If you're here, you may resonate with many symptoms of anxiety, and that may include difficulty sleeping. Often when we are under chronic stress, we may have a difficult time to wind down at the end of the night.

Trouble sleeping may look like:
- Difficulty falling asleep
- Experiencing racing thoughts or intrusive thoughts while trying to fall asleep
- The inability to step away from responsibilities that push you to continue thinking about them at night
- Waking up in the night with physical symptoms of anxiety
- Waking up feeling exhausted over and over again
- Inability to maintain a bed time, or trouble shutting off before bed
Sleep is ESSENTIAL and the way we create an environment for sleep can really impact our wellbeing. If you'd like to learn more about the ways sleep impacts our brain function, read more here.
Not sure where to go from here? Let's chat about 5 tips to create a more consistent sleep routine.
Limiting your caffeine intake during the day - Often we are fuelling ourselves with caffeine to simply get through the day itself. This can also impact our ability to fall asleep. If you're a coffee person (believe me, I was at one time too!), try having one less coffee per day, or switching to decaf. If you're still not struggling to fall asleep - try switching to tea or Matcha. There have been many properties of matcha to have a calm alertness different from the caffeine in coffee.
Dimming your lights 1 hour before bed - Our bodies respond to our external stimuli, and that includes winding down for bed. Our body runs on something called a circadian rhythm, and it will begin to respond to darker light as time to shut down for the night.
Schedule 'worry time' earlier in the day - If you find your thoughts are racing at night, a helpful exercise may be to schedule worry time daily. This is designated time (maybe around 10-20 minutes) where you can brain dump everything that is on your mind. If these thoughts come up at other times of the day, simply remind yourself you have this worry time scheduled. You can even create a little list for yourself to refer back to during your time.
Be consistent with your schedule - This may feel difficult at first, but setting a consistent wake up time can help to begin to regulate the time you fall asleep every night.
Try incorporating supplements into your nighttime routine - Many people swear by melatonin, but a relatively new sleep aid can be the use of CBD oil. I personally have enjoyed trying to incorporate CBD oil into my routine on busy days when I have difficulties winding down. There is no high associated with use of CBD oil, and there is emerging research for its use for sleep, anxiety and more.
If you're interested in incorporating CBD oil into your nighttime routine - you can get 15% off of Plant of Life CBD oil with the code 'HEALINGTHEANXIOUSMIND'. Plant of Life is a Canadian, organic, non GMO and third party lab tested product that I've found helpful in my nighttime routine :) Check it out here.
Sleep is essential to our wellbeing, and I hope these tips can help you to create a more consistent routine to help you get the rest you need.
I'll be sharing more on this topic in the future as well :)

Sending love,
Carly
If this post resonated with you and you would like more support with healing from anxiety, check out my instagram @healingtheanxiousmind for daily posts on anxiety support and education.
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