Sleep…..predictably elusive
I’ve got loads of material on the topic of sleep. Over the past 2+ years it’s a bodily function that I’ve developed quite a relationship with. I never gave my sleep health much thought prior to January 2019, but I always knew I wasn’t giving it much importance. In an effort to squeeze in as much life as I could, I would stay up as long as my eyes could stay open. During my late 20’s, it was a bit of a mind game I played to make myself feel like work the next day was a world away. It was also a way of claiming my time away from work as absolutely 100% mine. Grand Theft Auto on my PS2 was my go-to escape for hours! I couldn’t get enough of it. Night would turn to day, and I’d still be at it. I’d call it quits sometime around 2 or 3 AM for the sake of being able to function at work the next day, which meant I was logging 3 - 4 hours of sleep those nights.
Fast Forward to 2019, and as described in my About Me and Finding Sleep Through Finding Peace blog, I hit burn out. In January of that year, logging zero minutes of sleep multiple nights in a row was my norm. It was at the top of my list of symptoms that I was trying to find a root cause for when I landed on my therapist’s doorstep. I had started a journal filled with notes of symptoms and remedies I had been trying. That was the seeker and overachiever in me. Those are two traits that definitely worked to my benefit countless times in life, but for this challenge; not so much. I spent the better part of 2019 asking myself to achieve something I had never allowed myself to do before. After years of asking my body to run at full speed with little sleep, I now wanted the recommended 7-9 hrs a night. Why? Good question.
The unraveling process my therapist has guided me through revealed (amongst a multitude of things) that my mind started using my sleep health as a measuring stick for how close I was to being “completely healed”. Early on in 2019, my goal was to get back to the routines and lifestyle I had prior to my crash. In my mind, that would mean I was all better; problem solved. Not only was that adding pressure to the situation, but I was striving to get back to the lifestyle that helped lead me to burnout in the first place!
Now, enter performance anxiety. My bed is the stage, and sleep is the performance. The more I researched and experimented with recommended ways to achieve that perfect night’s sleep, the more elusive sleep became. The best advice I’ve heard to date came from listening to one of the speakers available through the Calm app. In a nut-shell, if you suffer from bedtime anxiety, ignore all the bullshit you hear over and over again about what to do and what not to do in order to achieve your 7-9 hrs a night. Oh, and about the 7-9 hrs standard; ignore that too. At least for the time being. When you’re trying to resolve difficulty with falling asleep, the last thing you should be doing is putting pressure on yourself to achieve a standard that may not even apply to you. Turns out, different body types require different amounts of sleep. I’ve found for myself that the best thing I can do to resolve bedtime anxiety is to throw out the rule book. The following two things, as simple as they appear, really helped me early on with my sleep journey:
Replaced my alarm clock with a Casper glow light for waking up (and sometimes winding down) and turned my clock face down and hard to reach from my bed
Re-wrote my mornings. Prior to January 2019, my loud alarm would go off at 5 AM, and I started my mornings with some sort of HIIT workout. I was desperate to get back to that routine, and prove to myself that I was ok. As each hour passed without falling asleep, I would stress more and more over whether I would be able to make my workout. Making the decision to forget any sort of mandatory agenda for myself released a huge amount of pressure every night.
So did my sleep journey and challenges resolve with just those two changes? Absolutely not. Like any healing process, getting back on track and moving forward has had ups and downs since 2019. Even after weeks of feeling cautiously optimistic that my sleep woes are behind me, I’ll get hit with yet another challenging night. My challenge; as I like to call it, has always been falling asleep. Once I’m asleep, I’m out. I’m not a light sleeper. And just the mere fact that I still consider it a challenge, is in and of itself THE challenge. Feel me?
Perhaps one of the most difficult things for me to accept regarding sleep has been it’s elusive nature. The unrelenting desire to predict and plan for a future outcome is what drives an anxious mind. And the only predictable outcome for bedtime anxiety is that your night is going to be unpredictable. What’s kept me awake countless hours over the past couple of years is anxiety not insomnia. Over and over, I was not as confident and convinced as my therapist that I do not have another underlying condition creating a sleep problem. It’s not as simple as feeling absolutely drained the moment your head hits the pillow. Your physical fatigue can be no match to anxiety. There can be zero swirling thoughts in your mind, but your subconscious is always on. So after months and months of discussing sleep as a problem with my therapist, she presented a new homework assignment. The assignment was to NOT sleep; at all. Stay awake. Enjoy your room. Read. Meditate. Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep! I was stunned. I was confused. WTF? I’m trying to figure out how to easily fall asleep; not stay awake! I had gone on and on session after session about how I was functioning on fumes from sleep deprivation, so she said she wasn’t asking me to do anything I hadn’t already done countless times before. I knew what it was to function on little to no sleep, and I had already proven to myself over and over again that I could make it through a day after no sleep. Brilliant. Suffice it to say, I failed my homework assignment! Once I 100% removed the pressure to fall asleep, all my body wanted that night was to sleep. This was the one and only time in my life that failing a homework assignment was actually the desirable outcome.
Failing this assignment was really a clutch thing for me. It was instrumental at demonstrating my therapist’s notion of performance anxiety and the power of releasing expectations. This is new to me. Releasing expectations that is; at least for some aspects of life. So I continue to work with it. I continue to observe just how much my mind gets caught up with #predicting. Ultimately, the power lies in noting when you get caught up and gracefully returning back to the present. #Mindfulness.
