Sleep Anxiety: Why Your Nervous System Won't Let You Sleep (Part 1)

Sleep anxiety is one of the most common experiences for people living with chronic stress, anxiety, and dysregulation. In Part 1 of this three-part series, Amanda breaks down why the nervous system is at the center of sleep disruption, the difference between not being able to fall asleep and middle-of-the-night wake-ups, and the primary drivers behind nighttime anxiety. This is the understanding episode — Part 2 brings the tools, and Part 3 is a guided wind-down practice.

3 Takeaways:

• Sleep requires safety, not effort. Your nervous system won't let you go offline until it believes the coast is clear. Sleep disruption during chronic stress isn't a flaw — it's your system doing its job. The path forward is building safety, not trying harder.
• There are two distinct flavors of sleep anxiety and they feed each other. Not being able to fall asleep and waking in the night share the same root — a nervous system that hasn't received the signal that it's safe to rest.
• If the middle-of-the-night wake-up is consistent, it's not random. Four primary drivers are worth understanding: dysregulated cortisol, unprocessed stress, conditioned arousal, and blood sugar instability. Knowing which applies to you is where the work starts.

CLICK HERE for the full show notes, resources, and 3 tangible takeaways!

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Website: https://www.regulatedliving.com/podcast

Email: amanda@regulatedliving.com

Instagram: @amandaontherise

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amandaontherise

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Regulate and Rewire, an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences, and tangible research-based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind, and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. Today and over the next couple weeks, we are going to talk about sleep anxiety. And this is another conversation in response to a listener who wrote in asking, quote, can you do an episode on sleep anxiety? How to manage it when it happens in the middle of the night, the spiraling thoughts, the tight chest, et cetera. Also, anxiety about falling asleep and staying asleep, end quote. So this person is asking about two very common but distinctly different things when it comes to anxiety around sleep. Some people struggle with both, and some people struggle with one or the other. The first being not being able to fall asleep in the first place. So the minute you lay your head down, ooh, thoughts are spinning, you can't fall asleep. The other is these middle-of-the-night wakeups. And while there are many common contributing factors to why somebody might struggle with both or either of these, they also have some independent and distinct contributing factors as well. And because this is a conversation, this is a very common struggle with folks who listen in on this podcast, but also people that we work with. I, like I said, am going to turn this into a little mini-series. So today is part one, where we are going to focus on understanding what's actually happening, the why behind sleep anxiety. Part two next week is going to be more about tools and solutions, suggestions. And then part three will be a standalone, guided wind down practice that you can just come to whenever, however, as often as you need to. Hit play if it is supportive and helping you wind down to get better sleep. I wanted to give you a tangible practice similar to the ones that I have inside my regulated living membership for you to use at your disposal. So let's start by painting this picture of sleep anxiety. It's 2 a.m. You're awake, either you never really fell asleep, or you suddenly woke up feeling anxious. Maybe you're laying there staring at the ceiling, maybe your chest is tight, you're tossing and turning. Maybe you're like me, where your mind uses this as an opportunity to go a hundred miles an hour. I also oftentimes will lay there. And about every 20, 30 minutes or so, I do the math equation. I'm like, okay, if I fall asleep right now, this is how much sleep I could get before my alarm goes off in the morning. And all that does is just add to the worry about how tired I'm gonna be tomorrow. And the harder I try to fall asleep, the more awake I often feel. So if this sounds familiar for you or somebody that you know and love, then this episode, this conversation is for you. Today, again, we're gonna talk about why this happens. So, what's actually going on in your mind, your body, in your nervous system, and what makes these two experiences of sleep anxiety similar, but then also what makes them distinct. So, one caveat I will add before we start is that if you have a significant diagnosed sleep disorder, please, please, please, please, please default to working with your provider on that. What I am covering in this series is the nervous system component to sleep anxiety, which is relevant for a huge portion of people who struggle with sleep, including those with diagnosable sleep disorders, but it may have limitations within a true clinical sleep issue. So let's get into it by starting with understanding how sleep works. If we are gonna understand sleep anxiety, we need to know just how sleep works on a physiological level and how our nervous system plays at the center of it. So, what you need to know first is that your nervous system doesn't know the difference between a real threat and an imagined one. Our body's stress response is a very generic