Sleep and Our Brain Functioning as We Age
September 11, 2020
What About Sleep Treatment and Meds?
October 9, 2020
When I was first learning about psychology, I thought that an experience such as anxiety or stress was just one big, amorphous blob, not really definable and certainly not controllable. Well, turns out the stress system in the body is a cascade effect that is interconnected between multiple systems in the brain, the emotional processing system, and the body. Today I want to talk about one aspect of this cascade, hyperarousal and its impact on sleep. More importantly, I want to discuss what you can do about it!
There are three types of hyperarousal: cognitive, emotional and physiological. Cognitive arousal is what we think of when we say rumination, or thoughts that seem particularly sticky or repetitive. Have you ever looked at the clock during a night of sleep difficulty and had the thought, “man, I really have to sleep tonight or it’s going to be awful tomorrow,” and then found yourself having that thought again and again? That’s cognitive arousal. Emotional arousal usually follows, and is the felt sense of anxiety. Stomach churning, sense of nervousness, etc. Simultaneously or soon after will come the physiological arousal. This is the heightened heart rate, increased blood pressure and general sense of wanting to crawl out of your skin.
Some of us only notice one or two of these arousal states. Others of us notice all three.
As you can imagine, none of this is very helpful for promoting sleep.
But, there is a relatively easy psychology hack to induce your body to have a deep state of relaxation and calm down the triad of hyperarousal into a positive, sleep-promoting cascade. The most researched and efficacious relaxation technique is progressie muscle relaxation. This is a process of systematically tensing and then relaxing all the major muscle groups of the body. This gives the muscles in your body a chance to loosen and relax.
Once you loosen and relax the muscles, this gives the brain feedback that everything is C-A-L-M, which can calm down the cognitive and emotional hyperarousal related to your sleep.
Interested to check it out? Here is an excellent progressive muscle relaxation recording you can access for free. Doing this on a nightly basis can be incredibly sleep-promoting.
Happy relaxing!
