Are you looking for effective tools to help your clients struggling with insomnia and sleep anxiety? This video introduces a ready-to-use sleep hygiene handout designed specifically for therapists!
Learn how this practical resource can empower your clients to:
- Understand the importance of sleep hygiene for mental health.
- Establish a relaxing bedtime routine.
- Optimize their sleep environment for restful sleep.
- Utilize worry journaling techniques to manage anxious thoughts.
- Implement evidence-based strategies for better sleep and reduced anxiety.
This video provides an overview of the handout’s key sections, including:
- Creating a relaxing bedtime routine.
- Optimizing the sleep environment.
- Dietary considerations for better sleep.
- Step-by-step guidance on worry journaling.
- Additional evidence-based tips for improved sleep.
**Perfect for: Therapists, counselors, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health professionals.
⬇️ Download the handout Sleep Hygiene for Nighttime Anxiety 👉 https://mht.thrivecart.com/sleep-hygiene-tips-for-nighttime-anxiety/
⬇️ Download the handout Worry Journal 👉 https://mht.thrivecart.com/worry-journal/
🛍️ ALL ACCESS PASS** https://mht.thrivecart.com/all-access-pass/
Let’s explore effective strategies for managing sleep struggle and insomnia through proven methods like meditation and sleep hygiene. Discover how cognitive behavioral therapy can help reshape your approach to rest and relaxation. Learn practical techniques to address your sleep disorder and create a sustainable nighttime routine. 🌙
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TRANSCRIPT
****PATRICK MARTIN, LCSW****
Hey helpers, you asked, “How do I help my client get better sleep?” And I love this question because sleep is one of the most. Salient issues when it comes to therapy and sleep is often times a really crucial indicator of what’s going on in the clients world. And it tells us a lot of information and gives us a point of intervention and leverage and how we can. And help them. So I think of sleep as a vital sign, just like when you go to the primary doctor and they take your blood pressure, your temperature, etcetera. When we’re doing therapy, most of the time every session, I’ll ask, hey, how are you sleeping, right? Asked this question a lot because it is like a vital sign and it’s going to give me a lot of information. And one thing we know about mental health and clients is that sleep can have different patterns depending on what’s going on with a. For example, if a client struggles with major depressive disorder, then they may have good sleep for a lot of the time. But when they’re going through a depressive episode, they will often times have. Yeah. Or were they just sleeping weight a lot? More than usual. Same would be true if somebody has like a bipolar disorder. They might sleep OK for a lot of the time, but when they’re ramping up to a a manic episode, for example, then they won’t be sleeping. Maybe for two or three days. And we’ll have a lot of racing thoughts and other things that go hand in hand with that. And so sometimes there’s not anything as extreme as one of those two examples, but not sleeping well can be a number of things such as chronic nightmares, recurrent nightmares. Intrusive thoughts. Just due to high anxiety and can tell us a lot about what’s going on within the client’s world. So great question and I’m so glad we’re talking about this. One thing to know is that sleep is often. X something we really, really want to assess for in the front end during the intake assessment and we don’t want to drive by the sleep topic too quickly because there’s a lot of really good media information there that we want to kind of dive into, OK. So when we’re talking about sleep, you know, thinking about insomnia or sleep anxiety, right? Can sometimes be two different. Insomnia could be a number of things. Just to be clear. I am not a doctor. I’m a therapist. And so if you are having sleep issues or your clients having sleep issues, of course always have them make sure they’ve had their physical and they’re following up with their primary care. To make sure it’s not anything due to a primary medical or General Medical condition, right? Mental. 101 we never want to label something as a mental health issue before we roll out General Medical stuff. OK. There you. I’m not a doctor, alright so. When we think about my anxiety. And what we can do about it, right? The first thing to understand is that nighttime anxiety and insomnia are common and very distressing for clients, right. As we know, whether you have mental health challenges or not, if you don’t get a good night’s sleep. It affects the rest of your day, right? And what we know is that we generally want to get at least six hours of solid consecutive sleep. In order to function. You know. Well, maybe closer to 7-8 depending on the age group you’re working. Teenagers need a little bit more, give or take. So bottom line, we just need a good solid sleep, especially when we’re talking about how the body builds things like the human growth hormone, which is. A primary factor in creating. So precursor, just like tryptophan and night. Nice and human growth hormone comes from good. That’s when the body does its repair and we can’t get deep sleep unless we’re getting, you know, solid four to six consecutive hours. So very, very important, especially for our mental health and it’s one of the biggest risk factors for declining mental health. If we do not. Get a grasp of it. Right? So we know that it impacts daily life, mental well-being and underst. Why we’re having sleep issues, our clients are having sleep issues will give us effective points of intervention, be that sleep hygiene, be that diet, be that lifestyle, etcetera, be that addressing the cognitive. Intrusive worries through acbt lens versus a solution focused lens. You know, we’re really trying to kind of figure out how we can get at this because sleep is not a one-size-fits-all issue. It’s definitely something that. Has a lot of dimension to it. But what we do know is that improving sleep is ossible, right? So we’ve all heard of the circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm is just the pattern of sleep. Your body gets used to, which is why, umm, if a client’s doing a lot of day napping because they don’t sleep at night and then they take a. Two hour nap during the day. It’s really going to be hard to get back on track and from my experience it takes about two to three weeks to reset your circadian rhythm on stain to a regular sleep schedule. And correct me if I’m wrong, if you know more about sleep than I do, which could very well be the case. Maybe it takes longer, maybe it takes. Let me know in the comments sure with the group. What we know is that cortisol. In the evening. That’s your stress response hormone. Chemical and that melatonin drops as cortisol increases. We actually want the opposite we want. We really want our melatonin to be increasing. Because that helps us get more sleepy, relaxed. But for cortisol, levels are out weighing our melatonin.
