Dealing with night terrors

Anxiety when it comes in the night can be particularly hard to deal with. It may be less troubling than anxiety at times when we’re more visible, but it is also harder to manage. The tired mind isn’t as easy to control. When you’re awake, it is easier to try and reason with your own panicking mind. When awake, strategies can be deployed – be that breathing techniques, or visualisations, or just leaving the building.

In the middle of the night, in your bed attire, with everyone else asleep, or perhaps alone, it is difficult to fight your way out of panic. Waking into panic is especially hard because you get no conscious warning and there is no time to deploy tools or even brace yourself.

If it happens rarely, it’s a hard thing to prepare for as well. If it comes round more often, it pays to develop a plan when you can think about it properly. Decide what you might be going to do – because when you’re sweating with night terrors and barely awake, you’ll have trouble coming up with anything useful.

I find it helps to move. If you just lie there with nothing to distract you, it is easier for the terrors to keep chewing on you. Moving your body can help ground you and if the terror is vague, just the action of getting up and drinking some water can help push it away.

If that’s not enough, I go for distraction. The internet is a great blessing to me at these times, and there’s often a friend or two from some other part of the world online in the wee small hours. Random chats have rescued me on many occasions. I find things to read. If I’m more awake, I might go for a book. There’s no point trying to reason with my brain if I’m tired, but distraction often works.

I give myself an hour. If I can’t get it under control in that time frame, I wake my chap up. I don’t like waking people up, but if the panic is too intense for me to cope with on my own, this is the better call. Sometimes a calm, sane person who can talk you down makes all the difference. In the night, my fears can be incredibly irrational, and I can know they are irrational and still not be able to challenge them. I latch onto small problems and wake up convinced that they are perilous and disastrous and it’s hard getting out of that by myself.

That said, anxiety isn’t utterly irrational even when the focus of it is ridiculous. It troubles me how CBT and other ‘cures’ start from the assumption that you have nothing to fear and need to stop being silly. Anxiety exists either because of something historical that still haunts you, or something contemporary that threatens you, or both. Taking it seriously and trying to put it into perspective is more productive than dismissing it. If the superficial anxiety seems ridiculous, it could be because something else is underlying it. It can also be hormonal, and I know much of what I’m experiencing relates to the menopause. This too is an entirely real experience that needs taking seriously, even if it is manifesting as irrational panic. It seems to come from excess stress in my waking life, even if the rest of the time I feel like I’m on top of it.

If we lived in a kinder culture, with gentler working practices, this would all be so much easier to deal with. The sleepless night would not lead to the terrible day, and that in turn would give us less to fear.