Morning Anxiety Guide: Causes, Symptoms & Tips to Stop

Today will be the last day you wake up with anxiety in the morning!

Because, today you will get to know everything you need to kick morning anxiety’s butt.

This is the most comprehensive guide on the causes of morning anxiety and how to deal with it.

Let’s get started!

What Is Morning Anxiety

If you wake up with an excessive and uncontrolled feelings of stress and worry, it might be a case of morning anxiety.

Morning anxiety is not a formal medical diagnosis but it may make it difficult for you to get up from the bed and organize your morning to prepare for the day ahead.

Doctors often consider morning anxiety to be an extension of general feelings of anxiety and panic attacks. However, if it starts occurring more often, it might be an indication of having GAD (General Anxiety Disorder.)

Is Morning Anxiety Common?

Morning anxiety is becoming increasingly common.

This is mainly due to the rise of mental illnesses among populations, with almost 40 million adults suffering from anxiety disorders every year in the US alone.

Google has also seen a consistent rise in the amount of searches for the term ‘morning anxiety’ since 2004. As the January, 2023 data shows, the popularity is only going to increase.

That being said, there are some specific reasons why you might be experiencing morning anxiety.

What Are The Causes Of Morning Anxiety

The causes of general stress and anxiety can be quite difficult to understand.

Since morning anxiety is an extension of the general stress and anxiety, there can be many different factors that can contribute to your symptoms.
However, I’ve narrowed the list down to the following potential causes of morning anxiety from a variety of biological and lifestyle factors.

General Stress (Life Events – Relationships – Work – Finances)

Stress is omnipresent and follows us in everything we do every day of our life.

When we perceive something as disturbing or worrying, our body releases the cortisol hormone, also referred to as the ‘stress hormone’ as a natural response.

Stress can be both good (eustress) and bad (distress), depending on the nature of events causing stress in us and the outcome expected because of the stress.

Both types of stress are important in our life, however, we have a greater tendency to cause persistent distress because of the challenges we face in everyday life or because of certain life events.

This type of stress can trigger anxiety symptoms and damage emotional well-being. According to University Hospitals, the five most stressful events in life are:

• Death of a loved one
• Divorce
• Moving to a new home
• Major illness or injury
• Job loss

Apart from these life events, other regular areas of life, like relationships, finances, and work, can also induce stress and anxiety in you.

Relationships

You might have already experienced the impact of relationships on your mental health and emotional well-being.

There is enough evidence to suggest unhealthy relationships can lead to severe stress and agitation, whereas healthy relationships improve the mental well-being of both individuals, even enhancing their quality of sleep at night.

Any sort of relationship distress like breakups, can affect your emotional health and also contribute to increased anxious thoughts.

Work

According to WHO, poor work organization, poor work design, poor management, unsatisfactory working conditions, and lack of support from colleagues and supervisors can lead to work-related stress. Research findings suggest types of work with excessive demands and pressures that are not in line with the worker’s knowledge and abilities, along with little flexibility and support from others tend to be the most stressful.

Chronic work stress, however, can have serious implications for your mental health, and can even lead to the development of anxiety disorders and depression, along with increased risks of fatigue and burnout.

Finances

Financial stress eats up almost everyone.

Financial Health Institute defines ‘financial stress’ as, “A condition that is the result of financial and/or economic events that create anxiety, worry, or a sense of scarcity, and is accompanied by a physiological stress response.”

When financial worries become persistent, you can develop chronic financial stress which can cause severe damage to mental health, including anxiety disorders and insomnia.

General life stress can be damaging when it becomes a persistent part of your life, increasing the risk of developing anxiety and other serious mental health conditions.

If you are unable to keep the stressful thoughts out of your head either before going to bed or after waking up in the morning, it can become an apparent cause for waking up with morning anxiety.

What You Eat For Dinner

There is concrete evidence of the relationship between foods and mental health.

Eating certain foods can trigger stress and anxiety symptoms.

What you eat for dinner can very easily make you prone to increased anxiety and stress if you’re not careful. If your dinner meal contains gourmet foods, processed foods, or fast foods (with added trans fat in them), it can trigger anxiety right before you go to sleep at night.

