Ever experienced that paradoxical state where you’re exhausted and just want to sleep, but your brain is racing through thoughts in overdrive and just won’t let you relax? — dpa
It typically happens to babies and young children: They become “overtired” and can’t sleep, often because they’ve been awake too long.
But adults can become overtired too, robbing them of longed-for sleep that can set a vicious cycle in motion.
Two experts explain what overtiredness is and how to break the cycle.
Overtiredness is feeling exhausted while your brain is overstimulated and in a state of hyperarousal, according to Britain’s University of Bristol professor of neuroscience Dr Matt Jones in an interview with BBC Science Focus.
This state inhibits important processes such as the build-up of “sleep pressure” during waking hours.
This process involves an increase in the concentration of various neurochemicals and hormones in the brain, such as adenosine, that allow your body to sleep, he explains.
The brain, however, can become more excitable over the course of an extended period of wakefulness, causing your thoughts to race and resisting sleep pressure.
What’s more, getting too little sleep increases the likelihood of your brain becoming overstimulated by troubling thoughts the following night.
“Rested brains are good at ignoring things that happen all the time but have no real consequence,” Prof Jones is quoted as saying.
“But if you suffer from insomnia, you’re less able to let go – consciously or unconsciously – of irrelevant information.
“That accumulates a massive burden on the brain.”
Psychology lecturer Dr Alex Scott, from Keele University in Britain, offers three strategies to break the vicious cycle of overtiredness and insomnia.
The first is not trying to will yourself to sleep, e.g. by counting sheep, because the harder you try, the harder it will be to drift off.
“We need to acknowledge that sleep is an automated process,” the BBC quotes him as saying.
“It won’t happen if you try and make it happen.”
The second strategy is to keep a worry journal.
Strange though it may sound, regularly writing down your worries before you go to bed can help people who have trouble sleeping get more shut-eye, according to Dr Scott.
How?
It can help you realise that your worries are really trivial, he explains.
For those that aren’t, writing down a brief action plan on how to deal with them will help you to put them aside for the moment, he says.
While this won’t solve them, writing them down will “force you to process your emotional responses around the things that are keeping you awake”.
And if they keep running through your head anyway and you can’t fall asleep, get up, go to another, quiet room, and write some more.
“One of the worst things you can do is stay in bed tossing and turning.”
Dr Scott’s third strategy is to set a bedtime timer – preferably an hour before bed – to give yourself time to unwind.
What works best to relax depends on the individual, he says, be it reading, writing in your worry journal, or something else. – dpa
