Insomnia, sports and anxiety

Haven't been on here in a long time.... A number of years ago I healed from crippling chronic pain. Been busy living my life.

A few years ago I had a baby who slept terribly and it really messed up my sleep to the point where I developed bad insomnia, even after she was finally sleeping through the night. After trying various things to no avail I came across sleep compression, which worked like a perfect cure and I highly recommend it to anyone struggling with insomnia. I guarantee it works. This method proves that there is nothing wrong with your brain and you can sleep normally. Any time I have had a relapse this fixes it every time.

However, I am finding lately that playing late night sports games are triggering insomnia. Which I can then fix by compressing my sleep, but come back around to next week's game, I can't sleep that night again, get 3 hours sleep and have to start the whole cycle all over again. It's always taken a little longer to fall asleep after playing sports, because your muscles still feel like they're firing and twitching when you're lying in bed (although it's never caused insomnia before). But I joined this new league where the games are really short and intense, so I know part of it is conditioning, not just the physical over-exertion, because last week I played goalie half the game (so no running, mostly just standing there) and I still couldn't sleep (we're talking no sleep until 5am).

Part of it is anxiety as well, because I love soccer too much. It is a huge part of my life and who I am. It is my favourite night of the week, and I spend lots of time practicing and perfecting my game. I like to ruminate during the week on what I should do better next time, watch videos, constantly pursuing improvement of myself. I know this puts a lot of pressure on myself but I love it - this kind of thing is so fun and I get a high off of it. I love taking on challenges and I love beating them. And age is one of the latest challenges too - as grey hairs begin to appear I love to find that I can still give young kids a run for their money (although there's a nagging idea - what if it's age causing the insomnia? What if you are getting "too old" for this?). And I can see the results because I have been improving and moved up to the leading goal-scorer. I have a really great team and am just really enjoying it. Somehow my brain has gotten enjoyment and excitement mixed up with anxiety. I have found this with other things too that I look forward to sometimes - instead of just feeling excited, I feel anxious. Sometimes even sick. I get pre-game anxiety and during the game my mind is so jacked up and the adrenaline high lasts for hours after. I don't know how to turn this off. I need to think differently about sports but don't know how.

TMS always seems to hit you at the things you love. I don't want to quit one of the funnest things in my life. The idea that I might have to quit soccer is horrifying and frightening to me, which makes everything worse, of course. Help?

 

I have been having this same issue brother. I didn't really think it was TMS as much as my TMS personality.
Last year I quit playing night games because of it. Most of our games are night games so I missed a LOT of games. Then, Sunday I played a game at NOON and felt great! And that night I still had a tossing and turning night of sleep??????? I even did a lot of stuff after the game to make sure I was tired...no dice.

and like you said, twitchy, muscles firing, etc. Sometimes when I had a bad game, I caught myself replaying the strikeout or error... but then when I had a good game, my brain was replaying the great catch or big hit (for me). I think I am just a twitchy b-tard.

BUT...When I am laying in bed going 'I need to be asleep, I need to be asleep' I think the underlying fear is that I won't be worth a damn on the next work day...well...that's not true. On 3 hours of sleep I worked a full 9 hours the next day...so THAT little fib can get put to rest. Maybe we don't need as much sleep as we think? I am getting old, but 6 hours seems to be a full night and I have a pretty physical job.

I have always been high strung. I can only guess that the level of 'being there' and being excited is sort of like a drug for my over sensitive system... but I want to keep playing so I have been trying to UP my mid week workouts so the spike on game day isn't so extreme. I also have some sleep aid crap that I don't like taking because of needing to be on deck for work the next day...and usually by the time I think to take it, it's too late anyways.

This is a good topic. I'd like to hear more of your experience with it.

 

I was just thinking about how TMS tries to kill your life, and it does it by trying to make you give up what you love most. This is the ultimate win. The ultimate distraction. It’s very depressing.

It seems like TMS pain is only used for this goal: to make you stop living life. As you give in to these battles, your world gets smaller and smaller. I sometimes wonder if my brain will only be satisfied if I just stay in bed with the drapes drawn.

I think we shouldn’t give in. But it’s hard. I give in a lot. Lately, my world is frighteningly small. I need to get a sword out and start hacking.

@grapefruit, I found a writing exercise in Kevin Viner’s book, The MindBody Syndrome. It’s a great recovery story. He says you need to teach your brain that strong emotions (both good and bad) won’t hurt you. He advises to write about a strong feeling or topic for 20 min every day, while observing the feelings in your body and this will do the trick. I only just started, so I don’t have anything to report yet. But I say out loud all day to myself- “strong feelings are ok. It’s safe to have strong feelings.”

 

@JanAtheCPA, I am loving these discussions. They are making everything so much more clear. And also making me feel part of a winning team! Thank you!

