Anxiety can play tricks on a soul–and on sleep. I love it when a person can beat anxiety at its own game. Let me tell you a story.
A coffee buddy showed me the jawbone bracelet she recently started using about two weeks ago…measures her steps during the day and her sleep at night. She’s been finding herself competing with her adult daughter to meet their individual goals for steps. Suddenly, getting the laundry from the basement isn’t a chore she looks with puppy dog eyes at her husband hoping he will be convinced to go. She charges down because it is an opportunity to achieve her goal of how many steps she wants for the day.
That’s not the really cool part.
This is:
M., my coffee buddy is a notoriously poor sleeper. She has a stressful life, and often has a lot going on that she finds herself thinking and planning for at all hours, often late into the night. And yeah, well, whatever, she’s just a lousy sleeper…has been for a long time. Insomnia is huge for her.
The jawbone has changed her sleep patterns…literally.
This jawbone bracelet connects to an app on her iPad. It tells her the pattern of her sleep at night. When she is awake, and when she is asleep.
When she first started using it, she noticed that what felt like two hours awake at night wasn’t two hours…and instead of what seemed like 3-4 hours of sleep was actually more like 6 hours. Not great…but not as lousy as she was convinced it was.
Middle of the night periods of being awake that seemed to last for hours were more like 45 minutes…quite a while, but not the hours that she “knew” it to be.
What happened next?
She began to not dread night time as much. She began to believe that she would have a better night’s sleep than she previously was anticipating. She was able to tell herself that it wasn’t as bad as she thought it was…and that when true change happened.
Last week when we had coffee, she showed me her previous night. As is typical, she woke up in the middle of the night…she got up, went to the bathroom, and pondered, “What’s next?”
Previously, she would have “known” it would be hours, and she would have started to read a book, knowing it was “hopeless” to try to return to sleep.
This time, she told herself, “Hmmm…the bed seems quite cozy, and I’m quite relaxed, how about I just rest here and see what happens.” And she calmly went back to bed, without all those self defeating thoughts that were present even a few weeks ago, like, “It’ll take hours” “The longer I lie there, the more frustrated I’ll get”.
And she fell back to sleep. Only 13 minutes awake…that little orange slice in the middle…her middle of the night awake time.
She was thrilled. She felt great the next morning, and was thrilled to show me her graph. When she isn’t anxious about how bad she “knows” it will be, she is quite able to not be her own worst enemy. She is calmer at night, is able to give herself soothing messages rather than self-critical ones…and that makes all the difference.
I may not have a jawbone of my own…but I am taking a lesson from her on this one.
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