I was able to finally sleep. Thanks @Wings for the recommendation. Warm milk helped
BUT I can’t focus on the present anymore, I can’t get through my day routine. All I can think about is going to bed at night and how much I dread it. I don’t why I feel so much anxiety surrounding this. Something about not knowing when I’m going to fall asleep or just being unconscious somehow invokes fear.
And this is new to me. Bedtime is never scary for me but I just can’t stop thinking about it and my mind won’t calm down. I just sit and think.
Im frustrated and feel like crying
It’s like I can never have peace. I was finally just starting to get my life together and this comes up
The anxiety about sleep is such a paradoxical phenomena. You think about sleep, can’t sleep because you’re thinking about sleep, so you can’t sleep. Not sleeping leads to more depression/anxiety and the vicious cycle perpetuates itself. I’ve had a moment in my life where I was dealing with a lot of anxiety and the idea of being alone, in my own head, with nothing but my racing thoughts terrified me. I would literally only fall asleep when I was too exhausted. I resorted to reading on my phone until I passed out, which actually helped because it made my mind focus on something else other than the thought of trying to sleep with chaos in my mind.
What I ultimately learned out of the ordeal is to redirect my mind to focus on things other than what I want (sleep) and allow my mind to be occupied through out the day with things that would make me tired… eventually I learned how to comfortably go to sleep again.