OCD and Insomnia: Why It Happens and How to Sleep Better

The OCD and Anxiety Podcast by Robert James Coaching. Music.

Hello and welcome to the OCD and Anxiety Podcast where we explore how to have a more positive relationship with anxiety disorders taking back control so that you can start living the life you choose and not the one chosen by your fears. Music. Hello and welcome to episode 465 I hope that you're doing very well today wherever you are and if you are struggling with OCD or anxiety and you would like to get some support with that Well, you can by heading over to my website, robertjamescoaching.com.

There you can book in for a free session. Or if you prefer, you can send me a message and let me know about what you're struggling with. In today's podcast, I'm going to be talking about OCD and insomnia. So if you struggle with sleep because of anxiety and OCD, then today's episode is definitely for you. If you find the podcast helpful, it would be great if you could leave us a review.

That really does help the podcast and please do follow along on instagram my instagram handle is at robert james coaching uk and if you have any questions at all about anything i speak about today do please let me know off we go.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking. Clifton Fadiman. And this is a great quote to get us started today because actually, you know, sleep and OCD are things that really do influence each other. Back when I was really struggling with OCD, I would find myself going around in circles all day pretty much with my thoughts. And of course, whilst I was doing that, I was winding myself up.

I was getting myself, you know, more and more stuck in the kind of anxiety trap. And I was producing a lot of cortisol and a lot of adrenaline, which if you don't do something about that, if you don't process that throughout the day, it tends to kind of pool in your body and it tends to stay there in your blood.

And of course then when you try to go to sleep if you've been thinking like that throughout the day and you've got all of this cortisol and adrenaline in your blood it's much less likely that you're going to be able to fall off fall off to sleep in a in a good and positive way and certainly for me I remember you know one time it was about a period of three or four months where I just couldn't sleep at all every night I was kind of dreading going to bed because I knew

the inevitable situation was going to happen i wouldn't drift off i'd start getting angry about the fact that i couldn't sleep i'd start thinking about what i had to do in order to sleep better and i would go around in circles in my head you know with this this frustration about you know why i wasn't sleeping which of course made it even less likely that i was going to fall asleep ocd and insomnia are closely linked because they both thrive on the same pattern a mind that refuses to settle.

With OCD, your brain becomes locked in on loops of trying to solve, prevent, or fix something. And at night, when the distractions of the day fade, those loops often grow louder. It's not just intrusive thoughts about sleep itself, though. You know, like, what if I can't fall asleep? The kinds of things I was struggling with in the past. It's also the compulsions to kind of fix that fear. Whether it's checking the clock, analysing your tiredness or replaying the day in your head.

What makes it even harder is how anxiety fuels this process. When OCD triggers the brain's fight or flight response, your body reacts as if it's actually in danger, keeping you alert when actually you should be winding down. And the more that you try to control this, the more elusive sleep becomes.

Instead of relaxing into rest your mind feels like it has a job to do protecting you from the imagined threats even if that might be at 3 a.m in the morning and the way forward isn't about controlling the thoughts or forcing sleep it's about learning to let go of that need for control sleep happens naturally when you give yourself permission to stop solving and start being and you know the thoughts might still be there

but they don't have to to kind of hold you hostage which is something that OCD is very very good at.

So rather than go into detail about some of the more obvious things that you can do for for sleep such as managing your your thoughts throughout the day so that you remain more calm come the evening and developing habits like limiting screen time before bed etc etc I'm actually going to offer two interesting and powerful approaches that I've actually used and which can be extremely beneficial for sleep.

The first is a lifestyle approach that can dramatically improve sleep and the second is more of a practical intervention that can be utilized whilst you're in bed and struggling to drift off. So when it comes to fighting insomnia you might not think of plunging into icy cold water or doing intense breathing exercises but actually that could be part of the solution and I'm talking here about the Wim Hof method.

Wim Hof developed a method of combining breathing techniques and cold exposure and mental focus to help people improve their health, resilience and yes even their sleep. So what is the Wim Hof method? So really it has three pillars. Pillar number one is the breath. The breath work involves deep rhythmic breathing techniques that actually involve cycles of inhaling deeply and exhaling without fully releasing the breath.

