Blog Post 20: Type C, Adrenaline, and Insomnia
While babies and young kids take sleep for granted, as we get older, we often discount how seriously impaired sleep patterns impact our lives. Type C’s often struggle with falling and staying asleep. Suppressing emotions, focusing on others, staying busy trying not to upset people – this can all increase adrenaline in our bodies. Sometimes sleep issues relate to negative stress, though positive stress can also contribute - like not recognizing that we’re doing too much.
When adrenaline is high in our bodies, it takes a long time to fall asleep, or we fall asleep from exhaustion, but then wake up quickly. The trick is to manage adrenaline levels - not only at nighttime, but also throughout the day. Here are several ways to manage adrenaline levels - while some of these may not be new to you, some may be, and we hope they will help:
Diaphragmatic breathing: take three deep breaths not only before bed but throughout the day.
Put down devices 20 to 30 minutes before bed and instead read a book, work a crossword puzzle, stretch, or write in a journal. Do these activities somewhere other than bed - use it for sleeping and sex only.
Do one thing at a time during the day - avoid multi-tasking! A good exercise on this front is to do things without a phone in hand - like eating, going to the bathroom, and drinking your coffee/tea.
If you drink alcohol, give your body time to process it before bed by having a drink in the late afternoon or early evening.
Try to only be in bed physically for eight hours even if you’re not sleeping the whole time. The longer time you spend in bed the more this can mess with your sleep; it’s better to wake up at your regular time even if you didn’t sleep as much.
Practice acceptance. Insomnia can be a difficult thing to accept. We can control relaxing and winding down; we can’t control falling asleep or waking up early. Our mind tends to paint worst case scenarios! Remember - you can do a lot when sleepy, more than your mind lets you believe.
Practice worry time. Sometime in the evening, but not too close to bedtime, write a list of all the worries that are on your mind - past, present, big, little. Actually write this down. The act of writing is part of separating and creating a distance to look at it versus being it. Ask yourself if these are things you have control over today? Often, we get stuck in the future, which we can’t control - or we feel upset about the past. Taking some time to bring these thoughts more into our awareness instead of racing around the back of our mind makes them less likely to want attention in the middle of the night. If there are things you can do - great, go make a plan! If there aren’t, try to be compassionate and say hey this is tough, I really care about this, but I also must remember I can’t control it - like sleep.
If you wake in the night, here are some further tricks to go back to sleep.
Get out of bed, head to the couch, and turn on a low light and read or do something that is active yet relaxing for your brain (puzzle, chill podcast).
Try not to toss and turn and worry about not sleeping; your brain will associate the bed with stress. Also, worrying increases adrenaline that keeps us awake.
As hard as it may be, avoid scrolling!