Five Practices to Navigate Sleep Deprivation [Sleep 02]
Struggle with sleep deprivation? Find yourself having trouble with sleep due to the world’s recent events? You’re not alone.
This episode covers five practices to boost your mental capacities when you’re operating at less-than-optimal sleep levels:
Mind training for the moments stress, trauma, or anxiety take over
A cognitive practice for holding both the good and the challenging, which can be difficult when we’re sleep deprived
A way to talk to ourselves, a technique I learned in Ethan Kross’s book, Chatter
An invitation to boost your mood wherever you are
A deep dive introspective practice when sleeplessness arises
Please remember that this podcast is not a replacement for treatment by a healthcare or mental health professional. This content is created for education and entertainment purposes only.
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This has been transcribed by A.I. Please forgive any errors.
Unknown Speaker 0:00
Welcome to I thought I was over this. I'm your host, Dr. Kimber, a licensed clinical psychologist, trauma healer, and fellow life journeyer. Every episode we dive into the science of human need, and whether you find yourself feeling like you've just hit an iceberg and don't know where help is coming from, or you're ready to trade in your raft for something bigger, you aren't alone, grab what you need, get comfortable. And let's do this.
Unknown Speaker 0:35
This episode, I'm going to dive into the very real reality of not getting sleep, what do we do to help us navigate when we have those times where we cannot get to sleep? I know that most of us, if not all of us are impacted by the war that is going on. As I'm recording this between Russia and the Ukraine. I live in the LA area. And as you can imagine, as you know, it's a very international place, which is a tremendous gift for being here. I have friends colleagues, who are one person removed from the situation, and it's a very scary and stressful time. I also support a group of Afghan women who have found their way into the United States, some of them have come over because their husbands had jobs in the military when we were over there. And all of them are impacted by the news as they see the images and are reminded of their past recent past situation where they too, lost everything and had to start somewhere. So it's a big deal. We are a very connected world. And these are the very real things that can keep us from getting sleep. And so what do we do? How can we help ourselves get the most rest even when we can't sleep? Today in this podcast, I'm going to cover five points to help you regulate your mind as best you can as much as possible when you are living with some sleep deprivation. So the first thing that I want to suggest is to begin a practice of tracking your breath. If you don't do this already. See, tracking your breath is a practice, you are asking your mind to follow your breath, into your body and out of your body. That's it. So as you breathe in through your nose, or in through your mouth, you're asking your mind to track it. You're not making a judgment about whether your breath is shallow, or deep about whether it stops in your chest or goes into your lungs, or your diaphragm. The practice of tracking your breath is really training your mind to pay attention to what you're asking yourself to pay attention to, when we are stressed, it is much harder to rein in where your mind goes. And that's why we want to practice this tracking of the breath so that we can do the hard thing we can pay attention to what our mind is telling us in stress. So a good way to practice if you haven't done this practice already is just start with two minutes, your mind is going to wander away. And you bring it back. The task of tracking your breath is noticing that your mind is off your breath. When it goes off your breath. This isn't failure. This isn't the label of failure. It is literally the practice of tracking your breath. As your mind wanders off, you bring it back. So if your mind wanders off 1000 times in two minutes, congratulations. You've just tracked your breath 1000 times the goal of breath practice is to notice your thoughts. That's it. It's not necessarily to try to quiet your mind. As you get more practiced at it. Your mind will be quieter. That is true. But the practice itself is really about building the skill so that you can notice where your thoughts are going. It's like building a muscle. Just like there are different body types for building muscles. There are different strengths. When we go into this type of breath practice. Maybe it's easy See, to stop working and set the timer and do it. But what is hard for you is actually keeping your mind on the task, you will keep thinking that you're failing and that it's worthless. For others of you, you're going to be able to notice your breath, you're very introspective. But what's going to be harder is remembering that you want to do it. And you're going to make it through the day and realize you haven't stopped to do it. So I just want you to know that you're not alone, there are many people who have the same kind of struggles, here's the thing I want you to keep in mind, if you aren't getting good sleep, or a different application of breath practice is that if you want to reduce your anxiety, and become more present, you have to become aware of what you're thinking, you can't change something that you aren't aware of. And so breath practice, helps us become aware of what we are thinking when we are just going about daily life. So there are a couple things that you can use. If you don't want to do it yourself. You can use apps like insight, headspace calm, Dr. Dan Siegel also has a wheel of awareness on YouTube, that you could do, he probably has one on his website. Those are methods that will help you train your mind to again, track or focus what you want your brain to focus on. You may have heard about keeping a notepad and writing down your thoughts so that you can let them go and not keep thinking about them.
