Anxiety: How Does It Affects Your Sleep Habits?

By Shana O'Connor

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Anxiety: How Does It Affects Your Sleep Habits?

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Shana shares when she realized she had sleep issues, and describes how these issues are affected by anxiety.

Shana:
I first noticed that I was dealing with insomnia when I was in high school. I had cross-country practice really early in the morning so I’d try to go to bed early so that I can be awake and I had anxiety about being able to fall asleep, so I’d take Tylenol PM so I get to bed early.

My anxiety makes me worried that something is going to disrupt my sleep or I lay in bed and I start thinking about things and then, a side thought will come up, like ‘stop thinking, you have to go to bed’ and so the anxiety really, it builds it up to make sleeping a bigger issue than it is.

So I take Tylenol PM every night and it just got to the point where it was just so much easier to be tired and to fall asleep with the help of something. So, six years later every night I had still taken some kind of sleeping medicine and I noticed that there was a problem with taking sleeping medicine every single night and I went to a pharmacist, actually, and she told me that it’s very damaging to your liver to take Tylenol PM, Excedrin PM, other medications to help you fall asleep.

So then I tried switching to Benadryl. So currently I take Benadryl every night to fall asleep and natural remedies just haven’t worked for me. I have tried almost anything you can think of to fall asleep, I have tried, and I still take sleeping medicine every night.

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