Sleep anxiety - please help!

[Sally101]

Hi there, I suffer from severe sleep anxiety. It reared its head last May out of the blue - causing a month or so of chronic anxiety, a bit of depression and hopelessness. I felt like I would feel like it forever. I ended up going on antidepressants which immediately helped and had sound sleeps and manageable anxiety for the next 7 months. In December I came off them but instantly became anxious with no sleep again, going back on the same ones didn't help and am now on another but it hasn't had the same effect. I may sleep well for 3 nights then have 5 terrible nights and my anxiety during the day consumes me. I've tried meditation work shops, yoga, I've been seeing a sleep psychologist for the last 7 months but nothing seems to be helping. Sleeping pills are the only things that get me to sleep on bad nights but they seem to make me just as anxious as having no sleep. I'm at my wits end, it's really interfering with work and my day to day anxiety is incontrollable - any advice possibly would be greatly appreciated 🙂

[Neil_1]

Hi Sally

Welcome to Beyond Blue and thank you for coming here and posting.

Sleep is such a huge thing for us.  It’s so vitally important and I guess we all know that.

It’s great that you’ve been so pro-active about it and trying to fix it all – but now I’m wondering whether a ‘sleep psychologist’ is like or similar to a regular psychologist (I wonder if there is such a thing as regular, garden-variety psychologists?).  But when I say this, what I’m meaning is that for everyone, sure we may go along to a psychologist (or psychiatrist) but that doesn’t mean that we might find a good connection with them.

We are all different, as in indeed are these professionals.

So a long story short here, I’m just wondering whether you had a good repour with your sleep psych, and maybe that could be why you felt that you didn’t receive the kind of help you were expecting (or hoping for)?

I actually have medication that I need to take at a night-time that is for my anxiety (and ptsd) but it’s needed at night time as it has the very beneficial side-effect of drowsiness or basically that they just help me get to sleep.  If not for these, I would be in a very bad way, as I suffer very badly from insomnia – I guess like so many people as well.

I just wonder whether it might be a time to head back to your GP to see if there’s other alternatives that they may be able to suggest for you?

Neil

[Agnetha]

oh sally I'm sorry to hear about your irregular sleep patterns. I suffer insomnia too and if I don't take a certain sleeping pill, really struggle to get a good night's sleep. Sometimes physical exercise like swimming has really helped though. good luck!

[Neenie87]

I had a really hard time sleeping my brother put me on to Glenn Harold who does guided hynosis. That was the only thing that could get me to sleep. You can get it for free on YouTube or he has an app full of different sessions there is one for insomnia.