How Does Insomnia Affect Mental Health?

This post goes with sleep because I honestly cannot believe that I have only done one article on sleep so far.

Insomnia is not uncommon at all, but that does not mean that it is not serious.

I can speak from experience, insomnia is not only incredibly frustrating, but it affects our overall mental health.

Why Can’t I Sleep?

I went to Newcastle, England to study abroad during my junior year of college. Around a month in, I started to not be able to sleep. I still don’t know exactly why to this day, but it was so frustrating that I went out for a walk at 4 in the morning. My insomnia was brutal for my already fragile mental health while traveling during the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then I think I realized that why I couldn’t sleep could not be attributed to just one reason. During that time I was adjusting to a new country, worrying about the pandemic, and trying to figure out where my life was going. All of those things might make it seem like insomnia was inevitable, but I just wanted to sleep but I couldn’t. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back so to speak.

Insomnia And Mental Health

For me, insomnia was a consequence of a culmination of stress from multiple different issues, it was not chronic. However, for many people, chronic insomnia can be a huge detriment to physical and mental health. Sleep is just so important to human existence and not being able to sleep is detrimental in so many ways. A lot of the time insomnia does not act alone as I talked about in my personal experience. Insomnia can be caused by several physiological, psychological, and physical things. For me, my insomnia lasted for a couple of days and eventually stopped but that is not the case for many people who struggle with not being able to find good quality sleep.

What Can We Do?

There are so many stressors in our daily life. Sleep should never be one of them. What worked for me was if I could not fall asleep in 15 minutes of really trying to I got out of bed. The worst thing we can do when we are struggling to sleep is to stay in bed because that associates the bed with something other than sleep. In our minds, we like to put two and two together. For example, we associate the kitchen with food, we associate the office with work, so if we have a hard time sleeping and we stay in bed we are associating struggling to sleep in a bed. This is why I am linking the program Cure Insomnia which goes through everyone’s unique sleeping habits and cycles to end insomnia once and for all. No two days are the same, so why would two nights of sleep be the same? On top of this, everyone has their sleeping habits, positions, pillows, and mattresses. There is no reason to suffer anymore from insomnia and have your mental and physical health suffer because sleep eludes you. Let’s get back to sleep so our minds can stay sharp throughout the day!