Thanks for the question. Anxiety is a common cause of insomnia. When your mind is moving quickly and you are worrying about things, it is definitely difficult to turn that off and go to sleep! Before resorting to the use of medications, sleep hygiene is the most important thing you can study. In fact, behavioral changes are almost always more effective than medications. If you lay in bed awake, try getting up and reading a book or doing something else, and only go to bed when you actually feel tired. This trains your body to associate the bed with sleep only. There are many tricks like this if you Google the term sleep hygiene. Medications such as Ambien (zolpidem) can sometimes be useful, but studies show they really only add about 20 minutes of total sleep time. Xanax is actually a very bad medication to use for sleep, because its effects wear off very quickly, you wake up in the middle of the night, and even worse you will develop a tolerance to it, requiring higher and higher doses. Try focusing on sleep hygiene. I would also visit your primary care doctor or psychiatrist to explore treatments for anxiety, whether it be behavioral (therapy) or a medication (such as an SSRI). I hope this helps. Dr. Sheppe