experience. It simply reads chemicals and state change and hormones. So I'll make this tangible with an analogy. I want you to imagine for a second that there is an actual tiger in your closet. Assuming you're not in animal rescue and that's not a foster tiger that you raised from a pup, that's a very real threat. Nobody wants to have a wild feral tiger in their closet in their bedroom while they're trying to sleep. And even if your friend told you, like, hey, it's probably fine, just go to sleep. The tiger's probably tired too. Just knowing that there is a tiger there has already pumped adrenaline into your system. So it makes complete sense that falling asleep is going to be hard. And even, even if you were so exhausted that you finally did just pass out, you succumbed to that darkness, your sleep is not going to be very restful. You're gonna stay in lighter stages of sleep, you're gonna wake up more frequently, and that's your nervous system's way of saying, like, hey, double check. Has the tiger crept out yet? Is it licking its lips? Okay, you can go back and rest, but only lightly because in a minute I'm gonna wake you up and say, hey, check again, check your surroundings. Are we safe? Are we safe enough to sleep? Because here's the thing: your nervous system, again, cannot tell the difference between adrenaline from a possible tiger in your closet and the residual still pumping adrenaline from a stressful day, from an intense TV show you just watched, or a conflict that you are worried about in your head that you have to deal with or face tomorrow, all it reads is activation. And when that activation doesn't have a way or a time or a place to settle before you go to bed, the light sleep, the spinning thoughts, that restlessness in your body is an appropriate response. Your nervous system has to believe that you are safe enough to become unconscious. And when you are chronically dysregulated, your mind-body system is not receiving signals that it's safe to truly power down and rest. It is still scanning, it is still watching. And this is why some nights, even if you get enough hours of sleep, you still wake up exhausted. And this is usually happening because you are not getting enough of your REM or deep sleep, but instead staying in these lighter stages or for whatever reason have fragmented sleep cycles. So your sleep is never settling enough, your system is never settling enough for that true restorative rest to happen. So when someone says, I can't turn my brain off at night, what they are often really describing is a nervous system stuck in activation, one that has not received enough safety signals to downshift into rest. Something I say often here on the podcast is your state determines your story. When we are in a more activated state, 80% of these mind-body signals, they are originating from our body. When our body is jazzed, when it's activated, it is creating a similar experience in our mind. Also, sometimes when we do have genuine worries and thoughts and those are activating, it can turn up the volume on activation in our body. So working with our mind and our body is something we're going to talk a lot about in part two when it comes to the solutions and the tools to help you really find resolve with sleep anxiety. But this ultimately is why sleep problems are one of the most common things that we see in people dealing with chronic stress or anxiety. That's not a coincidence, it's basic physiology. When your stress bucket is full, when your nervous system is running hot, sleep is one of the first things that we struggle with. And at its most basic level, quality sleep requires safety. And safety requires a nervous system that's actually received the signals that it is okay to power down. If your nervous system doesn't feel safe, it is not gonna let you go offline. And no amount of melatonin or white noise is going to override that signal, which is why we're gonna talk about how oftentimes good sleep tonight started this morning. Good sleep tomorrow is gonna start with how you wind down tonight and allowing yourself to move through your day intentionally in both a mindset-based way, but also in a physiological way to prepare you for rest at the appropriate time. Now, another situation or experience around sleep that some of you might relate to is what I had experienced for many years. I would have told you for most of the decade of my 20s into my early 30s, I would have told you that I was a great sleeper. I would have told you that the minute my head hit the pillow, I was out. And while that was true, I never felt fully rested. That experience is something that I now call blackout sleep. And it was from exhaustion. It was not healthy physiological rest. I was essentially running my system into the ground to the point where anytime I would watch a movie or listen to a podcast or set my head on the pillow, didn't matter what time of day, who I was with, I passed out cold. My body was so desperate for a reset. I think I could count on maybe a single hand how many actual dreams I remembered throughout my 20s. It truly was this exhaustive blackout. And as I started to come out of survival mode, I went through a long period of time where that blackout sleep became more anxious sleep. And while that was really, really annoying, it was actually a good sign. It meant that I was moving from the bottom, that shutdown place on the nervous system ladder, up towards a more regulated state. I was moving from less exhausted to more mobilized. And while for me that was a much more