 This week on the anxious truth, we're going to talk about something you've been waiting to hear about, and that is sleep anxiety. Anxiety centered around sleep, sleeping and not sleeping. So let's get to it. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the anxious truth. This is episode 225 of the podcast. We are recording in September of 2022. I am Drew Linsalata, creator and host of the anxious truth. This is the podcast that covers all things. Anxiety, anxiety disorders and anxiety recovery. If you are new here to the podcast or the YouTube channel and just sort of stumbled in by accident, welcome. I'm really glad you're here. I hope you find the content useful and helpful in some way. If you are a returning listener or viewer, welcome back. I am always happy that you guys are here. Thank you so much for your continued support. So this week, we're going to cover a topic that people have been asking me to cover for such a long time. And because I am not the best sleeper anyway, I didn't think really I should talk about this because I'm not really the best guy to give sleep advice. But you know what? In the end, it's not really about my sleeping. It's about your sleeping and how you're viewing it and what your relationship has become when it comes to sleep or not sleeping. So this week, we're going to go into it. We're going to do sleep anxiety. But before we get into the meat of the episode, I'm going to remind you, as I always do, that the anxious truth is more than just this, you know what, I'm not going to do. I'm not going to do that this week. I'm kind of doing it. I'm not doing the pitch this week. What? Why not? Because I do the pitch every week and I'm pretty sure that they're tired of it by now. Come on. You don't know that. I would be tired of hearing it if I was them. You're ridiculous. You're not going to tell them about the books you wrote. No. The free morning newsletter. Nope. No mention of all the free social media content. The Distress Tolerance webinar. The Facebook group. No, no, and no. And honestly, now you're just kind of being annoying. You're the worst. Not even a mention of your website at theanxiestruth.com. I can't even with you. Yeah, whatever, dude. I'm here to talk about sleep anxiety and I would like to get on with it. So are we done here now? I guess so. Okay, fine. Thank you. Thank you. Just relax. This guy, this guy. Anyway, folks. All right. Sorry about that. Let's get into it. We're going to talk about sleep anxiety. Like I told you, this is a topic that a lot of you guys want to hear about. It's a thing that is a common thread for so many people. I understand that it's important to a lot of you guys. So we're going to get into it today. Can I help? Wait, what? I want to help. I'm kind of bored today. Let me hang out and help. You want to help? This sounds like a terrible idea that I know I'm going to regret. No, you won't. I'm good at this. Okay, fine. If it keeps you quiet, then you can help. Just please relax. Sit over there and don't say anything until I ask you to. Can you do that? You won't even know I'm here. Yeah, I will believe that when I see that. All right. All right. Anyway, all right. Let's get it together here. Let's talk about sleep anxiety. When it comes to sleep anxiety, I feel pretty confident in saying that most of the conversation about sleep and not sleeping, not being able to sleep and freaking out over that centers around three basic fears. So there are sort of three fear themes that come along with sleep and sleep anxiety. So what I thought we would do today is just spend a little bit of time. We'll go through each of those three. We'll have a little discussion about each one of them. Hopefully that shed some light on it, answer some questions. Maybe gives you a better grip on what's going on. So yeah, we're going to do each of the fears one at a time and let's see how this turns out. In fact, you know what? You know what, man, you wanted to help. Can you read each of the fears when I ask you to? Hello. Hey, hey. Me? Yeah, you said you wanted to help. Yep. Okay, so then can you read the main sleep anxiety fears when I ask you to do that? Yeah, I can do that. Okay, great. So can you do it? Oh, you mean now? Yeah, I mean now. You are a terrible director. I don't know if I can work under these conditions. Just do it. Okay, fine. Relax, chief. Number one, sleep is super vital. So I must get lots of sleep to regenerate and recover. If I don't sleep properly, I won't ever get better. All right, that actually didn't go too badly. Thank you. All right, so the first fear that we're going to talk about today when it comes to sleep and sleep related anxiety is this one. The idea that if you do not sleep perfectly optimally enough or in the exact way that you think you have to, that you will likely never get better. This is a very common fear. And that's why I put it number one on the list. This is what happens when two things that are very common among listeners of this podcast viewers of this YouTube channel experience. Number one is the fear that you might never get better. A very, very common recurring fear, very normal, very