 

I don't participate in sports, so I can't address this in that context, but I do I get in an over-stimulated state at times that leads to insomnia. I have found that taking a cold shower helps calm down my nervous system. You may need to do the full cold plunge technique for this to work for you.

https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/cold-plunge-after-workouts (Cold-water plunging health benefits)

I think it works because it forces your body to use all that excess energy to bring your body temperature back up to normal.

 

This was actually one treatment I idea I had read about somewhere and actually tried to do this the other night after my game but I couldn't bring myself to do it - if you're sweating hot in 90 degree weather, that's one thing, but after coming home late on a cold Canadian winter night an ice cold shower is like torture lol.

 

Yeah that's weird about the noon-time game and still tossing later. Like I said, the one game where I played net half the game so hardly even exerted myself physically.... Yet my brain was wide awake in the middle of the night as if it was daytime. Definitely there is just as much mental as physical part to this. And this particular league I am playing in now, which I never have before, is so intense - the games are very short, only 40 minutes, so it's like your body and brain get revved up but never actually exhausted. Whereas I am used to playing outdoors for 90 minutes, and I think the combination of fresh air and tons of running normally just wipes me out. I even played two 90 minutes games in a row last summer, and it was co-ed (I'm a female, so I'm pushed to the max trying to keep up with men), AND we had almost no subs so basically 3 hours of running all over the place. And I basically slept fine.... Definitely did not experience full-out insomnia. So physical exertion in and of itself doesn't fully explain it. I know part of the problem is that I get my brain way too fired up. Like you, I will revisit plays over and over again in my head after while I'm trying to sleep. Although this has never led to insomnia before....

I care way too much about soccer. And yet I don't want to not care about it. The intensity doesn't bother me. I just want to sleep normally. I don't know why my nervous system sees it as a threat. I get the pressure to perform frightens the id - and I know I put a LOT of pressure on myself, I am a crazy perfectionist when it comes to soccer - after every game I analyze it and pick one thing I can improve the next week - but why does it feel threatened when you are performing well? Or when you are excited about something? It's like my brain can't differentiate between the two or something. Also this perfectionism is just for me, it's not a "people-pleasing" thing - no one cares how I play soccer, I know that. This is just a fun thing I like to do. There are many areas of my life where I don't care to be a perfectionist - I can invite people into a messy house and not really care.

My short term plan is to skip next week's game, get a couple of solid weeks of sleep in and try again. I felt like I still had a hangover from the previous week's insomnia episode at my last game and maybe it's having a domino effect. Nothing like poor sleep to encourage more poor sleep.

 

Alot of research says that physical exertion even within a few hours of bedtime can disrupt sleep, for that reason I usually do my preferred sports (trail running, cycling, weightlifting, etc) in the earlier part of the day.

But I have a lot of thoughts on insomnia, having gone through a terrible bout with it when I had my "come to Jesus" time with TMS back in 2018 and my hip surgery etc. My insomnia was so bad I went through a 3 week period where I had a cumulutive amount of sleep totaling less than 8 hours. It really made me crazy (or crazier I guess). Once your sleep goes, the house of cards quickly comes down.

HOWEVER, that's also just what our TMS brain wants us to think. Baseball65 touched on it above with his "how am I going to work tomorrow if I don't get to sleep NOW" comment. This is the absolute worst mindset to have when you're trying to sleep. As he pointed out, you can function just fine with a bad night of sleep, or even several bad nights of sleep...this is very important to remember as you get your mindset right for sleeping.

And in that sense, curing insomnia is very similar to beating TMS symptoms - mindset is important.

Some tips that have worked for me:

- Practicing published meditation tips to stop my ruminating brain
- Focus on my breathing and nothing but my breathing (helps me "snap back" my ruminating brain)
- Reminding myself that a bad night of sleep is no big deal
- Writing on a notepad bed side any worries/thoughts that I just can't shake (then telling myself, "I'll check on that tomorrow")
- Going through a list of things I am thankful for in my brain (sorta like counting sheep)
- In dire situations, turning on a light (or going to another room if you have a bed partner) and doing some reading
- I avoid blue screen exposure anyway, but this is probably important if you like to be on your phone all the way up to bedtime

In general I think the popular "sleep hygeine" stuff is overdone, but I do believe that finding a routine that works for you yourself is important. In that vein, I have tinkered with a lot of stuff to improve my sleep including:
- Wearing socks to bed (or not wearing socks) - same for shirt/no-shirt, or even naked/non-naked
- Hot shower just before bedtime
- Magnesium spray
- Cold bedroom (65f or below)

Those above have been hit/miss but if I want a rock-solid night of sleep, these are almost sure fire for me:
- Sex
- about 6-8oz of milk
- 1mg melatonin
- about 5-10min of reading a book

Good luck! This is a subject close to my heart if that wasn't obvious by the above.