A hyperdrive of anxious thoughts before bed can make falling asleep very difficult with increasing chances of developing insomnia along with a serious impact on sleep quality. All this can eventually contribute to causing morning anxiety when you wake up.

Drinking Alcohol

If alcohol has become your go-to stress reliever before bed, it causes mini-withdrawal effects once the good-mood wears off, significantly affecting sleep quality and giving you bad panic attacks.

Being a depressant and a diuretic, alcohol also leaves you numb and dehydrated that can intensify symptoms of anxiety like rapid heart rate, dizziness, and fatigue.

All the evidence suggests consuming alcohol regularly is not good for your health and can significantly intensify symptoms of anxiety, making you susceptible to developing anxiety disorders and depression. And if you have a habit of drinking to unwind and fall asleep at night, the side effects of alcohol in your body might be causing morning anxiety when you wake up.

Smoking

Much like alcohol, people develop the habit of smoking to temporarily calm their nerves and relieve anxiety.

However, the effects of nicotine can intensify multiple anxiety symptoms and may even contribute to developing anxiety disorders in the long term.

Similar to alcohol, smoking can cause panic attacks and ruin sleep quality.

If you have the habit of smoking cigarettes, especially before going to bed, it might be one of the biggest contributors to causing morning anxiety.

This should be another good reason for you to quit this bad habit now.

Lack Of Quality Sleep

The relation between anxiety disorders and sleep is not uncommon to those who suffer from either one of the problems.

Studies have shown that anxiety and sleep disorders particularly insomnia have an influential connection with each other.

One sleep study on youngsters with an anxiety disorder suggested insomnia may be a risk factor for developing anxiety disorders with sleep problems leading to anxiety disorders 27% of the time.

Not getting enough sleep for too many nights can lead to increased anxiety and make it difficult to cope with psychological stress, according to another recent study.

The relation between sleep and anxiety is so intimate that any drop in sleep quality can lead to increased feelings of anxiety and stress in the morning. In fact, lack of sleep quality is one of the major reasons for experiencing morning anxiety and fatigue.

Having Nightmares

Many times having a bad dream or nightmare can increase feelings of anxiety when you wake up. According to Mayo Clinic, you are more likely to experience nightmares in the second half of the night which is relatively closer to the wake-up time and can even occur multiple times a night.

You may wake up feeling scared, anxious, angry, sad or disgusted, depending on the theme of your nightmare.

If you experience frequent nightmares causing changes in sleep behavior and major distress, you might consider consulting a doctor for nightmare disorders.

Waking Up Stress – Cortisol Awakening Response

All living beings follow a natural awake and asleep cycle during a 24-hour period every day.

This natural cycle is controlled by the circadian system also referred to as the internal biological clock.

The Circadian System regulates biological processes and alertness levels in our bodies through a small bunch of neurons, called ‘suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN).’

Located deep within our brain, the SCN controls a vast number of biological cycles to regulate our body’s sleep patterns, eating patterns, core body temperature, brain wave activity, and hormone production over a 24-hour period.

It is this internal biological clock that signals your body when to fall asleep and when to wake up depending on how much sleep you need.

The cortisol awakening response (CAR) is considered to be a crucial function of a healthy circadian rhythm in human beings.

Researchers believe cortisol levels (stress hormones) go up between 30 and 45 mins of waking up to keep us awake and prevent us from going back to sleep.

It is this spike in cortisol levels that may determine times during the 24-hour period when we are awake and when we are asleep.

However, studies have shown people with higher stress in their lives to have relatively higher levels of cortisol release during the first hour of waking up, suggesting a more powerful signal by the body to get up and manage the stress expected for the day ahead.

Although a natural response of our body, higher than normal levels of cortisol may make you susceptible to anxious thoughts when you wake up causing morning anxiety.

Ruminating About The Day Ahead

When we wake up in the morning, our mind goes straight to all the activities and responsibilities that we have to take care of during the day ahead.

Some days might bring with it some new or difficult experiences which can let your mind ruminate about how those situations and your day might go.

