Do you often wake up in the middle of the night? The German doctor explains the reasons and gives advice on how to fall asleep again

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Waking up at night and inability to fall asleep painfully and nervously. Sleep expert Michael Feld from Germany explains the reasons and what techniques and herbal supplements help.

Very often it is personal and professional stress, stress and anxiety when a person does not sleep or does not sleep at night. Thoughts begin to spin. Everything that was bad during the day and could go bad tomorrow, what you have to do tomorrow but probably won't succeed, plus worries about money, work, children, relationships.

Fears and anxiety keeps us up at night

All these fears make the brain work at full speed. At night, in the darkness, there is nothing to distract us from them, we can no longer suppress and cover them in the same way as during the day. At night the (un)clothes of the day are removed, perhaps giving us the (deceptive) security of status and image, at night we are emotionally exposed and naked, feeling small and helpless, like children who are afraid of a bad person.

Because we unconsciously tense our muscles when we are afraid, they in turn support brain activity. And he just does what he does best: thinks, ponders, analyzes everything that we really don't want to look at. No wonder, even though we are dead tired, we wake up again due to the internal turmoil in our head.

Typical symptoms:

• internal tension or anxiety
• strong heartbeat
• feeling of pressure in the chest
• sweating
• nausea
• pain in stomach
• diarrhea

These complaints are often not recognized as signs of mental health problems. Especially since you really don't want to know anything about your fears.

To dissolve this dynamic, behavioral therapy has invented a “paradoxical intervention”: for example, the therapist instructs the patient to stay awake or directly “allows” to stay awake and think. . Since internal resistance does not lead to anything, the situation can noticeably relax.
Or someone even consciously interprets waking up positively: “it's really cool that I don't need to sleep. Now that it's so quiet and nobody bothers me, I can behave myself and do something good for myself.”

Tips for falling asleep

< li>Practice autogenic training or another form of relaxation.
• Write down all the thoughts that worry you so you can let them go at night
• Don't look at the time. This is stress.

Sometimes it is better to get out of bed and do something like ironing or cleaning for a while – something not too active, but rather simple, slow, monotonous.