📚Why Do I Wake Up With Anxiety?

For those of us who are night owls and struggle in the early hours, mornings can already be a challenge. If you find yourself pondering, ‘why do I wake up feeling anxious?’, it can make beginning your day particularly distressing. It’s a common issue many people face occasionally, leading to increased anxiety and stress as the day progresses. This article aims to explore the reasons behind this issue and suggest methods to lessen its frequency.

Am I Waking Up Feeling Anxious?

When we wake up in the morning it can take a while for the body to adjust to the new day, so quite often the groggy feeling you have can be a result of a poor night’s sleep or simply not being a morning person. These feeling usually subside, though, but the symptoms of anxiety in the morning will last into the day.

These symptoms can include your heart beating faster than normal, a weak feeling, faintness, or dizziness, a tingling sensation in the extremities, a sense of fear, feeling nervous, being unusually sweaty, pains in the chest, a difficulty with breathing, tiredness, confusion, shaking, or having chills.

Understandably any of these feelings can be disconcerting and that fact alone can lead to intensifying of the symptoms. It’s important to understand the causes of your anxiety so you can find solutions to improve the situation.

What Causes Anxiety After Sleep?

Anxiety happens because of thought processes and responses that happen throughout the day, so it usually increases as time passes while you are awake. At the moment you wake up your anxiety levels, therefore, should be at their lowest because there hasn’t been any time after your restful sleep to develop those feelings. If it does happen, then something unusual is going on.

There are a number of factors that can result in you waking up stressed, most of which are products of your lifestyle and, therefore, can be altered to stop anxiety from occurring.

Your quality of sleep can have a massive effect on how you feel, both mentally and physically, when you wake up. It is important to let your body maintain a regular schedule, so ideally you should be going to bed and waking up at the same time every day- even at weekends. This allows your body’s cycles to synchronize, and helps you fully benefit from the time spent asleep.

Dreaming

Dreams can also influence how you feel in the morning. We dream about 7 or 8 times a night but most of these are forgotten by the time you wake up. If you experience particularly vivid dreams, though, the memory might linger and if they are particularly troublesome ones, your emotional state from within the dream will remain.

Waking up in a Sleep Cycle

Disruption of your sleep cycles can increase the chances of this happening. Most dreams happen during REM sleep, and we are not meant to wake up during this stage. If you are disturbed while in the middle of a dream and forced to wake, you are much more likely to feel effects of it.

Stressful Lifestyle

The final main factor that can cause you to wake up feeling anxious is your general state of wellbeing. If you live a particularly stressful life, or have been feeling anxious recently for whatever reason, you will be more likely to wake up in that way.

If you often have arguments in the morning, for example, or are worried about being late to work, or have a job that involves high levels of stress, then your brain can shortcut to that feeling immediately, because it expects to be soon experiencing it anyway. In some ways it is serving as a warning to you of the way you expect things to be.

How to Reduce Morning Anxiety

By changing the factors causing your anxiety and pursuing a more healthy and productive lifestyle, you can train yourself to wake up feeling much better. Sleeping in a good environment will make a major difference. To sleep well, it is vital that you have a comfortable bed, keep to a regular routine, and aim to set aside about 8 hours each night for resting.

Reducing the causes of stress in your life will also help. If you are anxious about work or the people in your life, you should consider confronting these challenges to lessen their impact on you. By making work a less stressful place, for example, your mind won’t be as anxious about the upcoming day. You can do this by improving your work environment, listening to your favorite music, and maybe even decorating your desk.

It’s also a really good idea to have a decent meal for breakfast that includes plenty of hydration. While this isn’t necessarily a direct cause of the anxiety, it will prepare your body for the day ahead, help to reduce your anxiety, and reduce the chances that you will wake up feeling like that in the future.

The Final Word

It can be tough enough to get going in the morning, and the way you feel first thing will have a big effect on how you feel going forward. It sets the tone for the upcoming hours, and can make the difference between a positive, optimistic day or the complete opposite. Asking yourself ‘why do I wake up with anxiety?’ is not a great way to start, so it’s important that you take steps to remedy the situation, particularly if you find that you are experiencing it a lot.