What to do if you can’t sleep due to psychological stress

The most useless thing when encountering this situation is to force yourself to "sleep quickly". The more you set KPIs for sleep, the tighter the brain strings will be, making it harder to fall asleep. I stayed up for a week in a row last month to catch up on the quarterly report. I finally cleared everything up and lay down in bed. I was still thinking about whether there were errors in the data and whether the report would get stuck. The more I stared at the ceiling and counted sheep, the more energetic I became. I stayed up until after three o'clock. The sleep interventionist gave me a tip. First, let go of the thought of "must fall asleep". I lay down and rested. Even if I closed my eyes and rested, it was better than being anxious. I fell asleep not long after I relaxed my thoughts that day.

Many people will subconsciously search for various sleep tips at this time, such as mindful breathing and body scanning. I have tried them all, and they are indeed useful most of the time. Follow the rhythm of breathing and focus from the disturbing things floating in your mind to the tip of your nose and chest. Take three or five deep breaths and you can feel it. The stiff shoulders and necks relaxed, but some colleagues in the same department said that the more they count their breaths, the more energetic they become. They focus entirely on "Is my breathing rhythm just right?" and become more alert. This is normal. The method is to select people. If it doesn't work, change it quickly. Don't compete with yourself.

If you really don’t feel sleepy after lying down for more than 20 minutes with your eyes open, don’t stay in bed. Get up and turn on a warm night light. Just flip through two pages of prose with no plot or boring professional textbooks. Don’t touch your mobile phone and don’t turn on the headlights. When the blue light shines, your brain will directly think that the sky is coming. When it's bright, melatonin secretion is suppressed, which makes you even more excited. When you turn the book until your eyelids become heavy and the frequency of yawning increases, you can lie down on the bed and fall asleep. You can basically fall asleep by touching the pillow. I did this several times in the future when I was working on projects and suffered from insomnia. It was much more comfortable than lying down until dawn, and I didn't have a headache the next day.

In fact, stress-induced insomnia is essentially the result of your brain having too many unclosed programs hanging in the background. If you shut it down hard, it will pop up a bunch of pop-up windows asking "Do you want to save unprocessed files?" and it will be so stuck that you can't move. You can take three to five minutes before going to bed. Writing down those worrying to-do items on a bedside note and stuffing it in a drawer is equivalent to sending a signal to the brain that "I have written down these things and will deal with them tomorrow. Don't worry about them now." Once the background programs are cleared, you can naturally "shut down" smoothly.

It's enough to adjust it once or twice. If you have to lie down for two or three hours to fall asleep for a week or two in a row, and you feel so groggy during the day that you can't do anything, don't force yourself to adjust it. Go to a sleep department or clinical psychology department and don't buy melatonin on your own. My best friend bought imported high-dose melatonin in order to save trouble. After taking it, I felt dizzy all day long and affected my work. The most stable adjustment is to follow the doctor's advice.