Embarrassed to admit this but here goes

[ryangreen]

Sorry if I'm posting a lot today but I have a lot on my mind

This one is by far the most embarrassing to admit but I am going to just put it out there

At 30 years of age I am extremely fearful of the every day act of sleeping yep I said it I'm scared to sleep. I'm sure many here are rolling their eyes right now and laughing as I'm sure a lot of people can't wait to sleep to have a few hours free of their anxiety.......NOT ME

why you ask? Well it's simple I don't have control over what will or will not happen to me during this time. If I have a heart attack , stop breathing or something else bad I won't know it and won't be able to alert someone to my distress and there I will lay deceased in my bed as my beautiful wife is none the wiser laying next to me.

So there it is a grown man who lays awake until his wife wakes him up and tells him to turn off the tv because he can't sleep without it on

[cloudbusting]

Hi Ryan
I can understand that fear and you really mustn't be ashamed or embarrassed.
I have used some wonderful guided meditations over the past couple of weeks. There are loads of them on You Tube just search 'guided meditation for anxiety' and a bunch will come up. Pop in some earbud earphones and drift off as you listen to them. You can get short ones of a few minutes or ones that last for hours that will take you right through the night.
They will help you to get into the habit of relaxing once you are in bed, use these audios for as long as you need, they have worked for me.
Best wishes
Lisa x

[Andrash]

Have you tried sleeping pills? As you don't have insomnia only this psychological problem very mild ones will do. Let your wife make you take them if you're unwilling :)

[Lin71]

Hi
Another vote for meditation! I sometimes get scared to sleep especially when having a bad time with HA as my mind just obsesses about my symptoms and doesn't allow me to relax. Combined with a fear that if I go to sleep I might not wake up again :wacko:

I have a couple of meditation apps, just the free ones, that I find really help to slow my mind down and let me drift off peacefully.

Lin xx

[hheavenlyangel]

What other things are going on in your life, are you feeling like you have no control over other areas of you life? There is absolutely nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about. There are so many people out there who have the same fears as you, what you need to remember is that the body needs rest to regenerate cells, you need to be able to get a good night sleep to stay healthy, mentally and physically. As mentioned above, meditation is a great way to get you started, I would also add in some Melatonin from the Homeopath, this will regulate your sleep so that in time you will be able to drift off without your mind going 100 miles per hour. You need to try and let it go and just know, what will be will be. The TV may even be compounding your problem, it could be stimulating your brain, putting it into overdrive??? just something to think about. A great trick my sister taught me was to count backward from 300... I never usually remember much passed 270... I really do feel for you, I have been where you are and I know how frightened you must feel but know you are safe and you have nothing to be worried about.

[saab]

It's not silly, Ryan. When I started with my pvcs I was scared to sleep in case I died in the night. My pulse feels like it pauses, then starts again. Now that I have read up so much on the heart, I know that that is not true. A pvc is an early beat, and your heart never pauses and at no point will your heart stop.

I mention this because your heart has millions of pacemaker cells, all of which are capable of generating a heartbeat. If you are generally healthy, there is a miniscule risk of you dying suddenly, really miniscule.

I am sure we have all read news stories about healthy people dying in the night - very scary, but that is why they are newsworthy, because they are incrediby rare.

I used to have to sit up in bed, terrified, until I fell asleep. I am better now, but going to be bed isn't the calming sanctuary it was before the palpitations. Please don't waste your life worrying about something that is never going to happen.

One of the things that reading cbt books and meditation/mindfulness has helped me with is accepting uncertainty. I could post all day long reassuring people, but noone can ever be 100% sure. You have to try to look rationally at the facts and say, "It's not impossible that I will die in the night, but it's very, very, very unlikely". When you are lying awake feeling dreadful, you tend to think, "I feel awful... I must be ill", but actually just try to accept those feelings, rather than chase them away. You begin to realise thry are mental feelings of anxiety, not physical feelings. As Claire Weekes says, our nerves bluff us and make us think we are physically ill.

The free Insight timer app is very good for guided meditations and Tara Brach has a website with more on. They help me a lot.

I found having a radio on low helped too, if I really couldn't settle. It doesn't disturb your OH so much and you can fall asleep with it on.

[Shelly06]

Nothing to be embarrassed about at all as already said. I don't have a problem sleeping but when I'm having high anxiety periods such as I have been doing lately, it does get worse at night when I go up to bed. I lay there thinking that everyone's asleep and no doctors are open and what if this and what if that, now I do as others have said, put my headphones in and listen to either a talk show on the radio or most of the time do some meditation which does help, that silence isn't there and all you have to listen to is the thoughts in your head that are trying to scare you.

As mentioned though, for some the stimulation of listening to something or watching something might not help everyone, but usually any meditation apps, I use the free ones or YouTube videos I listen to and do are very relaxing and help to relax all the tense muscles and help me focus on that moment, also calming the mind and helping it not run at a hundred miles per hour.

A few nights this past week I've been very worked up at bedtime and it's no good if I just lay there and think, but ever since I've been putting my headphones in and taking my mind off it as much as I can it's been easier and I usually fall asleep pretty fast or even if I don't having something to listen to takes my mind of things somewhat as well. If I'm having a HA attack it might take a bit longer than other nights for me to be calm enough to go to sleep but I try to be calm as much as possible, do my meditation and try and not get myself anymore worked up than I already am at the time. You just need to find the right thing for you and what works.