Why Spending Too Much Time in Bed Can Be Exhausting
Susan went to bed at 8:00 p.m. in order to try and get enough sleep.
She wasn’t able to fall asleep right away, and she'd often wake up in the middle of the night. She'd get up at 7:00 a.m. feeling exhausted.
“Must get to bed. Must get more sleep” was her constant mantra.
Her life was dominated by trying to spend enough time sleeping.
She didn't have time for much else, including a social life.
She blamed this on not getting enough sleep.
And yet, spending so much time in bed was contributing to her problem.
While in bed, she'd think about all her problems.
She would re-hash an argument with her boyfriend that had happened the day before, mulling it over and over. She would wonder if she had said something else if things would have gone differently. And then what he said just got her furious…
She’d then move to her finances. Things were tight right now. How was she going to be able to afford to buy the condo she and her boyfriend were trying to save for?
Next would come her hateful job ….
All this was punctuated by “For goodness sake am I EVER going to fall asleep?”
Yet, the source of Susan’s exhaustion wasn’t lack of sleep.
When Susan became a client, we started tracking her sleep. We got a picture of when she went to bed, what time she fell asleep when she woke up, and what time she go up in the morning.
We found out how much sleep Susan was getting.
The answer was very surprising to Susan.
Once tracked, we could see that she was getting 7 hours of sleep on average.
The problem was that she spent a lot of time in bed stressing. Her exhaustion came from stress.
Susan didn't need more sleep. She needed less stress.
The more time she spent in bed trying to sleep, the worse she felt.
The more time she spent thinking about all her problems, the more stressed she became.
Stress is draining.
Stress wears us out at a cellular level.
Stress depletes all our body systems.
Stress as a chronic condition slowly erodes our resilience.
Susan needed to learn to stop stressing when she went to bed.
The first step was to spend less time in bed. This wasn’t easy for her. It was the opposite of what she had been doing all these years, thinking it would help.
This counter-intuitive solution was the beginning of her shift from being a bedtime stressor to a bedtime sleeper.
Now, she gets great sleep every night.
And she also knows how to stop the mental stress loop.
When she wakes up, she feels refreshed and ready for the day.