Author: Gud Sleepz Team
Date:
Negative Thoughts and Sleep: Is the Search Within Us Good or Bad?
“The search for something can prove as interesting as finding it” - Paulo Coelho
My friend Anjana had a break-up and post which she has never been able to sleep. Her work suffered, she lost interest in everything and never has been the same. She told me that she often has a lot of thoughts at night which she was unable to turn off. And that made her anxious and increasingly difficult to close her eyes. This cycle of ‘negative thoughts’ is what keeps millions of us up at night.
Why is it hard to turn off negative thoughts?
Primary reason is getting stuck in a loop of negative thoughts, stress and sleeplessness. The more thoughts lead to stress and stress leads to sleeplessness and vice versa. A study found that people who often ruminate about the past or future have something called ‘Perseverative cognition’ which further ruins their overall thinking patterns. Overtime people also get habitual to such thoughts making it difficult to turn off during the night.
Research on Sleep and Negative Thoughts
Rumination Spiral: Once you start thinking a thought and you get completely immersed in it and in turn your sleep gets interrupted. And you start ruminating about sleep and the cycle continues. Exactly what happened to my friend Anjana who couldn’t turn off her mind into going into the rumination spiral.
Conditioned Arousal: You need to understand that when you are stressed for whatever reasons, you are conditioning your mind in such a way that it affects your sleep. When this conditioning i.e., stress goes away, sleep comes back to normal. Therefore, the more we associate stress with sleep, the more it becomes automatic.
Reverse conditioning: Often when you have sleepless nights, research says, it also predisposes you to develop negative thinking. So, the bad news is, if you end up being awake or lose sleep, you might turn up to be more negative in your thinking.
Emotional Regulation and Sleep: Our brains are majestic in regulating minute aspects of our lives. It tends to control the way we think, feel and behave. During sleep our body and mind goes through a restorative process and often consolidates our memories including emotional events making us more adaptable to handle negative events and build resilience. Absence of it leads to frustration, irritability and depressive states.
Managing Negative Thoughts Through Tried and Tested Methods:
Parasympathetic Activation: Always trust your nervous system as it’s simple and basic yet controls the most complex mechanisms of them all. The easiest way to ‘turn-on’ your calm mind is through breathing. A simple diaphragmatic breathing technique with 6-seconds in and 6-seconds out through the mouth can send signals to your brain to relax instantly.
Thoughts Awareness: Often we are so lost in a world of thoughts, we are unsure if those thoughts actually are a threat or not. Therefore, pay attention to the journey of narration your mind takes you in. Do not judge nor do not get immersed, be a spectator and stay vigilant. Being aware solves half of the problem.
Thought Reframing: Everyone of us likes a validating response from a friend or a loved one because it gives a perspective from a third-person's view. Same goes for this technique. Try to be a spectator and give a validating positive response. It can be like, ‘I know this is scary but similar things have happened in the past and I overcame it’. ‘I will be fine’. Reframe it when you can to avoid conditioned arousal as we discussed earlier.
Hopefully this article helped you get a new perspective about negative thinking. For more content, follow us on Gudsleepz.
Tags: meaninglessness , mental health , negative thoughts , self-help , sleep
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