Unknown Speaker 7:01
I think that's a common suggestion that I've heard with people who are practicing contemplation or quieting their mind before God, I have mixed feelings about this. And if you find yourself in this boat, where you just have so many thoughts that come at you, you really could not shift and just focus on your breath, I want you to consider a transition phase, you know, set the timer for what you need to set the timer for whether that be two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, to allow yourself to stop and write down everything that comes to mind that you are absolutely worried you will forget about. But after that timer goes off, what I want you to do is trust that your mind can bring back any information that you need it to bring back. And that for the next two minutes, you are going to ask your mind to only be focusing on your breath. And again, your mind is going to wander that's part of the exercise. But you want to bring it back rather than holding on to it so that you could write it down. The act of bringing your mind back to your breath is the skill. When you are writing things down in a notepad, you're only quieting the chatter so that you're capturing it. But that is different than training your mind to focus on what you need it to pay attention to. And this can happen in sleep. This is one of the things is that when you lay down to go to sleep, your mind suddenly thinks that has permission to think of all the creative answers that have awarded you during the day. It's like a free for all fast. And sometimes for some of us. This is the problem. We don't stop enough during the day. And so when we go to sleep, we're bombarded and our mind races. And that's the thing we want to avoid. We want to take charge of the times when our mind can think and so that's part of this practice. So that's number one, use breath tracking as a way to train your mind. So number two, when we are sleep deprived, we have a heightened sense that everything is going wrong. That's just part of what sleep deprivation does, it actually kind of raises our nerves so that things that noises that wouldn't bother us before suddenly start bothering us. So we have cognitively what's called in our brain a negativity bias and that means we're looking for all the threats which can be concrete like not feeling safe. But negativity bias can also be abstract like thinking your coworker doesn't like you because you felt slighted when he didn't respond to your work chat. And later you found out, he had a sick child and he hadn't slept all night. So he completely missed your chat. But in fact, would love to work with you on your new project. So you're you've spent this time thinking someone doesn't like you, when really, it was a miscommunication, a lack of delivery of a message. And so our minds can start nitpicking and judging more often when we are sleep deprived, believe me, we can't do this when we've gotten a lot of sleep. But we do have a heightened sense of it when we aren't rested. So when you're sleep deprived, you want to keep a shortlist of all the things that are going right today, you want to actually ask your mind to notice those things. So my recommendation whatever is realistic in your job or life situation, set a timer every 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, what again, whatever's realistic, and then I want you to say out loud, or write it down what has gone right during that time period. The thing is, it doesn't shift your mind to be general and global, you need to be specific, like,
Unknown Speaker 11:36
I'm really proud of you that you made that difficult phone call, you got two matching shoes, and you arrived at work only 10 minutes late, or I am so grateful that you have finished those five heart emails. So you need to be specific, not global. And they also need to be 100%. True. Like if you said to yourself, Yay, good job, what a great presentation, when there's a part of you that really doubts whether it was good, doesn't shift out of the negativity, bias mindset and shift into something that is holding more of the complexity and is holding more of the positive feelings. positive feelings can be those things that surround connection, they can be safety, they can be holding on to hope. So what you want to do is state what you're 100% sure about, and you can get behind, like, good job for showing up for your presentation. You finished it, you breathe during your presentation, you didn't pass out, you managed to get two cups of coffee and you you got dressed this morning for work, you brought something to eat great job, these can seem funny. Try it, it works. Again, what we're doing is we're coming from a sleep deprived state and getting into a state that is focusing on what we're doing right, so that our mind is able to be as flexible and adaptive, curious as possible. What you don't want to allow is your mind to dwell on what isn't going right or the reality that you did bring lunch, but it's a banana and nuts, which isn't going to be enough. What you want instead is the problem solving that needs to be done around what am I going to do for lunch to come after you've had these this time, this period, even if it's two minutes of noticing what has been going right because you need your calmest most regulated mind to problem solve lunch for you. Maybe after you're done with your what's gone right section, your mind thinks I could email my co workers who are here and ask who's going to get lunch and have them pick it up for me because I don't have a break. Or hey, I can actually shift this meeting to later on and have time to get lunch. So here we are all about shifting our state of mind into one that is realistic, holding complexity, holding the good and bad and showing up in the best possible way that you can. And there could be a situation where you actually can't get more lunch. Like that's just the reality. So if that's the case, you could use my suggestion number three, and that is talking to yourself in third person.