common. And the second thing is sleep disturbances. Also incredibly common in the community surrounding the content that I create. No doubt about that, right? So those two things sleep disturbances and the fear that you will never get better can sometimes get glued together. How do they get glued together? Well, the glue that puts them together is the distortion magnification twisting catastrophic machine that is an anxious brain. So underneath that idea that if I don't sleep properly or enough or optimally, I may never get better is some basically reasonable information about the nature of sleep and the restorative nature of sleep and the power of sleep. Yeah, that's a thing like human being sleep for a reason. There's a reason why it's a natural function for us, but it's a natural function that varies widely over our lifespan, right? Sometimes we sleep well. Sometimes we don't sleep so well. Sometimes we feel good. Sometimes we feel terrible. It's normally, you know, variable like sleep isn't isn't a constant thing. Yes, human beings do sleep. It does have a purpose. Some we seem to know some we don't really know yet, but it's okay to say like, well, sleep is kind of important. You do need to sleep and that's why we sleep fair enough. But when we also find, especially if we are trolling through sort of wellness circles, healing circles and you start to see people who take that to the extreme and in any topic, you will find people who take it to the extreme. When you see people that put sleep up on a pedestal and call it some sort of panacea for wellness, then the distortion machine and the catastrophic catastrophic thoughts machine that is an anxious brain will literally turn that into a disaster. Like, oh my God, if I don't get this perfect sleep that this this person on HuffPo is talking about, then I'm never going to get better. So this whole idea that if I don't sleep enough, I will never get better is one giant distortion magnification twisted catastrophic scenario that an anxious brain can manufacture based on the presence of multiple conditions. The fear I might never get better sleep disturbance, which is real, you are experiencing that and then a misinterpretation and distortion of some information that you may find online about sleep and what sleep does and what it's supposed to do. Add them all together and you wind up in a frantic state thinking that, oh my God, if I don't sleep enough, I don't sleep properly, I'm screwed. I'm never going to get better. And that is a distortion that is not true. So just because we can make the assertion that sleep is important for human being, that's not a wrong assertion, but we can't automatically then say if we don't sleep, the wheels fall off and bad things happen and we'll never get better. I'm not getting the proper healing in my body. That's just frankly not true. So if you look at the reality in a large population of anxious people who are experiencing the fear that they may never get better and also experiencing sleep disturbances, which is super common. I see it every day. Then you can also see in that population of anxious people that those people who do think they'll never get better and are experiencing sleep disturbances who glue those two fears together, those two fears together wind up moving past that fear, past the sleep disturbances and they do start to get better. Is everybody better in the community surrounding this podcast? No, everybody's at varying stages of the recovery journey. So that's 100% true. Some people are sort of behind you on the path. Some people are ahead of you. But for instance, in my Facebook group, you will hear stories every day of people who their sleep was a disaster and they were frantic about sleep. But it got better like everything else gets better. That is possible. You are not doomed to never get better if you're experiencing sleep disturbances now. So the way we kind of have to answer this first fear about sleep, which is it's so vital that if I don't get the exact proper sleep in the exact amounts, I will never get better. You have to confront that as being a distortion. That's the conclusion. My brain is drawing to try to protect me, but it's not a correct conclusion. I can look around me and I can see that there are people who went through some pretty serious sleep disturbances that were also afraid of this that are getting better now. They're seeing improvement. Things are changing. It's getting better. So just remember the amount of twisting, magnification, distortion, and catastrophizing that goes into drawing a conclusion like the number one sleep fear. You might want to sleep a certain amount. You might want to sleep a certain way. Nobody wants to be tired. Nobody wants to be sleep deprived, but we do not have to draw the automatic conclusion that not sleeping enough or properly dooms you to a life in a disordered anxious state. That is simply not true. All right, let's roll the thing. Number two. Number two. If I don't sleep enough, I will be in danger of developing all kinds of scary health problems. Alrighty. Good job, dude. Thank you. But don't call me dude. Alrighty. Thanks, Eddie. The