Getting to Sleep and Panic Attacks at Night

As most doctors will tell you, there are two things that disturb sleep: physical pain and worry.

It’s therefore understandable that many people with anxiety report frequent sleep disturbance as a major problem.

Not being able to sleep can actually be quite traumatic for many people.

The first thing you need to understand about sleep is this: it’s not the amount of sleep you get that’s important, but rather the quality of the sleep.

Quality over quantity.

I am going to give you some quick tips to help tackle any problems you are having with sleep.

Firstly, to break the insomnia cycle, begin by not presuming you will sleep! That seems like the wrong attitude, but if you approach each night as just a possible opportunity to sleep, this helps remove the pressure you are placing yourself under.

In a way, some people have performance anxiety when they think about sleeping:

“Will I be able to make myself sleep tonight?”

The answer is maybe yes, maybe no. If you’re going through a period of sleeplessness, a good night’s sleep isn’t guaranteed, for whatever reason, so you have to accept that for the moment. If you get one or two hours’ sleep, that’s well and good, and if you get nothing, then accept it and move on. Each night, as you retire, say to yourself:

“I’m preparing for bed, but I won’t try to force sleep. If it comes, it comes. If not, I won’t beat myself up over it. This is a period I’m going through, but I’ll soon return to normal sleep patterns.”

Every person goes through periods of sleeplessness from time to time. It’s very natural. You may not be aware of why you experience sleeplessness, but at the very least, you can accept it.

Let me emphasize the importance of surrendering to your inability to sleep. Surrender to whatever may or may not happen during the course of a night, and you’ll put your mind under less pressure. After a certain point, it’s really the anger and frustration that keep you awake most of the night.

Naturally the best way to get a good night’s sleep is a good physical workout each evening in the outdoors. This is very effective because the mind may try to keep you awake, but the sheer physical exhaustion brings on sleep quicker. Couple that with a willingness to accept sleeplessness, and you’ll find yourself sleeping much easier.

Remember that alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine should be avoided several hours before sleep. You may be the type who finds it initially hard to get to sleep as your mind races with anxious thoughts. Should you find your mind racing and you simply can’t achieve sleep, keep a journal beside your bed. Sit upright and start to write down how you feel:

“I’m feeling quite restless. I keep turning over and over, trying to sleep, but I have worries on my mind.”

Now write down all of your worries, for example:

“Tomorrow I have to do X, and I’m afraid I won’t be well rested, etc.”

Continue to write down your worries until the exercise actually becomes quite boring. Then your body and mind will slowly want to return to sleep. Writing like this is a simple tool for preparing your mind in a linear way to wind down and return to sleep (an advanced form of counting sheep).

Don’t be afraid of writing pages and pages of nothing in particular. What you’re doing is helping the conscious mind release whatever is keeping it awake so it can stop obsessing and return to sleep.

You see, one of the reasons we can’t fall asleep is that our mind feels these worries (whatever they are) are important to analyze over and over; they need urgent attention and therefore should be thought about all night long.

The more worked up you get by the worries, the more your body gets stimulated and the harder sleep is to achieve. Writing down all your worries on paper has the effect of saying to your mind:

“Okay, mind, you think these are important. I’ve written them all down in detail. They won’t be forgotten, I promise. I can come back to them tomorrow and deal with them then-but RIGHT NOW, let’s sleep.”

The mind can be like a small child who just needs reassurance that things will be dealt with and looked after. That’s all it needs to let go of these mental worries. You then discover, in the morning, that almost all of the worries or concerns aren’t big issues. Many of our worries are the workings or an overactive imagination.

Dr. Dennis Gersten of San Diego suggests an approach that is effective for particularly restless nights. You may want to experiment with it the next time you are very restless in bed.

Try the following:

-As you lie there in bed, start by remembering a time in your life when you absolutely had to stay awake! Maybe it was an important exam you were studying for and you had to keep cramming through the night.

Maybe it was staying up all night nursing your baby to sleep. Maybe it was when you were traveling through the night on a bus and needed to stay awake in case you missed your stop.

I am sure there have been many different occasions in your life where you had to force yourself to stay awake.

-Remember the weariness and the effort just to keep your eyes open. Remember how your eyelids felt like lead weights and you wished you could close them, even just for a minute. At that time, you could not give in to your urge to fall asleep; you had to fight hard to stay awake. Relive those memories and really try and remember exactly what that felt like.

-Now think about right now, and how good it feels to actually be in bed with no pressing need to stay awake. Think how much you would have given to be where you are now, lying in your bed with your head resting on the pillow and the complete freedom you have to fall asleep. It feels really good to actually have full permission to fall asleep right now.

There are no demands on you to stay awake. With your eyes closed spend a few more minutes remembering that time.

-End of exercise.

