Classical Conditioning: A not so unique anxiety and insonmia vicious cycle

If you pay attention to the Journal of the anonymous anxious person struggling daily with sleep difficulties (another post in this very blog), You'll see a pattern in his Interesting Observation section. He/she observes:

"There’s fear and overt anxiety attached to the thinking. Many times, as I find myself about fall asleep, some negligible thought with surface, not important but my body will wake up, jolt up, in fear and astonishment, my heart pounding as if my life were in danger. Has my experience rewired my brain in such a way that it responds to everyday issues and annoyances as if they were threats to my survival? I think there’s some biologically wrong with my brain right now; the anxiety and fear pathways feel severely but unnecessarily sensitive to anything."

You may notice that for Pavlov's dogs, salivating is a natural response to anticipating a meal. If the experimenter rings the bell before the food comes, soon the dog will salivate just at the sound of the bell, even if no food is in sight yet. On that same note, an anxious person with a racing mind can develop a similar pattern where a survival threat is analogous to food, and a racing thought is analogous to the sound of the bell. This pattern can worsen on its own as thoughts can trigger the person into "flight or flight," and the person tries to force himself to relax, which, like fighting a rip tide in the ocean, strengthens this conditioning as he continues to obsess and worry about being able to sleep. It can become a vicious cycle as he begins to believe that thoughts may actually threaten his survival, prohibiting him from falling asleep!

As we can see, thoughts pose no survival threat (just as the bell has no innate connection to food). However, the body learns to associate the racing thought with a survival threat. Therefore certain thoughts in bed, despite their harmless nature, can cause the anxious person to enter in to a "fight or flight" mode with a racing heart and overactivated sympathetic nervious system in bed while trying to sleep, when the opposite is desired. The good news is that once the body unlearns the classically conditioned response, that the thought is not actually a survival threat (just as the bell has no inherent connection to food) "extinction," the unlearning of the classically conditioned response, should occur and loose its effect.