Speaker
Sleep.
****PATRICK MARTIN, LCSW****
Really going to contribute a lot of those sleep issues, right? Brain activity increases at night often times, and we talk a lot about this with the clients in the sense that if. They don’t have quiet time during the day to really reflect on what’s bothering them, what’s on their mind, what you know, things they want to accomplish. Then what ends up happening is your brain tries to get busy problem solving as soon as your head hits the pillow. Because that’s the only quiet time it has to really address these issues, right? And so this is kind of a perfect storm for anxiety to worsen at night between our hormones and the busyness of life in our. So we really want to kind of look at all of these factors and try and figure out how can we help clients get ahold of this, right. And there are the exceptions, right? Are some non 24. Or people out there. They think it’s approximately 8% of the population, don’t have a 24 hour clock, so they might be on a 36 hour clock for example. And so that their sleep cycles may look a little bit different. These types of people tend to. Do better on graveyard or swing shifts with work. You know, and they figure it out, but it is very much a individualized thing, and we’re just trying to figure out what works best for clients and how we can build our their help them build their lifestyles around what works for them, OK. So the role our minds in cognitive and emotional triggers, right? So we know there’s definitely a lot of daytime stressors stuff going on with families, stuff with work, other concerns oftentimes get put on the back burner in our minds because we don’t have time to deal with it. And sometimes it feels like life is just coming at you, right? If we can’t deal with things one at a time. Up umm. Then that can become very overwhelming and really come out umm in those quiet hours of the night. And again we talked about that, the ruminating your brain starts. Try and problem solve, but it’s really not the best time to work on those issues right that. We’re supposed to be resting. So our thoughts tend to get louder at night and umm, that’s a problem, right? So in therapy, we really encourage something like a worried journal and a worried journal is a tool we’ll talk about. A minute that I found very helpful when it comes to intrusive thoughts that are more anxiety based and maybe not so much of A chemical imbalance issue like you would see with a bipolar disorder or major depressive disorder. Sometimes general anxiety disorder can. Have a different flavor to. That’s more the intrusive thoughts of worry. You know the random thoughts at night that kind of keep people up, right? So other than those general things, right, the thought process, condition anxiety, or chemical imbalance, there are definitely some environmental factors that come into play. Caffeine and alcohol consumption in the evening can definitely impact our quality of sleep. Excessive screen time scrolling on TikTok Instagram, that kind of stuff. That blue light you’ve heard about blue light and messes with our dopamine receptors. So we want to be careful that we’re limiting the amount of blue light before bed. They say usually no screening. Time an hour or two before bed if possible. If you have to use your phone, there’s a setting I believe you can turn off the blue light so that can help, right? We want to make sure that we have a regular and comfortable sleep environment. We’ll talk more about that, but that could look like. Cool temperatures 69°. Making sure the room is dark. Don’t have a lot of light exposure too early. You want to keep it nice and sleep friendly, uncomfortable, uncomfortable sleep environment. The importance of a well lit room in the morning, so we do want sunlight to wake us up in the morning, but we don’t want sunlight before we’re ready to wake up so. Yeah, if you need blackout curtains, those are something you can use as well. But we’re really trying to help our body wake up naturally when possible. And all of these little things can tend to stack up over time, right? We’ll talk more about that. So sleep hygiene. So that looked like consistent bedtime routine and environment. Now we’re talking solutions. So how can we help our clients come up with solutions to address their sleep challenges? And that goes back to figuring out and spending the time. To identify what kind of sleep problem this is. Is this a quality of life issue? This a sleep hygiene. Is this a stress management issue or is this a chemical imbalance issue and so all of those things we have to take into consideration, but there are relaxation techniques we can help clients umm adopt such as deep breathing grounding exercises as well as that word journal I just. And word journals really help externalize your thoughts before bed. And we’ve. I’ve put out some other videos about Orion journals. I have one I’ve created. If you want to check it out, I’ll share that. You. A minute. But really, that’s helping to externalize ones worries on paper. And so you can put it away and come back to that at a later time. That really helps give. Brain. Some closure that you’re not going to forget to address the problem, which is oftentimes what fuels anxious thoughts is the. Fear that if you. Don’t think about it or sell it, right? Then somehow it’s going to fall by the wayside and everything’s going to. Apart. That’s how the brain. It doesn’t like anything that feels threatening, so I’ll worry. Journal helps us kind of put that in the box. Come back to it. We can confirm it to ourselves, to our brain, our. Hey, we’re coming back to this thing and it’s going to be addressed, OK. Sleep restriction is important. Sleep restriction means. Limiting our bed for