annoying experience, and I it felt like I was going backwards in my mental health and in my healing journey, it actually meant that I was moving through. So sometimes, it's just a reminder that sometimes things do get a little bit harder before they get easier. And that's not always, that's not always a bad sign. I've digressed. Let's get back on track. So there are these two distinct experiences that I have mentioned when it comes to anxiety and sleep. And I want to name them separately, talk about them separately because they feel different. They are driven by slightly different things. And what helps one may be a little different than the other. So the first one I'll talk about is not being able to fall asleep in the first place. It's like the act of putting your head on the pillow flips a switch and suddenly you have a million thoughts racing through your mind. You're exhausted, you want to sleep, but your brain has decided that right now is the perfect time to process everything that has ever happened and also pre-worry about everything that ever could happen. I've also had this experience where it didn't even feel like my mind was racing, but my body was so restless. I could not get comfortable. I was tossing and turning. And this can happen for a few reasons. Maybe it's that your daily life or a particular situation is creating more stress than your nervous system has had a chance to process. And so your day is go, go, go, go, go. The situation feels urgent. And the only quiet time your brain gets is when you finally lay down. And so it takes that window to kind of open think. A few weeks ago, we talked about how I've started doing kind of like walk and thinks. I am walking unplugged, no headphones, so that my daily walk can be an opportunity for my brain to process and just think about whatever it needs to think about and process about instead of when my head hits the pillow. Another reason that this can happen, this anxiety or restlessness that you feel, this just the struggle to fall asleep at night, can also be because your circadian rhythms are off. And one of the most impactful and underrated things that you can do to help keep a consistent circadian rhythm is actually has nothing to do with the end of the day. And it's about keeping a consistent wake time, not bedtime, wake time. And that is a really powerful physiological anchor to set your entire sleep and wake cycle. And we'll talk more about that next week. And then there is what I call or what is called anticipatory sleep anxiety. So this is anxiety about sleep itself. So the dread that starts before bed, the thoughts that follow you all day. I hope I can sleep tonight, the way that you start monitoring yourself as it starts getting later in the day. Like, am I tired yet? Am I tired yet? Can I get in bed yet? If I if I do get in bed, am I tired enough to fall asleep? What if I can't fall asleep? What if I wake up again and then my thoughts are spiraling? And then you get into bed and your nervous system, which has been absorbing that anxious anticipation all day, is now fully activated when you need it to be at its most, at its most chill and it's not chill. And oftentimes when this is something you know you struggle with, you're checking all the boxes. You're like, the room is dark, the room is cold, the room is quiet, the sound machine is on. I took my melatonin. Sleep becomes something that you try to control instead of something that just happens for you. Again, sleep, quality sleep is a byproduct of regulation. It is a byproduct of enough safety cues. It's a byproduct of timing, of sunlight in our eyeballs, of movement throughout the day. And if too many of those things are off, there's no amount of darkness, cool room, sound machine on that's going to be able to force quality sleep. And sometimes that trying part is what can add to the anxiety and keep you up. So let's move on to talking about this second flavor of sleep anxiety, which is the middle of the night wakeups. So maybe you fall asleep okay, but somewhere, usually between like 1 and 4 a.m., you are suddenly wide awake. It could be anywhere from you woke up mid full-on panic attack to you just woke up. And since you're awake, maybe you'll get up and you'll go pee. And then you come back to bed and you think maybe you'll be able to fall back asleep. And then the anxiety or then the restlessness starts to increase. So moving around a lot, then maybe you have a tight chest, then you maybe have some racing thoughts that are life-related or maybe they're sleep-related. Oh my gosh, I can't go back to bed. If I can't go back to bed, then I'm gonna be so tired for this thing that I have tomorrow. And unlike lying awake before bed, the middle of the night version often comes with, like I just mentioned, that additional layer of dread, right? Because you're not just anxious, you're also doing that calculating. How much sleep have I lost? How tired am I gonna be tomorrow? And so these two experiences, they feed into each other. And when they combine, oh, sleep starts to feel a lot less like rest and a lot more like threat. And so our brain makes this association that oftentimes creates that anticipatory sleep we just talked about when we have negative interactions or negative experiences around sleep more often than positive. Now sleep itself or trying to go to sleep becomes a threat. So I want to go now a couple layers deeper on the nighttime wakeups specifically, because I think understanding or at least putting on your radar a couple things that could be driving