Insecurity about the day ahead can paralyze and overwhelm you from getting off the bed and can very easily contribute to a burst of anxious thoughts in the morning.

What You Eat For Breakfast

What you eat for breakfast can also contribute to increased levels of anxiety in the early hours of the day.

If your breakfast meal contains foods with high amounts of refined sugar or salt, like breakfast cereals, bread, box juice, flavored yogurt, etc., it can quickly lead to a spike and crash in blood sugar levels.

Refined sugar gets absorbed into the bloodstream very quickly and easily, raising up our blood sugar levels. To compensate for this unnatural rise in blood sugar levels, insulin is released.

However, our body’s natural response to a rise in insulin levels is releasing stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline to prevent your blood sugar from crashing down.

Riding this sugar wave early in the day with consistent release of cortisol and adrenaline, it affects your mood, energy levels, appetite, and cognitive performance.

High levels of adrenaline and cortisol can naturally make you susceptible to severe anxiety and panic attacks. Therefore, the food you eat at breakfast can be one of the biggest contributors to increased anxiety not only during the morning but throughout the day as well.

Consuming Caffeine

Being the most popular beverage around the world, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you prefer coffee to jumpstart your drowsy mornings. The not-so-secret magic ingredient is caffeine. The average cup of joe may contain up to 85 mg of caffeine, which is more than enough to just drive you out of your morning slack. However, too much caffeine can:

• Increase your heart rate and blood pressure
• Make you shaky and nervous
• Is addicting
• Makes your brain and heart work harder
• Blocks sleep-inducing neurotransmitters like adenosine

High levels of caffeine can interfere with the production of the feel-good chemical serotonin, eventually leading to a depressed mood, with one study noting that consumption of 300 milligrams of caffeine a day can leave you with twice as much stress. To put it in perspective, a Starbucks ‘grande’ coffee packs about 330 milligrams of caffeine.

Caffeine is also a diuretic meaning it will make you dehydrated and it also interferes with your sleep quality. Lack of quality sleep and depressed mood can naturally aggravate anxiety and nervousness, which can contribute to your morning anxiety.

GAD (General Anxiety Disorder)

If anxiety is constantly haunting you throughout the day and the symptoms seem to exaggerate during the morning, it might indicate sustaining other mental conditions like GAD (General Anxiety Disorder.)

People with GAD often feel anxious at any time of day with anxiety worsening typically either before going to bed or when they wake up in the morning.

Depression

Multiple studies have found links between depression and increasing scores of morning anxiety.

In a 1989 study on 131 elderly and middle‐aged patients with clinical depression, close to 32.1% of them reported early morning anxiety as a symptom of their long-standing depression.

In another recent study, general feelings of depression in healthy individuals was found to be a conclusive predictor of a surge in blood pressure in the morning.

Both of these research studies suggest depression can be attributed to an increased feeling of morning anxiety.

Underlying Physical Health Conditions

Certain physical health issues can contribute to increased feelings of anxiety and anxiety-related symptoms. Oftentimes, doctors find it difficult to diagnose an underlying medical condition because many physical and psychological symptoms may get overshadowed by the symptoms of anxiety, with evidence of anxiety co-existing with other health conditions.

Common health conditions that can also trigger anxiety symptoms include:

• Heart conditions like Hypertension, Coronary artery disease, etc.
• Respiratory conditions like asthma, etc.
• Hormonal conditions like hyperthyroidism, etc.
• Neurological/muscular disorders
• Blood conditions like anemia, etc.
• Psoriasis
• Diabetes
• Tumors or cancer

Many such underlying physical health conditions can contribute to increased feelings of anxiety and panic-like symptoms in the morning.

What Are The Symptoms Of Morning Anxiety

The symptoms of morning anxiety are similar to that of GAD. Some very distinct signs may be:

• feelings of worry and nervousness
• feeling restless and overwhelmed
• irritability for no apparent reason
• fatigue or exhaustion despite having full sleep
• inability to concentrate
• feeling lightheaded
• shallow or rapid breathing
• hyperventilation
• rapid heart rate or a racing heart
• tight chest and tense muscles
• sweating
• nausea

Considering the symptoms, morning anxiety can pose some serious danger to health and if the condition becomes regular, it can have a debilitating effect on overall well-being.