Unknown Speaker 14:50
This is a technique that I discovered in the book chatter by Ethan cross it can be extremely effective based off research findings and helping ourselves reduce the chatter in our heads. And an example of what it looks like to talk to yourself would be Kimber, it's going to be difficult in the afternoon when your blood sugar's tank, you will likely get a bit shaky, and it's going to be hard to remember things. So you will need to write down everything. And maybe tonight or tomorrow, you need to revisit them. So I want to remind you that when you get shaky that it's food, it's not anxiety, and you really need to limit the amount of discussion of emotionally hard things today, you've done hard things before you can do this treat this day, like a fast and you can fast. So let's do this. You got it. So you're talking to yourself using your name using the pronoun you, you can even become a reporter as if you're a fly on the wall. All of these things have been known to kind of decrease that internal chatter in the worry that how you're showing up is insufficient. So you really want to look for what's going well, in even yourself talk. Just to recap, we have start cultivating mind training through your breath work we have approaching the day after sleep deprivation with a lot of grace and intentional noticing of what's going right followed by talking to yourself in third person. And then number four is get into nature. If you can you want to take a break, go outside, listen to the birds, nature is known to be awe inspiring, and shift our moods. And the idea of this is when we're sleep deprived, it's just about giving ourselves these mood boosts to get through the day until we can get some more sleep. Maybe you find yourself in a situation where you can't get outside, you can jump on any platform and see some nature videos. Dan Siegel discusses this in his training, and I do believe that Ethan cross also mentions this in chatter. Well, baby animal videos are popular, not just because they're cute, but because they can actually shift our moods, which in turn can help us be a little more flexible, curious and adaptive than if we are in that more rigid judgmental mindset. So we find ourselves number five, how can we dig around in your unconscious to discover what's underneath the sleeplessness, if you don't know why it's there. As I mentioned, I haven't been sleeping well since committing to start this podcast. And I have to admit, it was a bit of a mystery. It didn't fully make sense to me. I know that it's new. It's also public. But I've been practicing public things before I speak at conferences. I do things that are out there. And so it was a bit of a mystery. So I went on an internal investigation to figure out what could be underneath this. What I noticed is I've been sleeping Fine. Since I started working on my podcast in August, and I worked on it mainly at night, I was fine. I could even work until 10 give myself an hour transition and fall asleep by 11. No problem. So what I noticed is that once I recorded my first episode, along with my trailer and set a launch date, then I seriously could not sleep, I had trouble falling asleep other nights I could fall asleep fine. But I would wake up at like two in the morning and not be able to go back to sleep. So I started sharing about my sleeplessness with a group of friends. And what I found is they reflected back to me their own empathy about the situation which was hey, you are doing something vulnerable. You are doing something that creatively you've never done before. It's new, it makes sense that you would be anxious about it.
