How Stress Impacts Regular Sleep

Sleep is extremely important if you want to be a productive, functional person. As your body sleeps, it’s rejuvenating itself, learning, strengthening memories, and doing many other incredible things.

It should be no surprise that stress and anxiety impact sleep patterns and habits. In fact, out of all the things that can affect your sleep schedule, stress has one of the most detrimental impacts. If you’re curious and want to know why you’ve come to the right place. We’ll discuss how and why stress impacts regular sleep patterns and what you can do to reduce stress and get your sleep schedule back on track.

How Does Stress Impact Sleep?

The number of people who aren’t getting enough sleep or have impaired sleep is at an all-time high. Over 40% of all Americans complain that they either don’t get enough sleep or they don’t have quality sleep. Ironically enough, stress levels in adults are also at an all-time high. This isn’t a coincidence. Studies have shown that stress has a direct impact on your sleep patterns and can upset your sleep schedule.

Stress and Hormones

Part of the reason that stress affects sleep so drastically is because of how stress affects your autonomic nervous system. Your nervous system controls the release of hormones, which in turn, help regulate your body.

When you’re stressed, your body automatically releases stimulating hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. These are the same hormones that get released when you’re afraid during fight-or-flight situations. They’re meant as a trigger to stimulate your body into action rather than calm you down. Therefore, you don’t want your body to release adrenaline and cortisol when you’re trying to fall asleep.

Stress and Your Mental Health

In addition to your hormones, stress also keeps you awake by affecting your cognitive functioning. When you’re stressed, it’s because you’re thinking about something that worries you. This could be family or relationship stuff, work or school-related issues, or financial problems. Regardless of what the source of your stress is, however, you won’t be able to fall asleep as long as you’re thinking about it because your brain won’t be able to wind down.

Stress and Sleep Quality

In addition to keeping you from falling asleep, stress also affects your quality of sleep. Stress is one of the leading causes of occasional sleeplessness and other sleep disorders where you fall asleep but then have trouble staying asleep. You can do everything else right, from diet to screen time, but if you’re stressed, it can still ruin your quality of sleep.

Part of the reason that stress disturbs your quality of sleep is that it affects the duration of the various sleep stages. When you’re sleeping, your body automatically cycles through each sleep stage every 80 to 90 minutes. If you’re stressed, however, you may cycle through the stages faster than you should, thereby affecting your quality of sleep.

Stress and Sleep: A Never-Ending Pattern

Unfortunately, once stress starts affecting your sleep patterns, it’s tough to get back on the right track. Stress and sleep have a symbiotic relationship in that one affects the other and vice versa. As we’ve discussed, stress will keep you from getting a good night’s sleep by keeping you up at night and fragmenting your sleep patterns.

On top of that, a lack of sleep will induce an auto-immune response triggering the activation of your body’s stress response system. When this happens, your stress levels are automatically activated, resulting in even more stress. Therefore, once you start letting stress affect your sleep, the lack of sleep will lead to more stress, and the pattern will continue.

How to Reduce Stress and Improve Sleep

Because of how connected stress and sleep are to one another, it’s important to do everything you can to eliminate stress in your life. Here are a few tips and tricks to get you started.

Consider taking natural sleep supplements such as l-theanine, magnesium, and chamomile, to name a few.
Exercise a minimum of thirty minutes per day. Exercise is a proven way to reduce stress.
Talk things through with a friend, family member, or spouse.
Consider seeing a mental health professional or counselor.
Practice yoga and meditation.
Reduce the amount of caffeine you consume.
Make dietary changes to eat and drink healthily.
Avoid social media and screen time late at night.

By doing these things, you can eliminate stress and get back on a healthy sleep schedule.

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