How Long Does Morning Anxiety Last?

It varies.

There is no definitive amount of time for how long an anxiety or panic attack will last because it depends on the individual and the reason for their attack. The symptoms typically peak from anywhere between a few seconds to 10 – 30 mins, as reported by most researchers.

Though any general stints of anxiety rarely last more than 30 mins, depending on the severity of the attack, feelings of anxiety may last for hours or even days.

How Can You Stop Morning Anxiety

Finally, I’ve shared ten ways you can actually stop morning anxiety from happening.

Prioritize Quality Sleep

Sleep is the single most important activity that can radically transform your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Research has suggested that a consistent and healthy sleep routine promotes better memory, productivity, physical performance, metabolism, heart health, pain management, and immunity. It also lowers the risk of depression, weight gain, and inflammation.

Prioritizing your sleep means cultivating a better sleep routine and sleep health and hygiene.

Tips:

• Find out your chronotype to identify your ideal sleep timings
• Have at least 7-8 hours of time scheduled for your night’s sleep
• Follow an evening + bedtime routine to promote better sleep
• Make your bedroom into a healthy sleep environment
• Reserve your bed for sleep and sex only
• Sleep on comfortable mattresses and pillows

Drink Plenty Of Water

Not drinking enough water can become a sneaky yet serious issue on a daily basis.

With 60-70% of our body made up of water, it requires little evidence of why dehydration can become a problem. Hormones to nutrients, almost everything is transferred via fluids inside our body, so less fluid consumption leads to bodily dysfunctions.

Dehydration may not cause anxiety directly but it can intensify many different symptoms of anxiety like increased heart rate, dizziness, and muscle fatigue. Apart from these symptoms, dehydration can also lead to gastric disorders, loss of appetite, and nausea. After a prolonged time, the brain may start malfunctioning and can bring on headaches as a symptom.

It is extremely important that you provide your body with the right amount of fluid it needs. Moreover, staying properly hydrated will keep you calm, relaxed, and promote positive emotions.

Tips:

• Measure how much water consumption you need daily. Men require about 3.7 liters and women about 2.7 liters of water intake a day.
• Keep a full bottle in front of you at all times so you don’t forget to keep hydrating yourself.

Practice Journaling

Your life, from the very beginning, has been an act of realizing yourself. If you don’t stop to reflect on what you think, how you act, and how you feel in situations important to you, how are you going to discover who you truly are?

Daily introspection helps you to know who you truly are.

Journaling is an act of becoming mindful of your thoughts, emotions, and intuition by writing them down. You can journal by writing down on a notebook or by talking to yourself and recording your self dialogues in audio. Choose whichever method helps you become mindful of the act of introspection most effectively.

Journaling can be very effective as a coping technique to explore and understand your fears and anxieties, develop self-awareness, manage your stress, and enhance your well-being.

Take some time out after you wake up daily to practice journaling and it might help you understand and manage your anxiety in the morning.

Tips:

• Keep a small notebook or install an audio recording app on your phone to journal anytime anywhere
• Dedicate to journaling daily before you begin the day in the morning and before going to sleep at night

Do Exercise, Yoga or Walking

Modern-day work practices have unfortunately made us into sedentary beings.

With 206 bones, 360 bone joints, and close to 700 muscles in our body, it’s quite evident that we are designed to move.

Lack of movement can make you prone to increased feelings of anxiety and depression, along with diseases like obesity, heart diseases, high blood pressure, stroke, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, etc.

What’s interesting is that exercising regularly can actually alleviate anxiety disorders. Numerous studies have suggested that exercise and regular activity positively reduces the psychological and physiological symptoms of anxiety, even in clinical settings.

It was found that exercise increased the release of anti-anxiety neurochemicals like serotonin, GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), and endocannabinoids. Considering the benefits of regular exercise, psychologists have also started to recommend exercise as a part of therapy for some patients with anxiety and depression, as part of clinical studies.

