress is impacting your health and/or sleep, you will first want to identify what is causing the stress [National Sleep Foundation]. How do you do this? Keeping a modified sleep diary is an excellent way to identify stressors and their impact on your life.

A sleep diary is simply a book you keep beside your bed that includes, at a minimum:

The time you went to sleep
The time you woke up and how you felt (i.e., “excessively tired”)
Estimated time taken to fall asleep – using qualitative measures like “not long”, “as soon as head hit pillow”, “a long time” are okay
Number of times you roused during the night, and why you woke up
Amount of coffee consumed
Amount of alcohol consumed
Amount of exercise
Other things you did during the day, including how you felt during various activities

The last point is usually not included in a sleep diary, but it is an important aspect of a sleep diary where stressors are trying to be identified. If you are diligent by spending 5-10 minutes every day with your sleep diary, you will likely be able to identify if you are getting enough sleep what stressors may be causing it.

Sleep Diaries and Stress – What to Look For

Identification of potential causes of sleep loss because of stress is an important starting point for figuring out positive coping mechanisms that will help you get better sleep.

Some things to pay attention to in your sleep diary are:

On nights when you don’t sleep well, what activities did you do throughout the day and how did you feel doing them?
Are you getting at least 7 hours of sleep consistently?
Are you feeling catastrophically tired when you wake up?
Are you rousing throughout the night?
Are you drinking excessive amounts of coffee or alcohol?

In the activity of analyzing your sleep diary, what you are looking for are patterns. Ideally, you will identify stressors that contribute to sleep loss. For example, you might identify that on particularly stressful days at work you drink a few glasses of wine in the evening, before bed, and then you don't sleep well. Since alcohol is not good for sleep, you have identified how your response to stress is contributing to sleep loss.

Yoga-Corpse-Pose Shavasana is a great meditative yoga pose to calm your nervous system before bed