There are people who sleep like babies, for long hours in a row, only to wake up the next morning more rested than the day before, reassured by this very restorative sleep session… and there are others, who regularly wake up in the middle of the night and take the opportunity to ruminate on anxieties which, in the middle of the day, would probably seem excessive to them.
For some, this type of episode repeats itself every night, sometimes more than once, making their sleep look like a pile of rest crumbs. Gold, “If you sleep eight hours in a very fragmented manner, you are not significantly better off than someone who sleeps four hours in one block”explains clinical psychologist Kristen Stone, who specializes in behavioral sleep medicine, to Fast Company.
The brain on edge
If anxiety peaks frequently occur in the middle of the night, it is primarily because there are fewer distractions. During the day, absorbed by our work, our leisure activities and our daily tasks, most of us forget our problems and our anxieties – which often suits us well.
But the brain is an efficient organ: once all these obligations are fulfilled or put aside for the day, it devotes itself to the remaining files. Kristen Stone describes a sort of snowball effect mixed with the Streisand effect: when we find ourselves alone with ourselves, idle, we try to avoid sources of anxiety by forbidding ourselves from thinking about triggering subjects… which has the effect of pushing us to think about them more.
But that’s not all: fatigue makes us more vulnerable to anxiety, adds neuropsychologist Sanam Hafeez. This specifies that there is also a biological component to our nighttime fears: it is in fact when we are most sensitive to danger. The one responsible is called the amygdala, an area located in the temporal lobe, which serves as the central node of the neural circuit of fear.
According to an American research group behind a study titled “The Mind After Midnight”, it is at night that our minds are more inclined to negative, emotional and irrational thoughts. The study highlights an increase in destructive and/or self-destructive behaviors, such as suicidal thoughts, alcohol consumption, nighttime overeating and violent acts.
The advice given to combat nighttime anxiety peaks (learning to manage your stress, finding gentle distractions, putting your anxieties down on paper, accepting that anxiety is normal, adopting a regular sleep schedule) may not be optimal for everyone. But it’s up to each person to find the best ways to get through the night without it being – too – synonymous with anxiety, with the added bonus of the crazy hope of waking up the next morning with a feeling of rest.