All the evidence suggests exercise is a natural and effective solution for anxiety. Dedicate to break out moments of prolonged inactivity and move your body. Exercise and walk more often.

Tips:

• Take at least 5-10K steps or walk for at least 15-20 minutes every day.
• Schedule time for exercise, work-out or yoga, preferably after you wake up in the morning.

Use Positive Affirmations

Affirmations are positive statements meant to challenge your subconscious thoughts, usually with the intention of promoting motivation and positive change and can be particularly helpful during moments of distress and fear in challenging yourself to take control of your anxious thoughts and subsequently the situation itself.

During anxiety, our thought process seems to spiral around the worst possible scenario with the given situation (cause) and we begin to react in response to those anxious thoughts (symptoms). Repeating positive affirmations (to ourselves or out loud) during these situations can help our conscious mind influence our subconscious anxious thoughts with positive awareness. This interference of anxious thought patterns can in-turn help to alleviate the anxiety symptoms and enable us to take back control over our thoughts and the situation.

Affirmations are not for everyone but consistently using them can be immensely effective in developing positive attitudes and behavior patterns that can strengthen self-worth. Much like at any anxious situation, use your set of affirmations during stints of your morning anxiety.

Tips:

• Create your own set of affirmations with personalized and realistic positive statements
• Practice repeating your affirmations daily in normal situations to make it convenient for you to start using them during anxious situations.

Practice Self-Compassion And Gratitude 

Practicing gratitude can be a silent treatment for your anxiety and stress. When you bring feelings of love and kindness towards everything that you do in life, you cultivate self-acceptance and self-love. Letting go of your judgments and accepting what is with a loving-kindness attitude is a powerful act of mindfulness.

To help with morning anxiety, when you wake up and open your eyes, simply pull yourself up and sit on the bed. Close your eyes. Put your hand on your heart. Take five deep breaths. Become mindful of the sensations of your pumping heart through the hand and how it feels inside your body. Remind yourself that you’re blessed to be alive with the gift of one more wonderful day.

Another self-compassion practice recommended by Dr. Shauna Shapiro in her bestselling book, Good Morning! I Love You is to stand in front of the mirror, put your hand on your heart, look yourself in the eye and repeat the words, “Good Morning! I Love You” with a gentle smile on your face. You might feel a bit embarrassed, or shy at first. But Dr. Shapiro asserts that we keep doing it every day. It’s one of the most effective ways to cultivate love and compassion towards yourself.

Or you can simply take time out to write down a list of things that you are thankful for, so you can focus on the positive side of your life and appreciate what you have around you.

Also, remember to treat yourself and others with love and kindness.

Tips:

• Practice self-compassion to boost your self-acceptance and cultivate self-love
• Practice Daily Gratitude Journaling (Write down five things you’re grateful for in your life)

Practice Mindfulness Meditation

When you realize that during anxiety your mind is simply anticipating the worst possible scenarios with any situation and is governed by a self-deprecating mindset with low self-esteem, the need to bring your anxious self back to the present reality becomes critical.

Practicing mindfulness is an effective way to learn how to bring your focus of attention to the present moment.

The technique of mindfulness meditation can be an easy yet effective exercise to practice mindfulness. By practicing mindfulness meditation, you’ll learn the objectives of being mindful that are:

• Your Intention should be to become aware of the present (and return to it again and again)
• Your Attention should be on what is occurring in the present (on the thoughts, feelings, sensations as they arise)
• Your Attitude must be compassionate, non-judgmental, and curious in the present

What you must remember is that mindfulness meditation is about becoming mindful of everything that happens to you in the present moment. Mindfulness is a way of living and activating the mindful mode can help to reduce your anxiety symptoms in the morning

Tips:

• Schedule time to practice mindfulness meditation every morning
• Once you understand the concept of mindfulness, try to experience mindfulness through daily activities by activating your mindful mode

Practice Breathing Exercises

During an anxiety attack, your breath becomes shallow, your chest expands as you breathe because of not using your diaphragm which leads to an increased urge to sigh, rapidly inhaling more air than what you exhale, eventually making you hyperventilate.

