Ever heard of ACT for Insomnia? Yes, they are a set of proven and tested techniques that help fight a wide range of mental health issued such as anxiety, depression, OCD, substance abuse, chronic pain and more!

You open your eyes, and before you’re even fully awake, your heart is racing. Your mind floods with worries about the day ahead, yesterday’s conversations, or nothing specific at all, just a thick sense of dread that arrives with consciousness.

If this sounds familiar, you’re experiencing morning anxiety, and you’re far from alone.

Many people I work with describe waking up anxious as one of the most frustrating parts of their sleep struggles. “I finally fell asleep,” they tell me, “and then I wake up already stressed, sometimes before my alarm even goes off.” The cruel irony is that dealing with morning anxiety often makes it harder to sleep well the next night, creating a cycle that can feel impossible to break.

But here’s what I want you to know: morning anxiety isn’t a character flaw, and it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. There are specific physiological reasons why anxiety peaks in the morning, and there are practical, evidence-based techniques that can help. 

Let me share five Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) skills that can transform how you experience those first waking moments.

Why Does Morning Anxiety Happen?

Understanding the science behind morning anxiety can actually be reassuring, it shows you that what you’re experiencing makes complete biological sense.

When you wake up, your body experiences something called the cortisol awakening response. Within the first 30-45 minutes after waking, your cortisol levels naturally spike by 50-75%. This is your body’s way of preparing you for the day ahead, it’s supposed to help you feel alert and ready to engage with your world.

But when your stress system is already sensitized (often from chronic stress, sleep deprivation, or ongoing worry), this cortisol spike can trigger anxiety instead of just alertness. Your brain interprets that physical arousal, faster heart rate, heightened alertness, increased energy as danger, even when there’s no actual threat present.

The connection to sleep quality matters too. When you’re not sleeping well, your stress system becomes more reactive. Poor sleep also makes it harder for your prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain that provides perspective and calm reasoning) to regulate your amygdala (your anxiety alarm). This is why morning anxiety and insomnia often go hand-in-hand.

The ACT Approach: Working With Anxiety, Not Against It

Traditional approaches to anxiety often focus on making it go away, deep breathing to calm down, positive thinking to replace worried thoughts, or distraction to avoid uncomfortable feelings. While these strategies can help sometimes, they can also backfire by teaching you that anxiety is dangerous and must be eliminated.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy takes a different approach. Instead of treating anxiety as the enemy, ACT teaches you to change your relationship with it. The goal isn’t to feel less anxious (though that often happens as a side effect), it’s to be less controlled by anxiety, so you can live according to what matters to you.

I worked with Michael, who would wake up at 5 AM every morning with his mind racing about work deadlines. He’d spent years trying to “think positive” or force himself back to sleep, which only made him more anxious. When we started using ACT techniques, something shifted. “I still wake up with worried thoughts sometimes,” he told me after a few weeks, “but now I don’t panic about having them. I can have thoughts and still make my coffee and start my day.”

5 ACT-Based Techniques for Morning Anxiety Relief

1. Cognitive Defusion: Notice Your Thoughts Without Believing Them

When you wake up anxious, your mind likely offers you convincing thoughts: “Today is going to be terrible,” “I can’t handle this,” “Something bad is going to happen.” These thoughts feel true and urgent, demanding your attention and belief.

Cognitive defusion is the practice of noticing these thoughts as mental events, words and images produced by your mind rather than facts about reality.

Try this: When you notice anxious thoughts upon waking, silently add the phrase “I’m having the thought that…” before each worry.

Instead of: “I’m going to mess up my presentation today”

Try: “I’m having the thought that I’m going to mess up my presentation today”

This small shift creates space between you and your thoughts. You’re not arguing with them or trying to replace them with positive thoughts, you’re simply recognizing them as mental activity rather than truth. Some of my clients visualize their thoughts as leaves floating down a stream, or words on a computer screen that they’re observing.