name's Edward. Hey, Eddie. Edward. Okay. So the second fear that we're talking about now is the related to the first fear, but it's the idea that if you do not sleep enough or do not sleep optimally or perfectly, then not only do you run the risk of maybe not getting better in terms of anxiety recovery, but you run the risk of actually developing serious debilitating or life threatening health problems because everybody knows that if I don't sleep, horrible things happen to the human body. This is very similar to the whole like, oh, the anxiety itself is damaging my body. I did an episode on this a few podcasts back of you go and look for that. We talked about that. The idea that anxiety itself is damaging your body and is going to lead to health problems. The same fear holds true here with sleep. If I don't sleep enough, I am damaging my body and I'm going to develop health problems as a result and I will be to blame here. So I've heard people afraid of cancer. I've heard people afraid of dementia or psychotic breaks. I've heard people worried about heart attacks and strokes. I've heard all kinds of health risks that people have glued to this idea that I'm not sleeping properly or I'm not sleeping enough. Therefore, I am stressing my body beyond its limits and I am hurting myself physically, especially people who suffer from health anxiety. This becomes a big issue. The idea that if I do not sleep, I am not only going to be an anxious person for the rest of my life, but I might actually die or I'm going to develop some terrible debilitating crippling health issue because I'm destroying my body by not sleeping enough or sleeping properly. And again, the answer to this one or the way we would approach this one is very similar to the way we would approach that first fear, which is that we have to recognize that sleep does play a role in health and well-being. It does, but if you are experiencing a sleep disturbance now, which is incredibly common again among people that are dealing with anxiety disorders and working on recovery, you do not have to draw the automatic and iron clack conclusion that if you experience sleep disturbances for a while now that you are automatically doomed to develop some crippling debilitating degenerative health problem that will put you in an early grave. That is also a distortion. It's a magnification. You are again assigning risk variables much higher value than they actually need to be assigned based on reality. Now I'm going to call out a book that was written in the last 10 or 12 years and I actually don't want to say the name of this book to be honest with you. It's kind of a catch-22 here. It was an incredibly popular book that was written about sleep by a professor at a major well-known American University that had great credentials. A guy who was very well respected in the field. He is a sleep researcher and he wrote this book which really wasn't a scientific book. It was a pop culture book. Right. So it was kind of an Oprah book club book if you will and in that he made a lot of really exaggerated, unfounded and outrageous claims about the health effects of not sleeping enough. So he sort of termed, you know, started to bring about that awareness of like, oh, the sleep deprivation pandemic. We are in an epidemic of sleep deprivation. He attributed health outcomes to things that were said by the World Health Organization that they had to come out and kind of put the smack down like, no, we didn't actually say that. We never said that. There's no data on that. But he kind of made some stuff up and played really fast and loose with some numbers and some data. And this is a respected scientist who sort of wandered over into pop culture and I may either intentionally plan to sensationalize things to sell a lot of books or I don't know, maybe got too enthusiastic, whatever the case may be. But that particular book as popular as it may be, it's called Why We Sleep. I'll throw it out there, but please don't run and go and buy Why We Sleep. Go ahead and buy it. If you want, I can't tell you not to buy it, but do not go and latch on to that book. I'm like, oh my God, I really need to read this book because it's going to freak you out. And that book has come under a lot of fire, a lot of criticism, a lot of peer criticism, a lot of criticisms in the academic and scientific communities. And in the end, what kind of happened is the guy sold a ton of books and even his university, which I can only guess. I'm completely guessing here. I don't know this to be true. But many times when you under the employee of a university, the research you do and the work you publish is partially, at least partially owned by that university. So I'm guessing and drawing my own conclusion, which could be wrong. But even when confronted with some of the things that were not okay with that book, already millions of copies or whatever, hundreds of thousand copies have been sold. He'd already been doing the book tours. He'd been on the big podcast. The guy's been on Rogan, you know, spewing this stuff and both he and his university sort of like, yeah, yeah, sorta. We kind