Ten Ways To Deal With Stress And Insomnia

Do you have times when stress and insomnia go together? When you’re just too keyed up and stressed out to sleep? It happens to all of us occasionally, and sometimes it can go on for several days or weeks, or even months. Here are ten tips to help you deal with stress and insomnia.

Ten Tips For Stress And Insomnia Help

1. Take a walk. Exercise helps in several ways. It decreases stress, improves stress resilience and helps burn off excess stress hormones. With stress and insomnia, you’ll want to do any vigorous exercise before late afternoon. Light exercise, like taking a walk, helps in the evening or just before going to bed.
2. Don’t take your worries into your bedroom. Don’t use your bedroom as an office or a family room. Don’t use it for anything except sleeping and sex.
3. Practice progressive muscle relaxation. This is a stress management technique that is especially helpful with stress and insomnia. Lie on your back and consciously relax each muscle, beginning with your toes. Work your way slowly upward. Hopefully, by the time you get to your head, you’ll be asleep.
4. Use visualization. Imagine yourself, as vividly as possible, somewhere warm and relaxing. Focus on putting mentally putting yourself in that place, and then visualize yourself falling asleep.
5. Don’t go right to bed. Give yourself a transition time between any stressful activity and going to bed. Do something that relaxes you for a half hour or so. That helps break the link between stress and insomnia.
6. Develop a bedtime ritual. This isn’t just for kids. A fifteen or twenty minute bedtime ritual is another way to break the link between stress and insomnia. A ritual signals your body that you are going to bed, and that helps your body shut down stress hormones.
7. Keep your bedroom dark. Your body produces melatonin in response to darkness. Melatonin helps you sleep naturally.
8. Meditate or pray. Meditation and prayer are a good way to relax before going to bed. Both practices cause your body to stop making stress hormones, and help decrease stress and insomnia.
9. Listen to music. Leave the radio on and playing soft, relaxing music.
10. And, finally, drink a glass of warm milk. This is not an old wives’ tale. Milk contains tryptophan, which helps you sleep. If it’s warm, it helps you relax. If it’s got sugar or honey in it, you absorb the tryptophan faster.

If stress and insomnia are keeping you up at night, try one or more of these tips, and see if you can get a better night’s sleep.