Night Panic Attacks

People with anxiety disorders can sometimes be awakened at night by panic attacks. We know that most nighttime panic attacks aren’t caused by dreams. Records of sleep polysomnographia show that most panic attacks take place during the early sleep phase (phase II), not during the REM phase associated with dreams. This is different from nightmares. Nightmares happen during the second half of the night, so we’re often able to remember the content of these dreams.

It’s important not to go to bed fearing you might have a panic attack. Go to bed confident that if one should arise, you’ll successfully deal with it. That way, you don’t put yourself under pressure to NOT have a panic attack. Many panic attacks are experienced at the very moment of falling asleep.

If you wake with a panic attack, implement the One Move Technique as outlined in  Panic Away course. (See end of email)

Here’s a description a woman recently gave of her experience:

“Getting to sleep is a real problem. Just as I’m about to drop off to sleep, my body seems to jolt awake, like an electric shock, which then frightens me and keeps me awake for hours.”

This jolt is called a hypnic jerk, or hypnagogic massive jerk. A hypnic jerk usually occurs just as the person enters sleep. People often describe it as a falling sensation or an electric shock, and it’s a completely normal experience. It’s most common when we’re sleeping uncomfortably or overtired.

There’s been little research on the subject, but there are some theories as to why hypnic jerks occur. When we drift off into sleep, the body undergoes changes in temperature, breathing, and muscle relaxation. The hypnic jerk may be a result of the muscles relaxing. The brain misinterprets this as a sign of falling, and it signals our limbs to wake up, hence the jerking legs or arms.

People turn hypnic jerks into panic attacks because they already feel nervous about their condition and the jolt scares them into thinking something bad is happening. Again, it’s a fearful reaction to a sensation.

Usually when these people wake up, they gasp for air, and this can also turn into a fear of a breathing problem while sleeping. If you jolt awake with panic, then simply understanding the nature of a hypnic jerk can strip away the anxiety from the experience.

Reassure yourself that you’re safe and that the jerk isn’t something to worry about. It doesn’t disrupt your bodily functions, and it doesn’t put you in any danger.

That concludes the Anxiety Mini Series.

I hope you have been able to take something from it. I want to leave you with a few last comments. All too often people with anxiety are pressurized to end their anxiety. People pass remarks like:

“I wish you could just snap out of your anxiety”.

Although people mean well, these type of comments are not helpful. People don’t just think one thought and snap out of anxiety. There is a step by step process of removing the illusion that anxiety creates and for some this can take time where the anxiety has been present for many years.

As this is the last of the mini email series I really want to impress upon you that anxiety is curable. What you must never stop doing is searching for the right approach for you. By the way I hope I have not come across too strong in pushing my course Panic Away. I am excited by the results it gets and that is why I talked about it frequently.

After many years working in this area I am now more convinced than ever that every single person, regardless of how severe, can end their anxiety problem. If you have a thought that is telling you different then you need to lose that thought.

From Barry Joe McDonagh

If you want to learn more about my work then visit the following link:

www.panicaway.com

Never stop trying, never give up. That is the best you can do.

Do you fear a panic attack could strike at any moment?

Sometimes people have the impression that their experience of anxiety is like being hooked up to an electroshock machine and that it just takes a flick of the anxiety switch to cause a flood leading to a full blown panic attack.

People in this situation often feel that are lucky to make it through the day without that switch been flicked but in the back of their mind they fear that it could happen at any moment day or night. They remain on high alert anticipating it. Anticipating the big one!

In fact most people who experience panic attacks fear it in this manner. It is natural for people to think this way as often the panic attacks come forcefully out of the blue.

The truth of the situation is however different. A panic attack does not lurk in the background waiting to pounce, it can feel that way in your mind if you are anxious but that is not how it really works.

Panic attacks are actually something we decide to initiate when we feel out of control. It begins possibly with a skipped heart beat or tightness around the chest, it is then that your mind fires off a thought warning that these sensations are very unusual and signal a dangerous event that needs urgent medical attention or else…

The thought that triggers almost all panic attacks is :

“This is too much , I cannot handle this,” Then the adrenaline starts to really pump.

“Ah I was right look my body is going into a fit…
“I am terrified by what is about to happen…HELP,- PANIC… !”

The severity of the panic attack is directly related to how you are feeling at that time. If you are exhausted physically, mentally or emotionally then you are more vulnerable to feeling anxious.

After the panic attack has run its course, it is followed by a prolonged period of general anxiety. During this time the person fears that the panic switch might go off again at any moment sending them into another tailspin of high anxiety.

When you feel this way it is very difficult to force a relaxed state of mind through will power (as some other methods would have you do).

So what can you do to stop the mind overreacting to these situations and not initiate the panic attack? Well most of this is about your mind reacting to false signals, so the trick is to train yourself to recognize these false signals for what they and thus shatter the illusion that there is a danger.

