Lack of sleep causes anxiety, anxiety causes sleep deprivation. It's a vicious cycle as illustrated in this article on anxiety and sleep. It seems like every few months I get into one of these cycles. Some random occurrence (insert any reason for not sleeping here) causes a bad night of sleep which aggravates my anxiety which causes me to not sleep.
This Reddit Post is the most poignant piece of collective information I have read on the subject. As someone who has struggled with chronic sleep deprivation since adolescence I can attest that one or two days of extra sleep does not nearly make up for weeks/months of poor sleep. My memory is terrible and as I have gotten older more of the "long term" affects of sleep deprivation have seem to arrived. It is so frustrating to know that my lack of sleep can cause a myriad of problems.
People ask "why don't you just GO TO SLEEP"?. I try. I spend at least 6-9 hours in bed attempting to sleep everyday. Some days I sleep for 2 hours and wake up, some nights I wake up 20+ times and fall back asleep, some nights I just stay up. It's not to say that I don't sleep AT ALL, I just don't sleep well or for any decent amount of time. Eventually I will miraculously have a good night's sleep and those are nights that I cherish dearly because it is only a matter of time before the cycle starts over again.
Clearly I'm just ranting about my own frustrations on the subject. Luckily doing a quick internet search on chronic sleep deprivation you can see that I'm not the only one who deals with this. There are plenty of ongoing studies on how sleep affects our brain.
/end rant
No comments:
Post a Comment