of maybe it went a little bit overboard. That's all right. It was not that big a deal. He issued a very tiny little retraction on like a personal blog site that he doesn't even maintain. It was really well hidden. So so much of this grows out of that. This guy wrote that book and it, you know, really sparked a lot of discussion about how like the obesity epidemic, you know, all the sleep deprivation epidemic and all the incredible health problems that it's causing is sleep important. It is, but that book caused so much trouble, especially for people like us anxious people, highly suggestible people, people that are afraid and frantically looking for 100% insurance that they're going to be okay. The stuff that was put out in that book that is still being perpetuated now because like I said, he did the tour. He's been on the talk shows. He's been on the big podcasts. And so a lot of the stuff that's in that book, the book Why We Sleep has been repeated again and again and again and copied and even just sort of lifted and plagiarized and just parroted and echoed and quotes in that book that shouldn't have been in the book, that thing where both the author and his university sort of shrugged their shoulders and said, yeah, maybe that wasn't right. People are still quoting those things. So it's just causing a lot of misinformation and it's fueling that magnification, the catastrophic thinking and the distortion that comes along with this disordered state that we're addressing. So this one, if I don't sleep, I'm destined to develop some horrible health condition is not automatically true. Again, we have to balance the idea that yes, sleep is important, but we cannot say that. Oh my God, I've been sleeping so badly for the last month and a half that this means I'm going to get cancer. That's not an accurate statement to make. So in this case, just like the other one, recognize where the fear is coming from, especially if you're driven by health anxiety already and you're worried about your health, but recognize that your fear is being driven by something like that and then recognize the information that's being fed in to that magnification lens, which then draws us to recognize how we are reaching these catastrophic conclusions. So this doesn't mean that you're going to instantly feel better about your sleep situation. You won't. In fact, a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about here might be attacked as like, oh, you're providing reassurance to people. Well, no, we can provide assurance like I can give you good information that you can then act on. I can't repeat this information a million times. And if you wind up coming back to rewind this podcast a million times because then your brain says he's wrong and you need to listen to it again. That is reassurance. That's 100% true. That's not healthy. So but if we can recognize how we draw these faulty conclusions and these catastrophic conclusions, step away from them and just let that fear be like just like the first fear in this fear, you're going to have to just sort of let that fear be there. Like, oh, guess I'm going to have to accept that this might be true because I can't prove it not true. And I'm just going to have to let this play out and I will handle it as I go. So so much of the time that is the answer here, but recognize what drives this and then understand that well, the only way out of this fear is to just let it play out and not try to find a way to not be afraid. You will be afraid until reality shows you otherwise. So that is like common fear number two under the umbrella of sleep anxiety or lack of sleep anxiety. So okay, Edward, let's roll on to number three. Number three, if I don't sleep enough, my anxiety will go through the roof. Okay, this one, we need to clarify a little bit because this has smacks of like the alcohol and caffeine thing that I talk about all the time. Being tired makes me anxious. Well, being tired just makes you tired. It doesn't make you anxious. It makes you feel a certain way and when we are afraid of changes in the way we feel and we interpret like unpleasant states as dangerous states or states that we must never allow, then we get anxious when we feel those things. Now, I was totally that guy. You know, when I was having such a hard time sleeping, I don't sleep an hour at a time 45 minutes at a time. I was getting maybe three hours of sleep and an average night for a while there. Yeah, I'd be really tired the next day. That was true. And because I was tired, I would feel like shit that there's no there's no mystery there. I would feel crappy because I was kind of sleep deprived, but I would take that feeling of being sleep deprived and it would make me feel shaky, weak and vulnerable. Like, oh, no, I'm in this tired states and now my anxiety will come and get me and therefore I would get more anxious. So the idea that being tired means that your anxiety will go through the roof. Not sleeping enough means your anxiety is going to go through the roof is really just another expression of being afraid of yourself, afraid of how you feel and what you think. And so it's not a