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Not everyone responds to stress with insomnia. Heredity, childhood experiences, diet, exercise, personal relationships, and the sheer number of stressors impacting your poor beleaguered body dictate the way you react to stress. In a study conducted at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, for example, women who had a preexisting tendency toward anxiety were twice as likely to develop insomnia than those who did not. Men were even more vulnerable. Men with a preexisting tendency toward anxiety were three times more likely to develop insomnia."Insomnia is a part of the individual way each of us handles stress," says Dr. Arand. Some people park stress at the bedroom door. Others develop high blood pressure. Still others take it to bed -- their minds just won't turn off.
That's not to say that occasional insomnia isn't normal. "Insomnia is a normal response to occasional stress," says Dr. Arand. "If it's the night before your presentation at work or the night before your divorce, it's a natural response.
"What's not natural, she explains, is if insomnia becomes chronic. And that usually happens when you focus on the fact that you're not sleeping rather than on the stressor that actually caused the problem. You begin to think that insomnia is the problem -- and you go to bed expecting to have a problem getting to sleep or staying asleep. As a result, says Dr. Arand, we start thinking, What if it happens again tonight? And, sure enough, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Supporting the notion that you seemingly have a problem with sleep rather than stress is the fact that you feel so totally rotten the morning after a sleepless night. So you say to your friends at work, "I feel awful. I couldn't sleep a wink last night!" And they all nod their heads knowingly because -- guess what? -- they didn't sleep so well, either. So now you've gotten support in blaming the wrong problem. And instead of trying to find a solution to what's actually causing the insomnia -- your stressors -- you're trying to find ways to catch up with the sleep you missed so you don't feel so darned awful.
"Sleep becomes your overriding thought in life," says Dr. Arand. You start mainlining caffeine during the day, then popping sleeping pills at night. Those strategies may give you a temporary boost in alertness, but in the long run they only exacerbate the problem.
The really insidious thing about this whole mess, says Dr. Arand, is that once you get into this pattern, even when your stressor is eventually eliminated -- the rent gets paid, the ex-husband moves out of state, the tooth gets pulled -- you've gotten yourself into a pattern of chronic insomnia. So now your problem really isn't stress, it's things like multiple naps erasing the need to sleep at night, too many trips to Starbucks for a caffeine fix, and your expectation that you won't sleep because, of course, you have a "sleep problem."
Fortunately, once you realize what's going on, changing how you handle stress and reestablishing healthy sleep practices will bring back restorative sleep within weeks.
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