All of these poor breathing habits can exaggerate your anxiety attack, especially hyperventilation which can contribute to symptoms like chest pain, rapid heartbeat, light-headedness, numbing or tingling in your hands and feet, and sometimes even fainting.

Controlling your morning anxiety must begin by controlling your breath. According to Richard P. Brown, M.D. and Patricia L. Gerbarg, M.D., authors of The Healing Power of the Breath, by changing the rate, depth, and pattern of breathing, we can effectively overpower how our brain reacts to our anxious state through the respiratory system. This can help us not only manage the immediate symptoms of anxiety but can effectively bring anxiety under control and induce feelings of calm and relaxation.

Our breath is immensely powerful and you can try practicing breathing techniques like belly breathing, resistance breathing, square breathing, etc. to relieve yourself of morning anxiety and relax your mind.

Tips:

• Practice breathing techniques during anxiety and panic attacks to regain control over your anxiety and induce calmness and relaxation.
• Schedule time for such breathing exercises every day in the morning

Drink Tea Instead Of Coffee

Coffee is the most popular beverage around the world and many of you might prefer it to jumpstart your drowsy mornings. However, your average cup of coffee may contain up to 85 mg of caffeine in it, and consuming too much caffeine doesn’t do much good to us.

Too much caffeine can increase your heart rate and blood pressure, makes you shaky and nervous, blocks sleep-inducing neurotransmitters like adenosine, and is very addicting.

When it comes to mental health, high levels of caffeine interfere with the production of the feel-good chemical serotonin, eventually leading to an anxious and depressed mood.

A healthier alternative to coffee? Tea!

Tea is the second most popular drink in the world after water and humans have been drinking tea for over 4000 years. Teas are a much healthier alternative than coffee when it comes to providing a kick of alertness after you wake up in the morning. With less caffeine in them, teas don’t hamper with your sleep, unlike coffee.

Teas have been known for ages to induce feelings of calmness and relaxation and can be had at any time of the day to soothe your nerves.

Many different varieties of herbal teas like lavender, chamomile, peppermint, etc. pack in natural ingredients that have been found out to relieve anxiety and help you relax and even sleep better at night. These ingredients are so effective that many over-the-counter sleep supplements and relaxants also make use of these same ingredients found in the herbal teas.

Replacing your cup of coffee with a refreshing cup of herbal tea can be effective in relieving your morning anxiety and help you relax for the rest of the day.

Tips:

• Try to cut down on the consumption of coffee as it does more harm than good.
• Check out for any other hidden foods that pack in caffeine and try to avoid them.
• Replace coffee with other stimulants like tea which can even help relieve anxiety.

Eat A Protein-rich Breakfast

If your breakfast meal contains foods with high amounts of refined sugar or salt, like breakfast cereals, bread, box juice, flavored yogurt, etc., it can quickly lead to a spike and crash in blood sugar levels.

Riding this sugar wave early in the day stimulates the release of cortisol and adrenaline which affects your mood, energy levels, appetite, and cognitive performance. High levels of adrenaline and cortisol can naturally make you susceptible to severe anxiety and panic attacks.

The healthier alternative is to change your diet to one high in protein, fruits, and vegetables, eliminating the chances of any intake of refined sugar or salt. Moreover, eating a protein-based breakfast will keep you full longer and can help to maintain a healthy balance of hormones, ensuring fewer chances of anxiety in the morning.

Tips:

• Eat a protein-based breakfast with fruits and vegetables
• Try to cut off the intake of foods rich in refined sugar or salt.

The Bottom Line

Morning anxiety can be beaten.

It’s nothing more than an extension of what’s going on in your life and what kind of lifestyle you lead.

If it happens consistently without any apparent reason, you should definitely talk to a medical professional.

Otherwise, a few changes to your lifestyle and better self-care can help you overcome morning anxiety easily.

Was it helpful?

If you found this post helpful, please share with those who might be struggling with morning anxiety as well!

Now I wanna hear from you:

Which tip are you going to try out today?

Or, maybe I didn’t mention something that has worked out for you?

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