special kind of anxiety like people will approach this as if, oh, my God, if I don't sleep enough, I'm going to have special not enough sleep anxiety. It makes me anxious. It's a trigger. Well, again, we have to realize here that you're not necessarily anxious. I'm not saying you're not anxious. That's not fair. I understand that you do feel anxious, but we have to come to grips with the idea that the anxious state is a secondary state. First, we're tired and our interpretation of tired means anxious. So it's not necessarily correct to say that if I don't sleep, then my anxiety goes through the roof. If I don't sleep, I feel really bad because I feel tired and then my interpretation of that and my fear of my own internal state becomes anxiety. The threat response is triggered. So it's really important to understand that chain of events as opposed to just saying not sleeping equals anxious. No, not sleeping equals tired, which means feeling bad, which means feeling anxious. So let me tell you a little quick anecdote from my own personal recovery journey. I remember there was a time when I was up in the morning and I was doing my exposure work like I had gotten a habit of doing and I was I was exhausted. I was I was tired. Man, I was tired. I just wasn't sleeping very well. Now my sleep at that point was starting to get a little better. I was seeing a little light at the end of the tunnel there, but I still wasn't sleeping enough. And so many mornings I was tired. I wasn't sleeping enough so that meant I was tired. It was not sleeping enough didn't mean disaster. It just meant I was going to be tired and I was and I was out driving and I stopped in a parking lot of a little dairy store that's not too far from my house literally around the corner from the house. I was at the end of the exposure and I was trying to work up the nerve to go into that little dairy store and just buy some milk to put in the fridge. I didn't even know if we needed it, but I know that I wanted to do it as a way to end the exposure and then go home. And as I sat there and I was super anxious and I was afraid to get out of the car and go into the store, a woman pulled up next to me that she was not looking good. She just wasn't. I mean, it was relatively early in the morning and I'm sure she would probably say the same thing. I don't know who she is. I've never seen her before since and that's going back to like 2007 or 2008 whenever that was. I don't know who she was. She pulled up next to me. She put her head on her steering wheel. She was clearly on her way to work. She got out of the car. She looked like she was dressed to go to work in an office and she was dragging ass in plain English. This poor woman was tired. She didn't sleep well. She was tired for whatever reason but she got out of her car and she walked into the store and she got what she was going to get. And in that moment I realized like, man, this is why. Now I didn't I didn't know that there was such a book called Why We Sleep at that point. I don't even know if it had been written at that point. But you know, I started to understand like, wow, so many of the people around me are tired at any given moment. So many of the people are tired at any given moment. Like when I was I had a little bit of a time where I was going into an office with people every day. That was kind of while I was going through my antidepressant withdrawal and people would drag into the office. Man, they stayed up too late. They were out late. They were sick. They just didn't feel good and they were tired. They just didn't call tired a disaster. And that morning in that parking lot when I saw that poor woman like drag yourself out of the car and just walk shuffle into the store. She was tired. She was going to have a long day. No doubt in my mind. But I'm thinking, well, wait a minute. I'm the one turning tired into a nightmare here. And I got out of the car and I went in and I got my quart of milk and it was what it was. I mean, that didn't change my life that day. But that realization was a kind of a big deal. Like, oh man, half the people around me are probably tired right now. I'm the only one that's calling it a nightmare. So consider that for a second. Like look at the people in your life. Many of them are probably had not as much sleep as they wanted to. They were up late. They were binge watching something on Amazon Prime. Whatever for whatever reason. They're not sleeping enough or they're just pushing themselves too hard. They're partying. Whatever they're doing and they drag themselves to work in the morning. They just don't call it a disaster like we do sometimes. So to address this third fear that says if I don't get enough sleep, my anxiety will go through the roof and I will be a mess the next day. We again have to look at it and say, well, first of all, it just changes how I feel and I'm afraid of how I feel and look at all the people around me that are giving me real world examples of the fact that human beings are capable of functioning and being tired and being sleep deprived. Not wanting that. It's not optimal. It's not what we wish for. But look at them