How I Overcame Middle Of The Night Anxiety With A Simple Method

I struggled with waking up terrified at 3am for over a year until I found a solution

Healing childhood trauma is often like opening Pandora's box. Memories you thought you had long forgotten suddenly come to the surface again.

The worst of it… they often choose a very bad timing and they do not come alone. Together with anxiety, resurfacing memories kick you out of sleep in the middle of the night.

Your mind races like a maniac on steroids. Anxiety tightens you so much that you feel like you have no more room to breathe.

It is pure horror.

How do you get out of this?

I had nights like these for over a year when I became aware that I was abused as a family scapegoat. I learned to cope with everything on my own, and so I did with my midnight horrors.

After trying all sorts of things, I finally found a method that proved to work very well. Nowadays, I usually fall back to peaceful sleep within 20 minutes.

It is actually a very simple method.

All you gotta do is breathe slowly, calm down, and allow yourself to feel your anxiety.

But as we all know, the devil is in the details. Simple does not mean that it is easy. It is extremely hard to breathe slowly and calm yourself down when you are experiencing an anxiety attack.

The problem is that you have to deal with two different problems at a time.

Your old memories are a problem, racing through your mind. Anxiety is an emotion located in your body. To deal with what is going on in your body, you need to become the master of your mind first.

Gaining Control Over Your Mind

Imagine your mind being a highway full of speeding cars that block your way to dreamland. The cars are standing for all the thoughts you have.

To go over the highway, you need to slow down the cars.

But you cannot solve this problem with your mind.

You cannot command yourself to have fewer thoughts. You cannot rationalize your way out of spiraling thoughts. That is like fighting fire with fire.

What you need to do is calm down your mind machine, aka nervous system.

And this brings me to breathing slowly and deeply.

So, how do you do that when you are experiencing an anxiety attack?

The answer is also simple. It is all about training.

You need to experience controlled shock moments to stay calm when you get hit.

Taking cold showers is a magic exercise for that. Yes, I said magic. I did not say pleasant.

The exercise is easy. When taking a shower, start as you always do with warm water first. Once you feel comfy and find something to hold on to, you turn the water on ice cold for 20 seconds. Let the cold water hit you on the back where it is worst.

It will be hell. You will literally freeze and be unable to breathe for a few seconds. Once the breathing comes back and you've gotten slightly used to the cold, you can switch back to warm water for a pitstop. Repeat the exercise 3-5 times when you take a shower.

If you do this for two weeks, you automatically learn to deal with the shock. Doing some deep breathing exercises before you enter shower land can make things a bit easier.

The positive side effect is that your mind will stay a bit clearer under shock. You don't get lost in it too much, and learn to focus on breathing. After some time, you will notice that cold water is not really that bad once you breathe deeply and slowly.

The same goes for a racing mind at night. It is like a shock that kicked you out of sleep. But with the shower exercises, you will just need a few seconds to return to calm breathing. And by doing so, you have slowed down the cars on the highway.

So the next step is dealing with your anxiety to finally make it over the highway to dreamland.

Processing Your Anxiety

Anxiety is an emotion, which means it is coming from your body. You could try to push it away or numb it. But that only works for a while. The body never forgets.

The only way to get emotions out of your body is to process them. Your body will do this naturally when you allow it and don't show resistance.

So all you need to do is feel your anxiety. Yes, it will be uncomfortable. But since you learned to breathe calmly, you know that your anxiety won't kill you. It is just a very unpleasant feeling that you somehow need to go through.

If you are a head-centered person like I was, you will have a problem understanding what it means to feel your body and your emotions.

Imagine you have a big and deep wound on your arm that is still open. Now, imagine putting a finger into this wound to find out how much and where it exactly hurts. Move your finger around like a scientist who is doing an observation. The scientist does not want to understand why the wound hurts. He is only interested in exploring the pain.

With this image in mind, do the same with your anxiety. Be like a child who observes what is going on in your body without giving it any label or trying to make sense of it. Be curious about your anxiety and what it does with your body.

Still not feeling anything… well then, concentrate on how your breathing feels. The point is to get all the attention into your body. If you catch yourself thinking about your sensation, go back to observing mode.

The thinking you can do the next morning, when your mind is relaxed from sleep and works properly again. Don't be worried about forgetting anything about your observations. The really important things will make it over the night.

Last but not least. DON'T check the time while you do the breathing, and feel what is going on in your body. Your sense of time can be quite altered. Checking the time will only stress you. The more you let go of things and dive into your feelings without using your mind, the sooner you will fall asleep.

This is it for today. I hope my method helps you to make it through the tough nights.

How to overall improve sleep quality and to sleep like a baby again will be material for another newsletter post I am currently working on.