it might change how you respond to it. And there are four primary causes that I see and that research tends to support. And so I'm gonna share a brief overview of some of the four most common causes for this middle of the night wake up. I'll also in this episode, I know next week we're talking more about the solutions, but I'm gonna share a couple brief minimizers for each of these that you can think about now, and then we'll go deeper, deeper into those solutions next week. So the first one is your cortisol. So your cortisol is your primary stress hormone and it follows a natural curve. So it is lowest in early sleep, and it starts to rise in the second half of the night to prepare you for waking. So if you are under a lot of chronic stress, that cortisol curve is often really dysregulated. It can spike too early, which can pull you out of sleep, flooding your system with that activation in the middle of the night. Um, when we talk about cortisol, people often look at this as a negative thing. But we actually want a very clear, a very strong morning cortisol awakening response. And next week I'll talk about a few things that you can do to create that. But if you know that cortisol being in an unnatural pattern contributes to your middle of the day waking up, a minimizer here is to address your overall stress load. And I want to be clear that it's not about a bedtime routine fix. It is about assessing your daily life, what's filling your stress bucket, what habits are promoting a healthy cortisol curve versus which ones aren't. The more regulated your nervous system becomes during the day, the more likely your cortisol is to follow this healthy curve into the night. Then the second reason is that the night removes distractions. So during the day, you have tasks, you have screens, conversations, you have movement, you have a ton of inputs that keep your nervous system really occupied. Well, at 2 a.m., there is nothing to help you metabolize your stress response. Your thoughts have nowhere to go but to stay inward and spiral. The things that you were too busy to feel during the day are now front and center. So, a minimizer here, if you know that you have this brain racing experience when you wake up at 2 a.m., this could be to build intentional processing time into your day. This could be a regulation practice, like I mentioned before, a walk without a podcast, talking things out with a friend or coaching or therapy, so that you're not carrying a full week's worth of unprocessed stressors to bed with you every single night. Then the third, the third one I'll talk about. For a lot of people, the night has become a learned context for anxiety. And I just nodded to this a moment ago. So your nervous system is incredibly good at associating context with these nervous system states. So if you've spent enough nights lying awake, anxious, and activated, your nervous system has started to learn that your bed equals threat. Dark and quiet equals stress or danger. This is called a conditioned arousal response. And it's one of the main drivers for chronic anxiety. So a minimizer here, if this is something that feels resonant for you, would be to have a consistent wind-down routine where your nervous system can learn to recognize certain safety cues. So the same sequence, same environment, same signals every night. This is exactly why childhood experts emphasize bedtime routines so much for babies and young kids. So the bath, the book, the song, because over time, that routine itself cues your nervous system into a settling experience. And we see that as important for children. And we often forget it can be just as important for us as adults. So a recommendation here could be to add a wind down. Maybe it's a warm shower, a warm bath, and I'll briefly expand on the bath part of it. So for kids and for adults, why it's recommended to do like a wind down warm bath or shower, maybe 60 to 90 minutes before bed, is because it works through something called passive body heating. So essentially, warming up the body triggers a rapid cooling effect when you get out. And this lowers your core body temperature and signals to your brain to release melatonin and begin the sleep cycle. So if you are somebody This would also apply if you have a hard time falling asleep. Try a warm bath or shower 60 to 90 minutes before bed and see if that starts to make a difference in kind of emphasizing a higher release of melatonin into your system. And now the last one I'll talk about that I think is the most overlooked for these middle of the night wakeups, and it can actually be blood sugar related. So in the early morning hours, if your blood sugar drops too low, your body releases cortisol and adrenaline to help bring it back up. So that hormonal surge is what can oftentimes pull you out of sleep. And when this happens, you wake up feeling activated. So if you are somebody who's like, I wake up in the middle of a panic or an anxiety attack, I wake up and I'm my heart is already pounding. This might be playing into that. Because physiologically, you've experienced some activation. We have just pumped cortisol and adrenaline into your system, not because of stress, but to pull your blood sugar back up. And so when you wake up and you're feeling this experience in your body, your brain does what brains do and it scrambles to explain why you feel that way. Therefore, cue the thought spiral. Is there a tiger in my closet? Is somebody mad at me? Should I be more nervous about this work presentation tomorrow? What about my kids? Not