- Sometimes anxiety before sleeping can be a symptom of a psychiatric disorder.
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| Negative thoughts can seriously impair our rest. / Pexels |
The quality and quantity of daily rest are essential to maintain good health. That is why it is very important to dedicate the necessary hours and meet a series of requirements of what we call sleep hygiene.
But unfortunately, sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes, more than the noise or the light from the screens, what prevents us from sleeping well are the worries and negative thoughts that we harbor and that come to the surface in the silence of the night hours.
A brain workout
The most appropriate way to manage these thoughts and this anguish, logically, depends on their origin and nature. In very serious life situations, in which the stressor is external factors such as economic precariousness, work or personal problems, etc. we may not be able to get rid of anxiety except with a change in that circumstance. In other cases, they may be due to psychiatric disorders that need appropriate treatment.
However, outside of these assumptions, there are some tricks that can help us manage negative thoughts to prevent them from keeping us awake at night. An example is the one described by the occupational therapist Catalina Hoffmann in her book Neurofitness.
As the expert explains, what we should do is take a notebook with white sheets and a pen (always the same color) and leave them close at hand, for example on our bedside table. Just before going to sleep, we will take them and write down the best and worst of the day, we will turn the page and close the notebook.
We must repeat this ritual seven days a week, and only on the seventh will we be able to read what we have written down in the previous days. Then, we will write down the phrase that most caught our attention.
After three months of repeating this process, we will write down all the highlighted phrases on a white card. According to the author, this should free the brain of all those thoughts that we do not need and that prevent us from sleeping properly.