bedtime. Not hanging out in our bed during the. I know some people have to rent rooms and they pretty much live in their bedroom, but as much as possible, we want to reserve our bedroom for bedtime and keep that to be a sacred space, right? You’ve heard of that before, and if you have any other ideas, of course, please let me know in the. Share with the group. OK so. Beyond that, really, I just want you to think again about case, case to case basis. Like try and figure out with your clients what the patterns and conditions are around the sleep that are causing problems. Really going to help you inform your treatment, treatment plan and interventions around the sleep issue. Example like if a client presents with good sleep 70% of the time but then doesn’t sleep at all for three days at a time and has no need for sleep, they feel very energized. And motivated and they get a little grandiose and. Racing thoughts. That’s a red flag for maybe a bipolar episode, right? If somebody has good sleep most of the time, but then has chronic fatigue for a couple weeks, that could be a huge red flag for depression. If somebody has just poor general poor sleep all the time, but nothing. Clerical then that can be more of a. Anxiety disorder and you’d work more in the CBT side. So always think about case to case basis in terms of what might be going on. In summary, nighttime anxiety and insomnia are very. We just have to kind of figure out what’s going. It might even mean referring them to the doctor for a sleep study to make sure it’s not something. Medical you know, generic like sleep apnea or something like that. We can take a holistic approach. Um to the mind, body environment and we can empower clients with tools and a sense. Hope. We want to make sure we do maintain that sense of hope that, hey, change is possible improvements possible. You’re not the only person in the world to struggle with this. Use the information we have. Let’s work for other people. Work for other therapists. To try and figure out how we can get a hold on this thing, right? And I’m very, very. Please do share what’s worked with for you or what’s worked for your clients when it comes to sleep, anxiety, insomnia. Please share in the comments. The more we can inform each other, the more we can help our clients and serve better, right? OK. So if you want to check out the handouts I have, I have some sleep hygiene tips, handouts for your therapy practice as well as a worried journal. And I’ll kind of show what those look like here. So this is my handout on sleep. Hygiene and it just kind of goes through a few basics for your. We don’t want to overwhelm them with handouts, so I try and keep it, you know, top level here, but some basic tips on what sleep hygiene is, some things to keep in mind. They could even take this, you know, by their bedside or keep it by their night. Just as a reminder or tape it on the mirror as we’re getting ready for bed, just as a quick reminder and what we focus on, we improve on, right. And this is very true with our routines, as we know, trying to even regulate our sleep around a certain window can be very challenging. This is my word journal. Out you can also grab this in the library. But the worried journal again, you’re trying to identify what the worries are verbatim. You know, you write them down, and then you come back to it at a time when you can actually chew on it and come up with some plausible ideas and solutions. That’s not actually bedtime. You want a time where you can focus and not interrupt your sleep and ultimately really trying to figure out is this a tangible problem? Vague concern is this a future problem? So sometimes helping clients identify that too will help reduce those intrusive thoughts at night. So if you want to grab either of these handouts, you can just head over to the mental health tool box. And that will help you there. I’ll show you that right. So you can just go over to mht gear com, or the mental health toolbox and justice go to the shop and you’ll see I have all my handouts here you can grab. Have lots of. Very affordable handouts as well as a lot of free ones. If you happen to be so inclined, you can get the All Access pass for $10 a month and then you can get unlimited access to all the handouts in the library for your therapy practice and your. Work with your clients. I do add to that weekly. I aim to add to it weekly, so if you want, you can sign up for a month. Everything then cancel it. I’m playing with that, but I do add to it daily and you can always give your feedback if you like. I have a request button here at the top of your resource. You can always submit me a personal request for a handout if there’s something you would like to see more of, just let me know. But this is what the library looks like once you get in there and set up your account, OK. Hopefully you find that helpful. Umm like I said, you can go over to mht gear com to check those out. But mostly I’m interested in what’s working for you and if you could please umm let us know and then we can all thrive together, OK? So hopefully that you know was helpful. Sleep is a huge topic. If you’d like to see more videos. And episodes around sleep and what we can do to help clients with that. As as a therapist in our practice, please let me know and I’ll definitely make more videos like this until next time. Keep social working. Take Care now. Bye bye. Hey, if you’re getting value from this content and you haven’t done so already, be sure to like and subscribe to the YouTube channel and podcast and be sure to subscribe to the Mt newsletter. That way you don’t miss out on any new content as it’s released links and the description.
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