because the thought spiral is the thing that woke you up or is keeping you awake, but because you woke up, your body was activated, and your brain is trying to assign meaning to that sensation. So if this is consistently happening for you, usually specifically between 2 and 4 a.m., it blood sugar might be worth exploring. And a simple thing to try could be to have a small protein and fat-oriented snack before bed. So nothing heavy, just enough to stabilize blood sugar through the night. Something like a small handful of nuts, maybe a spoonful of almond butter, hard-boiled egg, could even be like a few slices of deli meat. And if you have tried that consistently for a couple weeks and the pattern continues, there might be something else going on. If you notice that it takes the edge off a little bit, okay, it could have been a blood sugar thing. Functional lab work is also something that could give you a clearer picture around blood sugar regulation. All right, there's one more thing I want to name before we close out part one on this series because I think it pretty, pretty regularly applies to both flavors of sleep anxiety. And it's something that almost everyone with sleep anxiety experiences. And that is at 2 a.m., your thoughts will feel more true and more urgent and more catastrophic than they actually are. And this is not because your thoughts are that. Your thoughts and the things that you're thinking about don't suddenly become urgent and catastrophic and true because it's 2 a.m. It is because your prefrontal cortex, your rational reasoning brain, is less online in the middle of the night. More often it's your nervous system that's running the show. So thoughts generated by a dysregulated nervous system at 2 a.m., those thoughts are not reliable narrators. You do not have to believe those thoughts. And I promise you are not the best problem solver for those thoughts at 2 a.m. And one really simple script that helped a recent client was quote, this is my nervous system doing its job. I am safe. This is temporary. I don't have to solve anything right now. So not bypassing the fact that you feel anxious, not bypassing the fact that you do have these thoughts running through your head. But one of our clients said that just thinking, okay, whatever it was that woke them up in the middle of the night, hey, my nervous system and my brain, they're just doing their job. I'm safe. I'm safe. I'm safe. I don't have to solve anything right now. I don't have to figure this out right now. And for them, what they've been practicing recently is almost just repeating that in their mind. I don't have to solve anything right now. Things are figure outable. I don't have to figure this out now, while they layered in some of the breathing practices or somatic practices that they know help their system to wind down. And in this, reminding you about those three C's of safety. So your nervous system is looking for context, choice, and connection in any given moment to determine how many safety inputs it has. You can offer all three of those to yourself in the middle of the night. You can give yourself context for what's happening. That's my hope for what you've learned in this conversation today. Hey, my nervous system's activated. That's all. Maybe my blood sugar is low. That's all. You can remind yourself that you have choices. Hey, I can breathe. I can get up. I don't have to stay in bed tossing and turning. I don't have to think about this. I can go to the bathroom. I can go get a glass of water. There are choices I have here. Or in those moments, is there a way you can reach for connection? Maybe there's a partner or a pet in bed. Maybe you can use something cozy or comforting as a resource, even connecting internally to a past version of yourself who has gotten through hard nights before. All right, friend, those are the points that I wanted to make with you today. Next week is part two, where we are going to get into what to actually do. I know I gave a couple feelers of what to do today, but we're going to talk in more depth of what to do when you can't fall asleep or when you wake up in the middle of the night. And I will walk you through kind of full toolkits of cognitive, somatic, and practical tools organized by one and how to use them. And then part three is going to be that standalone guided wind-down practice, probably about 10 minutes, something that you could use any or every night if it feels helpful for you. All right, let's wrap up today with our three takeaways. Number one, your nervous system has to believe it is safe enough to power down to get quality sleep. So safety, safety, safety. Number two, there are two distinct flavors of sleep anxiety that we talked about today, and they often feed each other. The first is not being able to fall asleep, and the second is waking up in the middle of the night. Now, these sometimes have slightly different drivers, but they share a lot of the same route. Number three, if the middle of the night wakeups are happening consistently, that's not random. So there are those four primary drivers we talked about that are worth, I think, understanding or exploring. Could it be dysregulated cortisol, unprocessed stress, finding its window in the middle of the night, conditioned arousal, or blood sugar instability? And understanding which one or ones are the most relevant for you could be the first step towards really targeted actions to help you get more rest and better sleep. All right, friend. Until next week, I am sending hope and healing your way.