{"id":50538,"date":"2025-07-09T04:58:28","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T04:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/50538\/"},"modified":"2025-07-09T04:58:28","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T04:58:28","slug":"this-unexpected-bedtime-habit-helped-ease-my-nighttime-anxiety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/50538\/","title":{"rendered":"This unexpected bedtime habit helped ease my nighttime anxiety"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are roughly a hundred crows outside my window, staring straight through me like they know something I don\u2019t. A textbook case of nighttime anxiety dressed up as something far more sinister. I stand frozen on the other side of the glass. Then they break in. They circle. They scream. They peck at my head. I wake up<\/a>. It\u2019s 4:09 AM.<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t a one-off. My dreams had grown jagged, absurd, increasingly vivid. That viral video of a crow chasing a dog? My brain repurposed it into a horror sequence. \u201cIt\u2019s called the day residue effect,\u201d explains Dr Vivek Barun, a neurologist and epilepsy specialist at Artemis Hospital. \u201cThe content we are exposed to before bed often shows up in our dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n

After I quit my full-time job in April, my routine dissolved. I stopped sleeping well. My nights became a carousel of Reddit rabbit holes, sea monster theories and ganji chudail videos. I\u2019d stay up late, wake up forcing and carry a head full of racing thoughts<\/a>, especially at night.<\/p>\n

My therapist<\/a> asked me to log my daily routine and a pattern emerged: the doomscrolling spiked first thing in the morning and just before bed. That\u2019s when she pointed out that what I’m consuming right before sleep might be the problem. I was bringing nighttime anxiety into bed and wondering why I couldn\u2019t rest.<\/p>\n

Trying to cut screen time<\/a> didn\u2019t work. I\u2019d want to log off Instagram, then find myself just one reel away from learning about a haunted palace in Rajasthan. The modern-day Chakravyuh is the infinite scroll. You think you\u2019ve escaped, then you\u2019re pulled back in by a recommended video about ghost towns in Himachal.<\/p>\n

Then I stumbled onto a YouTube vlog<\/a> where Aaliyah Kashyap casually mentioned she\u2019d started watching children\u2019s shows before bed and it helped her sleep. No preachy, prolonged routine. No blue light sermon. Just… cartoons. I was intrigued.<\/p>\n

Ruchi Ruuh, therapist and counselling psychologist, explained how slower narratives create a sense of temporal spaciousness, signalling the body to slow down. \u201cThis helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system<\/a>, lowers the heart rate and prepares the body for rest,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

So that following night, I cued up an 11-minute episode of Oswald, the blue octopus with the bowler hat who once ruled my pre-school TV time. I also made a rule: no phone after 12:30 a.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are roughly a hundred crows outside my window, staring straight through me like they know something I…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":50539,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[210,517,67,132,68,3149],"class_list":{"0":"post-50538","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us","13":"tag-wellness"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114821510185392198","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}