 

Those are all good tips but the book will NOT work for me... I love reading in bed, but I will doze off and read the same page like 5 times over and over. After reading your guys' posts I just had a flash...the things that keep me up are all things I love...reading, Baseball (watching or playing) and sometimes if a song comes in my head I have to get up and play it.

That sounds like a good idea. Or even writing out what it is I am excited about. Funny, I was in a good mood and felt good about my game even though I went 0-4...I hadn't seen live pitching in awhile and I was just glad to get the at-batsa, but maybe like Tms, I am lying to myself???

Yea, I get that. I dress and look like crap and don't care, but my tools have to all be in order...and my bat bag too! I think the things we TMS/perfectionist over are tied into our egos and what we think about ourselves.

I actually remember the best I ever felt about sports was when I was playing LOTS of games on two different teams so I never had too much time to reflect on one game....maybe I need to get on another team

I feel a lot less stressed just knowing this is common

thanks, peace

 

But do these things work after late-night exercise? I don't have a problem sleeping other nights.

 

Probably worth a try, but most sleep experts advise against late night exercising as it has a known impact on sleep. Similar to avoiding obvious stimulants like caffeine etc.

 

I just wanted to give a little update in case anyone is interested. At some point I'd like to write a longer post on insomnia.

After posting this thread I spiraled into some pretty bad insomnia. Insomnia is such a beast of a symptom. It makes you feel so awful - anxious, sick, depressed. And by the way, by insomnia I don't mean restless sleeping, or waking up in the night for an hour. Real insomnia is you go to bed and the curtain of sleep just won't fall over your eyes and it feels like it's no different than the middle of the day. Some time around 5am you pass into a really light unrestful sleep for about 2-3 hours and you wake up feeling miserable and you despair when you think of facing the day.

Eventually I did climb out of that pit and sleep completely normally now, and yes, I sleep pretty soundly after soccer games again. And after running (which was starting to trigger insomnia too, which it never had before in my life). It is definitely possible to sleep after late-night exercise (at least an hour after - but after driving home, showering, winding down, stretching, etc it's always at least an hour for me anyway). After sleeping basically fine for a month, I had a relapse. After that I slept even better, and it's been over a month since that relapse.

What I did:

-I continued to pursue sleep compression, which is outlined in the article I posted above. This method really works. Going to bed too early is the absolute worse thing you can do for insomnia.

-I had to stop thinking about soccer. I just pushed it from my mind all week. For some reason fixating, replaying and ruminating on something over and over seems to really bother and frighten the id and initiate symptoms, particularly anxiety. I don't understand this, but I have noticed this to be true in all kinds of situations. I found this kind of sad, because I like to replay my soccer games in my head and fixate on how I can improve in the next game but sleep is more important so I just had to let this go. It just puts too much pressure on the id, I guess.

-When I was lying in bed and couldn't sleep I committed to only thinking about a peaceful, indulgent fantasy. Nothing else. It doesn't help you fall asleep that night necessarily, but it will one of the next nights as your brain gets less revved up when you go to bed. It rewires it to think, "This is not fighting sleep time, it's peaceful thinking time." So it gets less afraid.

-When I was struggling to get through the day on a sleep-deprived brain, I would just tell myself I only had to get through the next hour. Can I get through giving this child a bath? Yeah, I can do that. Can I drive to this store? Yeah I'll be fine. Can I get through eating supper? Of course! This helped calm down my brain.

-Sometimes during the day the thought would suggest itself to me: What if you can't sleep tonight? I have read this from other people, that just the suggestion of insomnia can cause insomnia that night. This happened to me. When that thought arose in my mind, I would counter it with, "Nice try, but I am NOT a slave to suggestion."

-Like many others have done, I had to tell myself when I went to bed that it didn't matter if I slept or not. THis is super annoying because OF COURSE it matters, but the logic behind it is that if you keep telling your brain this, it will relax and stop pumping adrenaline, which impedes melatonin.

Insomnia is from a revved-up, anxious and fearful brain. This is very clear to me. It's tricky because sports can definitely get your mind revved up - people foul you, tempers clash, the ref is unfair, you make mistakes or perform poorly, etc, and it's a potential recipe for frustration and TMS flare-up. But I would ask some of the other people on my team, do you sleep fine after this? And THEY all do. I have several family members on my team, including my husband, and they all have zero trouble sleeping after the exact same activity. I know it's true, because I can see my husband passed out beside me at night, after the exact same experience! So the problem is not the activity - it's the person. I do this to myself.

And just because the brain likes a little scientific proof, here's a study that shows that contrary to current recommendations, late-night exercise actually improves sleep:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-1015-0 (Effects of Evening Exercise on Sleep in Healthy Participants: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis - Sports Medicine)