How Stress Affects Your Sleep, and What You Can Do About It

This Stress Awareness Month, clinical psychologist and sleep researcher Dr. Mike Gradisar explains the relationship between sleep and stress, and how you can manage your sleep during tricky times.

Stress and sleep affect each other. Stress can cause poor sleep, and poor sleep makes it difficult to manage emotions the next day.

Stress manifests in two ways that affect sleep: cognitive arousal, like intrusive thoughts and worrying, and somatic arousal, which includes physical symptoms like increased heart rate, sweating and difficulty sleeping. People are often more aware of their cognitive symptoms of stress, but the physical symptoms that come with stress can have a real impact on your sleep too.

The Helpful Way to Worry

When people get stressed, they generally focus on dealing with the day-to-day tasks that are causing their stress. They might be being practical about solving their to-do list, but they’re often not spending time processing their thoughts during the day. So, when they go to bed, where it’s quiet with less distractions, they start to worry.

A cognitive technique called constructive worry can help process thoughts before bedtime. Set aside 15 minutes between 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. to write down your top three worries and their solutions, and then try to postpone worrying until the next day. You may find this helps your mind feel quieter at bedtime.

Calm Your Body for Bed

While constructive worry can help decrease the mental symptoms of stress, it might not fully improve sleep as there could be physiological symptoms too.

A mindfulness-based body scan technique is an effective way to reduce both mental and physical symptoms of stress. This technique can help focus the mind on the present and encourage even breathing.

Most people don’t realize that when they start to worry, they’re holding their breath and not preparing their body for sleep. Research shows that body scans like this can help people fall asleep faster after as little as one week of practice.

Constructive worry and the body scan can be used together to help prepare for a better night’s sleep. Try doing constructive worry in the evening, and the body scan at bedtime.

Good Nights for Better Days

Stress doesn’t have to affect your sleep. With these techniques, you can help prepare your body for sleep, and get the rest you need to handle stress during the day.

If you’d like to learn how to do a mindfulness-based body scan, and other ways to manage your sleep during stressful times, you can watch my free online class, the Science of Sleep for Adults.