Coping with Nighttime Anxiety for Better Sleep

13th September 2024 0 Comments

Dr David Garley from The Better Sleep Clinic explores why parents often struggle to get back into a healthy sleeping routine after having children, even when their baby or child is sleeping well.

How to manage anxious thoughts that occur at night.

Stress worry and anxiety are the three chief enemies of sleep. Such anxious thoughts can take many forms.

Commonly these involve lying awake and waiting for your child to cry, or having more anxious thoughts about your child in general.

Constructive worry

It’s natural for a loving parent to be concerned for their child’s well-being. However, there may be times when this concern creeps out of proportion and stops you from sleeping.

If you have spent a long time and put in a lot of effort getting your child back into a healthy sleeping pattern then it is quite natural to find yourself worrying that the sleep problem might return or lying vigilantly awake listening out for crying. Or sometimes you are listening out for any sound or noise at all, such as a creaking floorboard from next door, or a noise from outside. This vigilance is not helpful – it won’t impact your child’s health and can stop you from sleeping.

An effective approach for dealing with this is called ‘constructive worry’. This acknowledges that some anxious thoughts about your child’s health are reasonable, but it allows you to have these concerns in a more sustainable way that interferes less with your sleep.

A few hours before you go to sleep ideally after you have put your child to bed, give yourself 20 minutes or so to sit down with a piece of paper or a book and write down things about your child’s health that are on your mind.
Acknowledge that you have spent a lot of effort getting your child back to sleeping again, and be honest about how much this might be on your mind. Write down any fears you might have about the sleep problem coming back. Write down what a constructive approach would be if that happens – such as acknowledging that sleep problems are temporary issues with children, and that help on hand to get children back sleeping well.
If your child has recently been sleeping well, then make sure you acknowledge this in the book. Spend time thinking about anything else that is on your mind. Then, once you have come to the end of the 20 or so minutes, write down a time the following day, when you will think about these worries again.
You can now symbolically close the book. This way, when any concerns about your child come up in the night – either worrying about them crying, or about them in general, then you can think “I know I have these things to think about. They are important, and I will think about them, but not now when I’m trying to sleep”.
This is a very powerful way to clear your mind when you are trying to sleep.

If you feel you need more help with managing anxious thoughts about sleep, then it might be worth booking in with an adult sleep clinic. The most effective treatment for these sleep problems is cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, which The Better Sleep Clinic offers via online video sessions.

To find out more visit www.thebettersleepclinic.co.uk

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