Nighttime Anxiety in Children: How CBT Helps Without Reinforcing Fear
If you tend to overthink while you’re in bed, when you should be resting, you’re not alone. Busy schedules, constant stimulation, and short-form media distractions can leave little room to process emotions during the day.
As a result, your thoughts and worries often surface at night. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is helpful for those experiencing anxiety in general, including nighttime anxiety. It can help you prevent negative thought cycles that lead to anxiety by recognizing how your thoughts and feelings impact your daily behaviours.
Signs You May Be Ignoring Anxiety During the Day
When life feels overwhelming, it’s common to push anxiety aside just to stay productive. Here are some common daytime behaviours that may lead to nighttime anxiety:
Feeling constantly stressed or on edge.
Temporarily avoiding anxiety by staying busy, scrolling on social media, or drinking.
Temporary relief from distraction attempts.
Feeling anxious again before bed.
It is difficult to address anxiety in real-time, especially when our lives are so busy and distractions are only a click away. Recognizing the issue is the first step to properly addressing it.
Common Signs of Anxiety
Catastrophizing: jumping to the worst-case scenario.
‘What If’ Cycles: replaying possible future problems that haven’t happened yet.
All-Or-Nothing Thinking: believing things are black and white.
Ruminating on Negative Experiences: focusing only on negative outcomes that reinforce existing anxiety.
CBT & Anxiety: How it Can Help
CBT therapy is an effective treatment for anxiety. It teaches you how to recognize the thought cycles as they occur, and prevent them from worsening or occurring in the future.
It targets dysfunctional thinking patterns that lead to distress and negatively impact daily behaviour. By focusing on thoughts, emotions, and mental processes, CBT increases awareness of how what you believe influences how you feel and behave.
The ABC Model & CBT Therapy:
A: Antecedents - Previous events that lead to anxious thoughts.
B: Beliefs / Behaviours - Thoughts or actions that follow the trigger.
C: Consequences - Outcomes from antecedents and behaviour (such as nighttime anxiety).
CBT therapy is focused on reframing thoughts, slow exposure to perceived threats, and gradually facing feared situations with support. CBT also involves tools such as:
Keeping a thought record to become aware of automatic thoughts and their triggers.
Activating healthy behaviour by scheduling time to partake in anxiety-inducing tasks.
Role playing stressful scenarios to achieve a clearer, more realistic picture of what they really entail.
Relaxation and stress-reduction techniques to better handle anxiety when it becomes overwhelming, including deep breathing, muscle relaxation, mindfulness, and guided imagery.
Once you learn to catch your negative thoughts as they are happening, it is easier to change unhealthy behaviour and replace it with healthy coping mechanisms. CBT therapy is based on your goals and needs. The therapist only guides you to learning techniques or challenging thoughts when you are ready.
You Can Get Through This
You are not alone and you are not destined to feel this way forever. It can be healthily managed with CBT therapy.
If you or someone you know can benefit from learning to recognize negative thought patterns that influence behaviour and lead to lack of proper sleep, CBT therapy is the right path.
Contact us to book a free 15-minute consultation with one of our CBT therapists today. Let’s work together to help you overcome exhaustion from nighttime anxiety.
