New horizons and new challenges

If there suddenly is a challenge...even though it takes you off into unchartered and unfamiliar ground, I hope that you will take it - and that always you will go on growing out and out.

Leonard Cheshire


I tried something new on saturday night. When I can't sleep, as hard as I try to keep my mind calm and neutral, the fact is that I tend to catastrophize. One of the ways I sometimes do this is by imagining the 'inevitable' outcome of my sleeplessness in the form of an exhausted, despondent and un-unergetic figure who, let's face it, is no fun to be around. On saturday night, as I lay in bed, I imagined the antithesis of this person for the following day - the Rebecca of energy, smiles and enthusiasm. I proceeded to sleep reasonably. But trying the same thing last night, I proceeded to have a lousy night.

My seemingly endless search for some kind of pattern, some clue which could help me remains relentless and elusive. But here's the thing - I feel like I may have entered a new phase whereby my sleeplessness has become a learned, ingrained habit. And try as hard as I might to not think about 'not sleeping' when I go to bed, the power of the sub-conscious just can't be underestimated. This isn't to say that I'm feeling less hopeful about this crazy problem sorting itself out eventually, but what I do feel I need is perhaps a change of approach to it. I need to get myself into a deeply relaxed, meditative, almost trance-like state before I go to bed.

And I also need to think of ways to turn this learned behaviour on its head, something along the lines of the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy approach which runs on the premise that our thoughts and feelings determine our behaviour. So if I could find tools to feel fundamentally less anxious about sleeping, this could certainly help me to sleep better. It's not that I can't sleep - I know I can because as a teenager and in the first half of my twenties, I used to sleep for Britain - I'm just stumbling over some major pscychological hurdles at the moment.