Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi, I'm hoping someone here might have some advice on what I can do about my anxiety with sleep.
I've always hated sleeping. I didn't like the dark as a kid and I always felt uneasy when it started to get dark and then I would feel anxious all through the night. However it's now reached a point where it's starting to affect my life in a big way... at night I have frequent panic attacks and my anxiety now is less about the dark and more about sleep itself.
I hate sleep. I don't like it and I don't know why. I just feel intense anxiety about sleeping and it's led to me trying to stay awake all night which is now starting to impact my health in a negative way.
I can't explain how much dread I get when it comes to sleeping. I don't know why this is affecting me so much but it's a problem and I'm not sure what to do to get over it.
I don't know exactly what causes it whether it's autism or mental health problems. I have both but I don't know which is driving this.
Of course I can't say anything about the possible causes of your problem. It might be best to talk to a mental health professional about this. But have you ever tried relaxation techniques before falling asleep? For example, you could concentrate on your breathing with your eyes closed and breathe in and out as deeply and slowly as possible. The body cannot be relaxed and in a state of excitement at the same time. Additionally, you could imagine something pleasant. That could perhaps increase the positive effect. I have problems with claustrophobia, especially when I have an MRI scan and am pushed into the narrow "tube". then I close my eyes and concentrate on breathing in and out slowly. I also imagine a wide flower meadow. This works for me. Ideally, you should start the relaxation exercise before the anxiety sets in. If you do this regularly, your body may also "learn" that sleep is not dangerous and you would no longer be afraid of falling asleep.
It sounds like something that you should explore with a counsellor, if it's something you've had since childhood then it's obviously very deeply rooted. I couldn't say if it's autism or mental health without knowing what your mental health problems are, but I'm wary of lumping everything onto autism.
Second to my other post - is it possible you have Alice in Wonderland Syndrome? I had that as a kid. At night I might feel a sense of slowly being hurled into infinite space. Very. Scary. It turns out that's a vestibular system issue with the Timey-Wimey-ness of spacetime.
Sleep is a vulnerable state for humans. We're at the mercy of our subconscious not terrorising us with nightmares along with external possibilities.
More often than not, a fear of sleep is more a fear of what can inhabit our dreams, and these are easy to forget. It takes waking effort and sometimes being steadfast and present in a terrorising thought which requires sitting up, turning on the light and collecting the readied paper and notebook next to the bed. A way to perceive undergoing a marked out time for this is with an explorers mind, if you feel up to it.
Love him or not, Freud suggested our dreams should help us sleep and turn external things which might wake us up into a dream-quence to keep our biology in a restful recovery.
When I was in my mid 20's I found I had become so withdrawn from myself as a Survival Mode of being, that the latency between impact of some things and recognising them was severe. I couldn't take notice of intense reactions to interruptions or my intense reactions to sensory overwhelm. There were so many things I needed to unpack and un-learn because not really using the same language as our Typical peers, there was so much I didn't learn along with all the wrong things which I did. I went through a time where I committed to listening to my dreams and it helped (thought I liked sleep). A stage like this is often talked about like a snake shedding skin or peeling off layers of an onion. And sometimes we need help from a deeper inner voice,
While there are other possibilities here, this one can't hurt and sometimes our nightmares are spelling out in horrifying detail the world we must live in, the actions of others if we were to use an analogy, and sometimes the systems around us which are not just a mess but also oppressive. They can give us warnings of things to come, which we're intuiting like knowing someone is pregnant because of a heightened sense of smell or knowing the choices someone is making will help them succeed or fail in life because you can calculate the outcome.
This may not be the case, but who knows! Sleep is important to our being, which I think you know!