Actress Jennifer Aniston shares her tips on dealing with insomnia

There’s no end to the worries that keep us up at night; stress over work, finances, family and more all can lead to insomnia.

Actress Jennifer Aniston opens up about her struggles with insomnia and how a conversation with her doctor helped set her on the right path to getting better sleep in a recent interview with Healthline.

“It’s sort of hard to determine because I think when we’re young, if we don’t sleep, we’re like ‘oh, I feel great.’ You can go on two hours, three hours, four hours of sleep and you don’t feel the effects,” Aniston told the publication.

After a conversation with her doctor prompted Aniston to realize she suffered from insomnia, she made adjustments to her routine and has now partnered with Seize the Night & Day program to raise awareness.

“I put myself into bed at 9 pm, and it just turned into 10 o’clock, 12 o’clock, 3 o’clock,” Aniston said in a video on Seize the Night & Day. “I think I exhausted myself so much with the checking of the clock that I think I got one hour.”

Insomnia is a sleep disorder in which you have trouble falling or staying asleep – it affects upwards of 70 million Americans every year. Waking up too early is also a sign that someone might have insomnia.

“It’s not unusual for someone with insomnia to be so tired at the end of the day that they do fall asleep for a while and then wake up in the middle of the night or the wee hours of the morning and can’t go back to sleep,” Jennifer Martin, Ph.D., clinical psychologist and president-elect of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine said to Healthline.

During the pandemic, there’s been a rise in depression, anxiety, and even insomnia, especially among women, young men, ethnic minorities, and those with a predisposition for insomnia. With numbers continuing to rise, the best way to tackle insomnia is to see a professional.

Experts recommend getting outside and taking in the sun, having a wake-up and night-time schedule and sticking to it, and practice relaxing before bed. Jennifer Aniston shared a few tricks she uses to help her combat insomnia:

Investing in calming apps like CALM - that teaches you how to meditate, gives sleep stories, shows you how to focus energy into movement and more - is a great tool for shifting your focus from the worry of the day to the peacefulness of the night.