Help! Worst night of my life

I just had one of the worst nights of my life. I work at a bar so I'm off at 2 am, decompressed at home until 3:30 and went to bed feeling exhausted. I couldn't sleep until 5 then work up an hour later because of a stressful dream. I really couldn't afford to miss sleep tonight so I took some Xanax to help with my stress. That worked for 3 hours then I woke from another stressful dream. Took more Xanax and was only able to sleep for another 2 hours waking from the worst dream yet. My family has a history or addiction and bipolar disorder but I have never had any symptoms myself and rarely take Xanax for anxiety attacks. Does has anyone ever experienced anything like this happen or have any idea what could have caused this? My work life is great my home life is great, I have a wonderful loving supportive family I have nothing to be stressed about, which is even more concerning. Please anything that could help would be a god send. This has never happened before and I'm terrified

Honestly it sounds like you had a stress triggered anxiety event for the first time. It happens! In fact, your lucky that it hasn't happened more often. In short, I would recommend a two fold approach: 1) manage the overall stress level in your life to avoid going past a certain threshold. 2) Develop techniques for coping with the anxiety for when you do wind up crossing the threshold and spinning out.

I personally find breathing techniques to be the most useful fix when I need to sleep / and slipping into an uncomfortable state. Once I discovered the correlation between my subjective stress level, heart rate and heart rate variability I got super interested in biofeedback breathing applications and I'm even developing my ownhttps://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.martianwearables.hrv_flowt. There are other good ones though, I encourage you to explore HRV biofeedback to help you manage symptoms. Let me know if you have any questions.

I think it was smart of you to post here after your first anxiety experience, that is very pro active and I think that by taking action now you can best manage your stress levels and thus your anxiety symptoms. Cheers