Unknown Speaker 19:13
And as they reflected though, that reality back I realized that I had been dismissing my own internal anxiety. And in fact, I was feeling vulnerable, even though my stuff hasn't at that time, Ben public, I was working through a lot of things and so they my friends acted as mirrors through their responses and it slowly became more apparent what was keeping me up at night was unconscious. What I know about the unconscious logic believes cognitions they don't really help because I'm not aware of it yet. So what I did was I started tracking my dreams. I started writing them down and what I got at was In my own journaling about this was I have a fear of public embarrassment. And I have a fear of failure. It's an old wound. And we all have them, which is why I've named this podcast, I thought I was over this. This is something that again, goes under ground for me a fear of inadequacy, that I'm not enough. And I can tell myself that this isn't true, I can even quote evidence, I can even ask myself to get input from others for reassurance. And this could help. Maybe it didn't help me, I still have been losing sleep. But here's the thing, I know that it's going to be temporary. And I also know that this core issue this fear of inadequacy, this fear of embarrassment, it is a core issue. And it's going to show up again, and again. And all I can do is respond with a lot of compassion and grace to myself, I can use the first five suggestions. And I can recognize that while I'm not getting adequate sleep, what can I do to bring nurturing to bring compassion to bring the more positive feelings? How can I get more nature in my life, and tell I'm able to shift out of this dysregulation. And so this is part of what we do when we have unconscious things coming up and causing us to not sleep, I have no control over how long I'm going to be dysregulated. The good news for me at this point is that I am recording this before I've launched any of them. And so I am finding that at least for now, I've been able to be dysregulated only a couple nights out of the week versus literally every day was impacted the first time that I set my launch date. I yeah, I freaked out my nervous system freaked out. So the thing is, again, according to Dr. Dan Siegel, a thriving life is a stressful life. That's what I'm reminding myself, at the same time that I'm holding the truth that I can't control my unconscious, I can't control when I wake up in the night, I can't control the ways when I can't sleep. But I can do my best to show up in a way that gets my brain moving in the right direction where I can hold complexity, where I can try to be the most flexible and adaptive that I can be. So if you find yourself in a situation that seems emotionally just out of reach, you can't tell why aren't you sleeping? Hang in there, your unconscious will become conscious, just keep seeking, keep quiet in your mind as you're able to. And you will find her, I believe in you. So in every episode, I'm asking reflection questions. What suggestion Can you try today?
Unknown Speaker 23:17
Can you try the breathing practice? Maybe you want to try talking to yourself in third person? Or noticing all the things that are going right? Maybe you want to start the journey of digging into your unconscious? What is it that you want to try? What do you want to think more about? What do you know isn't right for you right now? And what are the conditions that make you vulnerable? To not fall asleep or stay asleep? Do you know when you're more vulnerable for that? Versus other times when it's not quite the same fight? I want to remind you, I believe in you. You can do this. Even if you have struggled with sleep for a long time. Or you find yourself in a situation of caring for someone where you will have disrupted sleep and you don't know how long it's gonna last. I want you to know that awe and joy are here for you. The moon shows up every night. If you can go outside and see or notice the stars. Are there planets in the sky during the day. Can you hear a bird? Can you watch the sunset? You aren't alone. Even if in this moment you are feeling lonely? Hold on. Loneliness is a temporary feeling. Let it pass. Find connection at the grocery store on a walk And let that brief encounter be enough for now. It's not going to be enough forever. But for now, in this moment, let it be enough. So next episode I'm going to be diving in to routines and habits to help you sleep better. Don't forget to subscribe for you go. Take the tongue off the roof of your mouth. Soften your hands. Soften your eyes and follow your breath as it goes in. And as it goes out. Take this moment just with curiosity and not judgment to notice is it easier to breathe in or to breathe out and keep following your breath until you feel a spontaneous breath. Come up and out and your body with that breath. Feels a bit more relaxed. I'll see you next time.