because in the evening we become more anxious and stay awake thinking – breaking latest news

Just when the mind should relax, remove all worries and finally get ready for sleep, it often happens that unwanted thoughts and ruminations appear instead. anxieties concerning possible problems of the following day or actions and choices made that you are not satisfied with.

Habit that comes from afar

It seems that this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon may have a evolutionary explanation: for our primitive ancestors the moment we were about to fall asleep was also a moment of great danger because you became exposed to potential enemies and predators. therefore it is obvious that the organism, before falling into the unconsciousness of sleep, carried out an examination of possible future dangers and a balance sheet of past actions. Today maybe there really wouldn’t be a need, but the mind doesn’t seem to know it.

What thoughts are they?

Cognitive therapists who try to combat the difficulty falling asleep precisely through behavioral procedures e thought control education when you get ready for sleep. Moreover, those who fall asleep easily, once in bed, naturally tend to have thoughts devoid of emotional connotations. To avoid falling into the trap of anxieties that keep the arrival of sleep away, psychophysical relaxation techniques can be implemented and above all one should learn to recognize the kind of thoughts who cause anxiety, as they are precisely those who tend to take into consideration issues left unresolved, personal or work, or who re-propose choices made with which they are not satisfied. The moment in which one prepares for sleep should be free from these ruminations. Instead they tend to concentrate precisely on that moment also because during the day, thanks to concrete commitments, they have not been sufficiently taken into consideration.

Think local

Among the techniques proposed to keep the mind free from these anxious thoughts there was also that of writing them on a special daily diary, in order to try to leave them there, where they will be found the following day, thus being able to keep them away from the moment you go to bed. Among other things, if on the one hand insomnia can be generated by this kind of thoughts, it has also been ascertained that in turn a very disturbed sleep can cause further states of anxiety, thus creating a vicious circle. The phenomenon has also been studied from a neurobiological point of view and it has been possible to observe that the anxiety-producing effect of too short and poor quality sleep is due to a malfunction of brain areas closely connected to anxious phenomena, such as the medial prefrontal cerebral cortex and the limbic regions, with which this portion of cortex is functionally associated. Fortunately, the opposite is also true: good sleep can positively stimulate the brain areas responsible for anxious phenomena and therefore have an anxiolytic effect on the following day.

How sleep restriction works

And given that tossing and turning in bed while thoughts crowd the mind does not help you fall asleep, one of the behavioral techniques suggested by specialists is the so-called sleep restriction, which suggests that you stay in bed only for the number of hours you are able to sleep. For example, if a person gets an average sleep of six hours a night but stays in bed for eight hours, they will be instructed to stay in bed for only six hours instead says Michael Perlis of the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who co-wrote a review article on insomnia in the journal The Lancet. This component of therapy, also called sleep reprogramming, is based on matching the ability to sleep with the time spent in bed, by postponing when you go to bed and precisely identifying when you have to get up. Once this way sleep became more efficientYou can try increasing your time in bed by about 15 minutes a week.