How To Manage Sleep Anxiety, According to Sleep Doctors | Well+Good

All too often, the more you worry about or pine over sleep, the more sleep seems to play hard to get. And as it turns out, that’s not just a coy metaphor—it's actual science: Thanks to the interplay of stress and sleep hormones, the experience of stress can make it harder to doze off at night and reach deep, restorative stages of sleep. Not to get too meta, but that reality certainly includes any kind of stress or fear that’s quite literally about sleep (or, perhaps more aptly, an inability to get it). This specific type of stress is what sleep doctors call sleep anxiety.