all going about their day anyway without calling this an absolute catastrophe. What does that teach me? So again, none of the things I'm talking about today to address these common these three common themes that come along with sleep anxiety or lack of sleep anxiety. They all are driven by distortion. They're driven by fear. They're driven by catastrophizing. They're driven by being afraid of how we feel. But we think it all comes back to the same themes again and again and again. And I know that I probably sound like a broken record when I talk about this sort of stuff. But it helps to understand this to a certain extent that all of the the anxiety the special anxiety that you think is is has you so distraught over the idea that you're not sleeping right or not getting enough sleep. Never going to get better. You're going to cause all kinds of health problems or tomorrow morning. You're just going to be an anxious incapable mess. All of those things are just another way for an anxious mind to throw a monkey wrench into everything. Everything like a highly sensitized person with an overactive anxious mind firing up that distortion machine will make a mess of everything and sleep anxiety is a really good example of that. But in the end it's not very much different than breathing anxiety or heart anxiety or health anxiety or fear of being alone. It's all kind of the same and it's really common if you're struggling right now and you're having a hard time sleeping and you're tired and you and you're catastrophizing over that what if I never sleep again what if I never get better what if this kills me because I'm going to develop health problems. I'm going to be so horrible and anxious for the next few days because I'm not sleeping. All of these things are incredibly common and explainable and when you start to understand oh yeah that's right it's the anxiety itself like pouring gas on the fire that can help us make a little space. The answer is always the same we got to move through it it's always comes back to that we got to move through it but it can help us to move through it find a little courage find a little resolve to look at these three common sort of fear themes when it comes to sleep and say okay this is not easy this is not what I want I don't like feeling this way I want to feel different but I can get through this I know you can do this I did it I watch people do it every day I know you can do this but when you get frantic and the fear starts to drive things remember what I'm saying take a little step backward make a little space I can get through this it's going to be okay let me let reality teach me the lessons I need to learn here I'm going to be okay because you are going to be okay I promise this fear of not sleeping doesn't mean you're special you're worse than everyone else you're broken you have a special problem it doesn't it just means you're like a whole lot of people that are dealing with these problems that we're always addressing together so that is my take on sleep and sleep anxiety is that an exhaustive take that covers every possible nuance and every sub fear and every thought that pops in your head about sleep no because your mind is going to get super creative and I hear a lot of different things I do hear that what if I never sleep again distortion right what if I have but I'm having a panic attacks but what do you do if you have panic attacks in the middle of the night we're going to do an episode on nocturnal panic attacks just by itself because I know some of you listening are going to do yes but what if you have panic attacks when you wake up we'll get there but spoiler alert it's not special you know I'm going to say that it's not special anyway that is episode 225 of the anxious truth in the books talking about sleep and sleep centered anxiety I hope it has been helpful to you Edward you did okay brother I told you I was good at this now tell them to subscribe to your YouTube channel and rate the podcast and tell them to go buy a couple of your books well number one you just did most of that and number two I'm not going to go tell them to buy books why do I even bother trying to help you just play the music and let's get the hell out of here you know I didn't ask you to come and help me but yes we're going to play the music and we're going to get out of here because I think I'm kind of done with you today so guys you know the episode is over because music that is after glow by Ben Drake it's a song you hear at the beginning and end of every one of these podcast episodes you can find more about Ben and his music at his website ben drake music dot com go check him out and tell him I said hello that is episode 225 of the anxious truth in the books including a special guest appearance by our new friend Edward who may be back from time to time if the situation warrants it we'll see how it goes I will be back next week with another podcast episode I don't exactly know what I'm going to be talking about but I will be here anyway and until then I will remind you as always I want to say it okay go ahead this is the way it's in these feelings that you never show