Rest & Restore: Strategies for Sleep

Sleep

A key component to health. How you feel during the day, depends on it.

Can you remember a time when you traveled (that might be hard...so long ago)? Due to jet lag or the change to your routine how you ate, slept, digested (& eliminated) food was off? What that felt like? Like you had a foggy brain, perhaps?

Your body, your brain, your systems, like routine.

Your brain constantly makes predictions about what's going to happen using past history, memory, your daily habits. Even for simple things like reading so you don't have to remember letters, how they're put together into words that then form sentences. Or how you just automatically know how to move. Get up, sit, stand, ride a bike. It would be exhausting if your brain had to (re)learn these tasks each day. Your brain also learns what you teach it to do at certain times of the day. When predictions or habits change, you might have a hard time adjusting.

I can imagine your habits and routines, things like prediction and reliability have changed over the past few months.

What affect might that have on your sleep schedule?

That might be one piece of the puzzle.

Add in the complexity of relationships, work, family and financial stressors. Excess screen time. Less physical activity. Isolation or loneliness. Depression and anxiety. Is it any wonder why you might have trouble getting to sleep, staying asleep or getting up out of bed in the morning? It makes perfect sense to me if you notice feeling overwhelmed, experiencing, some or all of these things and that your sleep is affected. I can relate.

All these disruptions in your daily life.

There are many ways to influence sleep. To restore a beneficial sleep pattern. As with anything, what is useful or beneficial will be unique to you. This is really important to understand and why some 'treatments' fail. Just as your life is like no one else's life, what works for you WITHIN your life is unique. So it takes a little time and commitment to explore these aspects.

There is probably already a lot to manage in your life so let's take a slow, gentle and compassionate approach to the exploration.

A 4-week, online workshop. Just for you, in the comfort of your own home.

Providing you with practices, tools, resources, some research, what we know about sleep.

> finding safety > decreasing threat > how to rest > sleep hygiene

> movement practices > breath practices > grounding practices

> stress & the nervous system > circadian system > homeostasis

> the effects on pain, mental health, immune & cardiac health, type ii diabetes

> touch > warmth > distraction techniques > connection > social support

There are things your can do during the day that will help, rather than "just" trying to get to sleep once you lay down in bed. What we know about light, technology, modern pressures to 'do more', the loss of extended family and how all these affect sleep.

Our society doesn't really take sleep seriously. Until there is a problem.

"Is this just going to be a bunch of restorative yoga poses? Or meditation, or breathing practices? I've done them all before and it didn't really help. In fact, sometimes it made things worse."

These can be helpful and some will be included yet you often need to try something else. It's common that when you stop everything, have nothing left to do, are laying in stillness ... that's when your mind starts to race. That's when you can't seem to find peace, calm, a quiet mind or a comfortable position.

This is about moving towards a place of stillness, rest, sleep. Also, what else you can do to retrain your systems.

Though sleep is meant to be an automatic reflex in order to maintain balance in your systems much the same as eating and drinking, it can sometimes become disrupted or dis-regulated. Both frustrating and exhausting if you struggle getting a good night's rest. Waking up in the morning, tired.

I most often work to support people living with chronic pain, and there is a often cross-over with secondary health challenges like anxiety, depression, digestive issues, IBS, etc. At least 50% of people living with chronic pain also have sleep issues. In fact, some studies now hypothesize if it's a lack of sleep that creates the chronic pain, not the other way around. Recent studies are exploring the same in terms of anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia.

Of course there will be people who should consult with their family doctors, go for testing, attend a sleep clinic, see a psychotherapist, etc. Yet, there is also a place for how you can learn and incorporate many things yourself. With support.

I would love you to join me in this exploration. Time and space and tools you can use to move towards sleep. Towards rest. A sense of calm and peace. Learn what works best for you.

We begin, Tuesday, February 16th.