Anxious? Can’t sleep? These two problems coexist so frequently it’s difficult to tell which one came first. If you find yourself tossing and turning at night, unable to quiet your spiraling thoughts, or if you can’t seem to switch off until you’ve read to the very last page of the internet, perhaps it’s time to seek a way to calm your anxieties and get better sleep.
Break the Cycle
Anxiety leads to poor sleep, and poor sleep leads to many stress-related problems including anxiety. To stop this self-reinforcing cycle, an increasing number of people are turning to potent, natural CBD tinctures for support. These fast-absorbing natural solutions are sometimes combined with melatonin, vitamins, or other nervous system supports for a variety of health benefits.
CBD (cannabidiol) is a natural substance derived from the hemp plant. A growing body of evidence supports the effectiveness of CBD for improving sleep as well as for reducing anxiety and pain. CBD can help with both falling asleep and staying asleep. For those who also suffer from anxiety or chronic pain, the anxiety-reducing and pain-relieving effects of CBD can calm the problems that keep you awake at night and help you to re-establish a healthy sleep cycle.
Why Better Sleep Is Key
While poor sleep and mental health issues occur together frequently, it is difficult to tell which one was the underlying cause. Maybe lack of sleep caused the mental health issue, or maybe the mental health issue came first. Either way, it is easy to convince oneself that your anxiety (or depression, ADHD, or other symptoms) is the problem and that you’d get better sleep if you didn’t have that.
There is reason to believe that you could get better results from turning that reasoning on its head. Even if insomnia did not cause your mental health issues, improving sleep will almost certainly improve those issues, and protect you from the compounding effects that stress and poor sleep have on the body.
Your body and brain repair themselves during deep sleep. This repair process fortifies your immune system, which is closely linked with mental health. Sleep is also a time when the brain processes memories and emotions you’ve experienced throughout the day. Lacking a daily 8 hours of quality sleep stresses the parts of the brain that handle your emotional responses to stimuli, causing increased stress in response to daily events.
Allow Time to Heal
The physiological effects of chronic stress are well known. Regardless of the initial cause of your stress, when you’ve reached the point of losing sleep you have crossed the threshold into chronic stress. Without adequate time to process the day’s emotions and clear the cells of cortisol and other toxins, your body is more prone to inflammation, weight gain, and other reactions to long-term stress. These issues can compound your insomnia, and lead to serious health complications.
CBD is a particularly useful treatment because it addresses both sleep quality and anxiety. By calming the anxiety that may keep you awake, and then supporting sleep, CBD can get you the most important thing your body needs to heal itself – a full night of quality sleep. When you wake up after a night of healing sleep, the neural-protective effects of CBD can help to keep the stresses of daily life manageable.
Healthy Sleep and Stress Reduction
Once a treatment such as CBD has begun to stop the cycle of insomnia and anxiety, you can rebuild a healthy sleep routine and other habits that can reduce your stress and improve your health. Remove obstacles to your getting a full 8 hours of sleep each night, by silencing phone notifications or other distractions and switching off all stimulation (including work and entertainment) an hour before you need to be in bed (at least 9 hours before you need to wake up.)
If you have been experiencing stress and insomnia for some time, your body may already be suffering some of the negative effects of chronic stress such as inflammation and weight gain. By improving sleep and calming the anxiety, you remove two of your body’s greatest threats. As you begin to feel better throughout the day, you can adopt more stress-reducing habits such as breathing meditation light exercise and healthy eating. You’ll create a positive cycle that leads to better physical and mental health.
