Anxiety and sleep

Anxiety often disrupts sleep. Anxiety is your body’s signal to be alert because there’s danger. Staying alert is necessary in situations of risk or danger. So, for example, if you’re about to take your final exams, or if your child is ill, anxiety is normal.  Other less obvious reasons for anxiety can be psychological, and take more work to understand.

Tips for getting to sleep in the face of anxiety:

o   Resist the urge to check your social media before going to bed. What you see is apt to be exciting or upsetting, or perhaps be a call to action, all of which could keep you awake.

o   If you drink coffee or another caffeinated drink, stop your intake well before bedtime.  This allows your body to metabolize the caffeine so it won’t keep you awake. Figure out how late in the day you can drink caffeinated drinks without causing sleep problems.

o   Make sure that you’re comfortable in bed.  Physical discomfort may keep you awake.

o   If your partner snores loudly at night and wakes you up consider finding another place to sleep. Loud noises tend to keep us awake.

o   If you’re lying awake and worrying about something in particular, make an effort to resolve that issue as soon as possible.  You’ll sleep better once you address the problem.

o   If you are suffering from insomnia and have tried all of the above suggestions it might help to talk to a professional about your trouble with sleeping.  Sometimes talk therapy can resolve anxiety.  Also, other conditions such as anxious depression can lead to insomnia.  In that case talk therapy may resolve the issue, and if needed antidepressant medications can also be useful.  Don’t use tranquilizers like Valium or Librium, as these can be addictive and ultimately cause more problems.

Keep working on this issue!  Sleep is important to our health and happieness.

Welcome to my blog!

Here I’ll address the same topics you’ll find in my book, American Madness. 

We’re told that one out of four Americans suffer from mental illness. The term “mental illness” implies so much that is frightening or negative. But this statistic counts everything that insurance could be billed for, that is, anything that has a DSM diagnostic code.  That could mean a mild and short-lived depression, a bout of mild anxiety, or occasional insomnia.  None of which I would call “mental illness.”

On the other hand, a few of us (about 1%) suffer from schizophrenia, and about 3% suffer from bipolar disorder.  These are serious mental illnesses, the sort that leave people disabled if not treated properly.  These are true medical illnesses.  A wide variety of treatment approaches, from body work to psychoanalysis, can be helpful with mild anxiety or insomnia.  But serious mental illness is a brain disorder and requires intensive treatment, one part of which is medical. 

American Madness is about serious mental illness.  It’s about what these illnesses do to the individual and to family members who struggle to help their loved ones. It’s about what it takes to provide successful treatment. And it’s about the illnesses themselves—how we recognize them, how we understand them and how it feels to be the affected individual. 

The Biology of Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are brain disorders. They are fundamentally different from psychological disorders such as anxiety disorder, PTSD, or mild depression. They are physical illnesses. Schizophrenia is a wasting disease of the brain. On an MRI you can see decreased volume of the gray matter, with increased volume of the cerebral spinal fluid, enlarging the ventricles. Schizophrenia is like ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), which is a wasting disease of the brain and spinal cord. 

The good news is that with schizophrenia if you start appropriate treatment early enough, you can arrest the disease process. But getting in early means starting the right treatment at the beginning of the illness, with the first psychotic episode if not before. The more months that pass with untreated psychosis the worse the prognosis is.