2. Expansive Breathing: Make Room for Physical Sensations

Morning anxiety comes with uncomfortable physical sensations; tight chest, racing heart, churning stomach. The natural instinct is to fight these feelings or try to make them go away through deep breathing or relaxation.

ACT invites you to do something counterintuitive: make room for these sensations instead of fighting them.

Try this: When you notice anxiety in your body, place your hand on that area (chest, stomach, throat). Take a normal breath (not a deep one, that’s trying to fix it), and imagine breathing into that sensation. Not to make it go away, but to acknowledge it and create space around it.

Say silently: “There’s anxiety here. I can make room for this.

This isn’t about liking the sensation or wanting it to stay. It’s about dropping the exhausting fight against it. When you stop struggling with anxiety, you free up energy to actually start your day.

3. Present Moment Anchoring: Come Back to Right Now

Morning anxiety pulls your attention into an imagined future, all the things that could go wrong today, this week, or beyond. This mental time travel amplifies anxiety because your mind can spin endless disaster scenarios.

Try this: As soon as you notice your mind spiraling into the future, anchor yourself in this present moment using your five senses.

While still in bed, notice:

• Five things you can see (the ceiling, morning light, your pillow)
• Four things you can feel (the texture of your sheets, the temperature of the air, your body against the mattress)
• Three things you can hear (birds, traffic, the hum of appliances)
• Two things you can smell (if available)
• One thing you can taste

This exercise brings you back to what’s actually happening right now, rather than what your mind says might happen later. Right now, at this moment, you’re safe. You’re breathing. You’re here.

4. Values-Based Morning Action: Do What Matters Despite the Anxiety

One of the most powerful questions in ACT is: “What would you do right now if you weren’t trying to control or avoid this feeling?”

Morning anxiety often leads to avoidance; hitting snooze repeatedly, scrolling on your phone to distract yourself, or lying in bed hoping the anxiety will pass before you have to face the day. While understandable, these actions often make you feel worse because they’re driven by fear rather than what matters to you.

Try this: Before you go to bed tonight, identify one small, meaningful action you can take when you wake up, something aligned with how you want to live, not how anxiety tells you to protect yourself.

This might be:

• Getting up to make your favorite coffee or tea
• Stepping outside for two minutes to feel the morning air
• Sending a kind text to someone you care about
• Doing five minutes of gentle stretching
• Writing three sentences in a journal

The key is doing this action with anxiety, not waiting until you feel ready. This teaches your nervous system that anxiety is uncomfortable but not dangerous, and that you can still move toward what matters to you.

5. Self-Compassion Practice: Speak to Yourself Like Someone You Love

When you wake up with anxiety, your internal dialogue is often harsh: “Why am I like this?” “What’s wrong with me?” “I should be able to handle this.” This self-criticism adds suffering on top of the anxiety itself.

Try this: When you notice morning anxiety, place your hand on your heart and speak to yourself the way you’d speak to a good friend experiencing the same struggle.

You might say silently: “This is a moment of struggle. Morning anxiety is really hard.”
“I’m not alone in this, many people wake up feeling anxious.”
“May I be kind to myself at this moment.”

Learn more about Quadra Wellness Areas of Practice!

The Connection to Better Sleep

Here’s where these morning anxiety skills connect back to sleep: when you know you have tools to work with morning anxiety, you worry less about it at night. Many of my clients spend their evenings dreading how they’ll feel in the morning, which creates the exact hyperarousal that makes sleep difficult.

By practicing these ACT techniques, you build confidence that you can handle whatever shows up when you wake up. This reduces anticipatory anxiety at night, which is one of the most common contributors to insomnia.

Additionally, the same skills that help with morning anxiety; defusion, acceptance, present moment awareness are core components of effective sleep therapy. Whether you’re in Vancouver looking for anxiety therapy or anywhere else seeking relief, these evidence-based approaches work by changing your relationship with difficult experiences rather than demanding they disappear. Ready to transform your relationship with sleep?

Learn more about our 6-week science-backed Gently to Sleep program and take the first step toward restful nights and energized days. Contact us to schedule a free sleep consultation!