[Allie fowler]

Hi, my concern is frequently waking throughout the night. I feel like I have tried just about everything I can think of to help with this but nothing seems to work completely for me, I’m now thinking maybe I’m over thinking it all and trying to control it so much that it is making me anxious. When I wake in the night ( which is often 4-5 times) I practice mindfulness to try to get back to sleep. This is having some relief as I do think when I wake I am hyper alert and my mind is racing. My naturopath is also helping me with food intolerance diets and supplements but this doesn’t work for long. Sometimes I feel like I my have had a break through and then I relapse. I have been this way for as long as I can remember but certainly in the last 18 years around the time I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (coincidence ??). Searching through social media brought me to this site….wish me luck 🙂

[Nao]

Hi, I have the same issue. I think part of it for me is that I eat and drink water and a protein shake often late at night and close to bedtime. But even when I don’t drink a lot before bed, I find myself waking more often. When I do, my mind is often on high alert and I have anxiety. I often have to go to the bathroom too every time I wake up, or at least I feel like I might, so I go anyway. Even when my sleep has improved, this is still an issue. I’d love more advice and help on the frequent waking and the psychological anxiety that persists.

[Martin Reed]

A key point you made was that when you wake, you practice mindfulness to try to get back to sleep. This sounds like a sleep effort because you are doing something with the express intention of generating sleep.

We have absolutely no control over sleep. We cannot make ourselves fall asleep or fall back to sleep. Whenever we do something in a bid to try to sleep, we generate arousal and this makes sleep more difficult.

When we believe we can generate sleep we can also go down the rabbit hole of experimenting with different rituals, different diets, and different supplements. However, this doesn’t work since nothing can generate sleep other than being awake for long enough. The more effort we put into sleep, the longer we need to be awake to generate enough sleep drive to overpower the arousal system.

Abandoning all effort to make sleep happen or to generate sleep is, perhaps ironically, the best way to improve sleep. Of course, it’s also often easier said than done — and this is where cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) techniques can be so helpful since they redirect our efforts into setting the stage for sleep rather than trying to directly generate sleep.

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