Anxiety and involuntary negative thoughts (NNM)
In the negative perception of sleep can be divided into two categories:
Anxiety: Conscious focus on anxious thoughts. Anxiety is intentional negative thoughts that you scroll through in your head and waste time on them. When alarms are transformed into “what if?” Questions (“What if I do not fall asleep again tomorrow night?”), You are inevitably thinking about something that may never happen.
Anxiety about the possibility of failure triggers the same reaction in the body as if it had already happened; the fight or flight response is activated, and there is even less chance of falling asleep. In fact, you are doing what you feared! Anxiety takes time and, as a rule, twists into a spiral, that is, the question “What if I do not fall asleep tonight?” Quickly turns into the thought: “What if, due to exhaustion, I fail on the exam?”
Involuntary negative thoughts (NNM): thoughts that rush through your head, while you do not realize them or do not notice.
HHM, unlike alarms, are not intentional. This is a stream of assessments and interpretations that passes through your mind, for example: “Probably, I always sleep badly”. They can be deliberate and deliberate, but they often arise automatically: you agree with them and perceive it as a fact. It’s easy to agree with them, since they look quite plausible (suppose you just don’t remember when you slept “normal” last time), but they are always unreasonable and unrealistic (in the past few weeks you did manage to sleep once, otherwise you wouldn’t would stand on their feet).
They fly so fast that you probably don’t even notice them. But the fact that you do not keep track of them all the time, does not mean that they do not harm. Such thoughts can trigger anxiety, spoil emotional well-being and cause physical tension, as well as provoke helpless behavior.
If you have caught yourself on a HHM about sleep and disputed it, we are ready to bet that in 99.9% of cases this will be complete and unsubstantiated nonsense. Meanwhile, there is a negative bias.
When you are in a depressed mood and feel fatigued, you need to find a scapegoat. Often, it turns out to be a dream: you start looking for evidence in order to reinforce dark thoughts: “I made mistakes in the electronic message because I was tired (a).” The fact that the feeling of fatigue has nothing to do with your blundering does not affect the negative inclination of the consciousness – but should have! It is necessary to change useless judgments and attitudes — and reduce the degree of emotional distress associated with going to sleep. There is no other way to return sleep to normal.