Harriet Cabelly, LCSW
Therapist . Speaker . Author
In light of the fact that my recent interviewee, Priscilla Gilman said that one of her daily coping skills was getting enough sleep, I thought it quite interesting and serendipitous that I should receive a guest post submission request on the topic of…. you guessed it –Sleep. Specifically, it’s on journaling as a technique for easing our stress levels at bedtime so as to get a better night’s rest and rejuvenation for our next day.
This is my first guest writer on my blog site. I am excited to open up to a new venue.
Benefits of a Nighttime Journal on Sleep by Ryan Rivera
Sleep is one of the most important parts of curing anxiety. Sleep itself is its own anxiety reduction strategy, and when you get a full night’s sleep your body has an easier time coping with daily stresses, because it’s working as efficiently as possible and helping your brain stay focused on tasks and activities that reduce that stress.
That’s why it’s somewhat ironic that stress also tends to keep you awake. Anxiety has a strange effect on the mind that makes it much harder to get the rest you need, and unfortunately that makes it more likely you’ll struggle with stress in the future. When you’re living with anxiety, you still need to try to get sleep as best you can.
Methods to Sleep with Stress
Ideally, the best way to get back to sleep is to reduce your overall stress and anxiety. But that’s not always possible, and when it’s not, you need to find ways to sleep with stress.
Exercise can help, because it tires your muscles and stimulates relaxation hormones. Dietary changes may help as well, as can creating a boring routine. But one of the most forgotten methods of sleeping with stress is simply journaling – the act of writing in a journal or booklet before you try to sleep.
Why is Journaling Valuable?
Journaling is an often forgotten anxiety reduction tool, and a surprisingly effective one. When you write down your thoughts in a journal, you’ll often find that you become temporarily less anxious, and this gives you the opportunity to drift off to sleep.
The benefits of journaling are based on several principles. These include:
Stress doesn’t just keep you awake with stressful thoughts. Anxiety keeps you awake by simply making it hard to relax your mind. You may be thinking about your day’s worries, but you may also be thinking about what to make for dinner the next day – the issue isn’t that stress always makes you “stressed,” but that it makes it hard to simply stop focusing on any given subject.
What makes journaling so effective is that, by writing out, your mind stops feeling the desire to focus on the issue, because it knows it’s written permanently in a booklet. Often the reason your mind over-focuses is because it wants to make sure it remembers the thought. Once it’s written down, it knows it will remember and relaxes.
In a way, going to sleep is actually too calm. When you’re suffering from stress, doing nothing alone in your own thoughts can, in some ways, cause more anxiety. Journaling is an activity that keeps you out of your own thoughts, without accidentally waking yourself up like would occur with watching television or talking on the phone.
Earlier we mentioned the value of an unexciting routine. If you do the same thing every night, your brain knows that once it’s done you’re getting ready for bed, regardless of what your thoughts are. It will help you become more tired, because you’ll start associating writing in the journal with sleeping.
Finally, a journal is an outlet that doesn’t judge and is always available. When you feel like you need to vent or yell or write out your thoughts, you can do so in the journal and no one will ever read it. Many people don’t have a best friend that provides them with that level of outlet, so a journal can be a tremendous help for reducing anxiety.
An Effective Way to Sleep With Stress
Journaling will not cure your stress, but it will make sleeping with stress easier. It controls your thoughts, provides a distraction from your own worries, and gives you a permanent place to allow your mind to stop obsessing over the issues of the day. All of these can help you sleep better no matter how much anxiety you experience, and that sleep will make dealing with your anxiety much easier.
About the Author: Ryan Rivera often struggled to sleep with anxiety. Journal writing was one of his most effective outlets. He runs a website about anxiety reduction at www.calmclinic.com.
Thanks for stopping by here to read. Hopefully there’s always some take-away for you – something that speaks to you, that you might incorporate, that is of interest, that is something new, that is inspirational or educational.