There is something very powerful in human psychology and that is the power of giving yourself totally to something. By that I mean, when we make a resolute decision to go for something results are immediate.

In this case you are going for the goal of an anxiety free life. You reach a point where you are completely fed up with this condition and that mindset can produce a real breakthrough. Remember anxiety holds us prisoner because we give it authority. We give it control because it threatens us with terror/death if we do not obey.

Turn this situation on its head. Really chase after the anxiety. It is the anticipation of having a panic attack that keeps you in a general state of anxiety, -so end the anticipation.

There is an element of throwing all caution to the wind to make this fully effective. You abandon yourself to the fear of a panic attack. Sometimes the best way is to get really mad at the terror and say:

“OK come on do your worst- and it better be very strong because I will not have this ruining the rest of my life”


“My life and the people in it are more important than this false fear could ever be, so do your worst because I have had enough.”

The minute you really throw yourself at a panic attack it disappears. It disappears because what was keeping it alive was your fear of having one.
Now you are not afraid in fact you are actually demanding to have a really Big Bad One NOW
DO that right now!
To make this really work you have to throw yourself at the anxiety 100%
-No coming back-

Don’t worry about having an off the scale ‘gigantic’ panic attack. I bet you have already had the very worst panic attack you will ever experience again. That is because the worst panic attacks are generally always the first few as you have no idea at all what is happening to you.
Ignorance in those moments is not bliss.
What I am trying to say is that there is no ‘ultimate’ panic attack waiting in the background that will finally push you over the edge.
Trust and believe that you will always be able to handle the anxious sensations each and every time. You will.
What you get by following my advice is confidence that you can in fact easily handle the anxious sensations.
Confidence is so crucial to tackling this problem. Anxiety can be likened to a fog that we must travel through in order to move beyond the fear of what may be on the other side. When we fail to move through it, the fear will linger and limit us from achieving all the things we would like to accomplish with our lives.

Click here to learn more about Panic

Panic Attack Solutions - Effective Techniques For Preventing Panic Attacks

Panic or anxiety attacks are any sudden wave of fear that overcomes a person often without warning. Panic attacks are typically accompanied by shortness or breath and increased heart rate. Feelings typically associated with panic attacks include dread, desperation, fear, loneliness and may even be as extreme as feeling like dying. Oftentimes, people who suffer from anxiety attacks become so fearful of when and how long their next panic attack could be that the increased anxiety that results from worrying about their next attack can actually create the perfect storm of conditions for their next attack to occur. It becomes a vicious cycle of worrying about an attack which leads to an actual attack which creates further stress and worry about the next attack which leads to the next attack. In order to begin living panic attack free it is necessary to break this vicious cycle.

Although there are many possible panic attack solutions, including breathing exercises, as well as mental exercises, the effectiveness of any of these techniques is dependent upon how successful the sufferer is at breaking the vicious cycle of worry, panic anxiety mentioned in the last paragraph. In order to start the process of healing, it is necessary to isolate and stop the triggers that lead to your panic attacks. Once you have identified these panic triggers, you can then isolate and stop them. The result is that you will be able to prevent any future panic attacks from happening even before they start.

The first step to identifying your panic triggers and coming up with your own panic attack solutions is to write down exactly where you were and what you were doing before your most recent anxiety attack. A good practice to get into is to write down as much information as you can immediately after a panic attack. Once you have relaxed sufficiently, write down as much as you can remember about what you were doing just prior to the attack. After you have done this several times, you should then try to identify any common factors that exist just prior to the onset of each of your anxiety attacks. You should start to see some things in common about each scenario of what you were doing just prior to each one of your attacks. This is a great technique to get in the habit of doing consistently no matter how difficult or how much you don't feel like doing it.

Many people have said that keeping a notebook with them at all times is very helpful is identifying their own personal triggers. It's up to each one of you to be diligent about writing down enough information regarding each of your attacks to develop a profile or baseline about what your own personal triggers happen to be. Interestingly enough, although these are unique to each person, there is some overlap among everyone who suffers from any type of panic disorder. Keep striving to identify these triggers and treat each panic attack as another opportunity to get closer to finding your own personal solution to preventing and avoiding these attacks in the future.


One of the most effective panic attack solutions is to now isolate these factors. What you should see as time goes on is a number of factors in common. These common factors that exist just prior to each of your attacks are your panic triggers. The final step is to now eliminate these panic triggers from your life. The result will be that without these triggers in your life you will effectively be able to prevent any future anxiety attacks - or at least the attacks that are the direct result of the triggers you have now eliminated. By constantly performing the techniques mentioned above you will eventually have isolated any and all of your personal triggers. Avoiding these triggers will ultimately prevent you from ever having another anxiety attack. Just remember stopping panic attacks is something that anyone can do. The solution to your panic attacks is within you! Stay healthy. 
By William Gere