Number two is cold exposure and this involves regularly exposing yourself to the cold like ice baths for example or cold showers even and this stimulates your body's stress response and actually increases your ability to be able to kind of resist stress and to learn how to bring more acceptance to those things. And the final area is actually mindset training, learning how to allow a bit more discomfort which is obviously something that can be helpful for OCD.

It's thought that the combination of these different activities helps to regulate the nervous system more efficiently.

It deals with inflammation in the body and actually improves your body's ability to recover and rest now an important thing to mention here is that you should never mix the wim hof breathing with the water so never practice wim hof breath work in or near the water because it can be dangerous so what does the research say about the wim hof method and sleep well wim hof himself has plenty of anecdotal stories about how the method can help participants but actually

there's now a growing body of research that really does back this up as well. One study into stress reduction and sleep found that the breathing exercises have been shown to reduce stress hormones like cortisol and increase relaxation hormones like endorphins which may indirectly improve sleep quality and And certainly when I think about my situation in the past when I was really struggling to sleep. I was dealing with a lot of intense rumination throughout the day about the OCD.

You know, I'm sure my body was producing a lot of stress hormones, a lot of cortisol, a lot of adrenaline. And actually, if something like the Wim Hof method can actually help to regulate those stress hormones and process them, then obviously that's going to be a really beneficial thing for sleep.

Another interesting area is body temperature regulation. Cold exposure obviously helps to regulate your body temperature and blood flow, which are crucial for falling asleep and actually staying asleep. This is particularly interesting because cooler body temperatures are linked to deeper sleep stages.

Another interesting area is improved resilience. Research published in 2014 found that Wim Hof's breathing techniques could influence the immune system by increasing epinephrine and reducing inflammatory markers in the blood. And while not directly tied to sleep, lower inflammation and improved stress responses can lead to better overall health, including more restful sleep. And while the direct link to insomnia isn't fully established.

The Wim Hof Method seems to create the kind of conditions, less stress, better resilience and a healthier body, that make sleep much more likely to occur. A word of caution if you are going to practice the Wim Hof Method is actually to really slow everything down, to begin by focusing on your breath and to start breathing, you know, initially into your stomach.

Maybe taking four or five very slow and deep breaths down into the belly, up into the chest and then breathing out nice and slowly just to begin to kind of calm and settle you.

And then next what you're going to do is you're going to start breathing and into each and every body part starting with your your feet and the idea is to imagine that you're breathing in a white light and this white light is going to be helping your body to relax and so the idea is to breathe this white light all the way down through the body into the feet and imagine that you're filling up the feet with this white light and in the process your feet are relaxing and then on the

exhale you let go and then you breathe back into your feet again and you would repeat this three or four times and then you would move to your ankles and then to your calf muscles and then to your shins and the idea is to work your way very slowly up through the body really focusing your attention on trying to relax every single different body part and often what happens when you're doing this is you're moving your awareness from the annoyance of

not being able to sleep and instead you're now focusing on your body on trying to relax your.

Different body parts and often we begin to just drift off to sleep because now we're not so focused on you know trying to sleep we're actually focusing on something else altogether you know if you're tired you might find that you just start to to kind of drift off and even if you don't well at least now you're going to be in a bit more of a relaxed state than you were when you were kind of getting frustrated about not being able to to fall asleep so there we go those are two tips you

know that i think are a little bit different from the standard tips out there that can be you know very helpful for dealing with insomnia when you when you struggle with ocd if you have any questions at all about anything i've spoken about today do please let me know and please do subscribe for more content like this it really does help and i will see you next time.

Just a quick reminder that if you want to get a free session all you need to do to get that is to head over to my website www.robertjamescoaching.com and there you can leave me a message and we can arrange the free session and now just a quick reminder of my disclaimer Any information that you view on my website, Instagram page, Facebook group or anywhere else online or any information that you listen to on the podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended

to be a substitute for actual medical or mental health advice from a doctor, psychologist or any other medical or mental health profession. Music.