Most of us go through periods when good sleep eludes us. Either we struggle to get to sleep in the first place, or we wake during the night and then clock watch, getting more and more anxious about our precious sleep time slipping away and the thought that the alarm will be going off all too soon.

Sleep is vital for our health. Losing a few hours a night can impair our cognitive ability and mood, making it hard to get even the simplest tasks done. Constant lack of sleep can lead to us feeling depressed, anxious, easily over-emotional and more prone to illness.

Often my clients are having patterns of poor sleep when they come to therapy. They have developed patterns of anxious thoughts or worries that go around and around in their heads, making it difficult to turn off at night.

This is a technique that I teach to people, and that I use myself, to take your brain and body into a sleep state:

1. Allow yourself the correct amount of time you need to sleep and wind down. So, if you need 8 hours of sleep and have to be up at 7am, you need to be starting your wind down routine 9 hours before that.
2. Develop a good wind down routine before going to bed. This includes disengaging from stimulants, screens and phones an hour before sleep, making sure your bedroom is cool and dark and having some quiet time with a book or activity that calms your mind. If you are a light sleeper, consider having some white noise in the bedroom such as a fan running.
3. Empty your bladder before getting in to bed. The need to get up and use the toilet several times in the night can often impair our ability to get back to sleep, especially when we are worried about things.
4. If you have worries, once you are in bed ask yourself “Is this a productive worry, is there anything I can do about it tonight?” If not, then let it go and tell yourself you will deal with it again tomorrow when your mind is clear and rested.
5. Begin the process of releasing tension from your body. Start in your shoulders, clench them tight and hold for a couple of seconds, then let go. Then move to your arms and hands, clench, hold and release. Gradually work your way down your body clenching and releasing to let go of tension. Finally clench and release your face and jaw, which is where we often hold a lot of our tension without realizing it.
6. Move your body into its favourite sleep position.
7. Now you need to find a way to stop your mind from wondering and exhausting you! To do this we use a repetitive, calm and focused thought pattern that we find soothing. Some suggestions for this are:
   1. Imagine watching rain gently falling against a window
   2. Imagine sitting on a beach and watching small waves gently lapping the shore
   3. Imagine sitting in a meadow or forest and listening to the sounds of nature
   4. Imagine you are back in a place in your life where you felt extremely happy and safe and watch the movie of that time playing in your head.
   5. If you like numbers, start at 200 and subtract 7 repeatedly … 193, 186, 179 etc.
   6. Focus on your breathing in a 5-7 pattern: breathe in and count for 5, hold for 2, breathe out for 7, hold for two, and repeat. Keep this gentle breathing and counting going. If you find this length of breathing too strenuous then reduce it slightly to 4 - 6. If you are a yoga practitioner, you can extend the breathing to a 7-11 pattern.
   7. Count sheep! It’s an oldie but it works.

 
All these mental techniques take some minutes to work so don’t give up. You want to find a place you go to in your mind that is comfortable, and that with repeated use quickly signals to your body that you are going to sleep. Once you feel the waves of sleep start to wash over you, allow yourself to give in to them and let go.
 
If you wake in the night you can use the same technique to take yourself back to sleep again. Don’t let yourself be anxious and watch the clock, just let go of your worries, tense and relax and then take your mind back to its focused relaxation place. Do not get up and engage in an activity and keep your phone away from the bedroom. Sleep is a habit which we sometimes need to retrain our mind and body back into.
 
Sweet dreams!

Dr Jules
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If the subject matter in this article resonates with you, then counselling might be a good option to help you to move forward. I offer a free 20-minute consultation so we can explore how I might be able to help you. 

Lately it feels like every time we turn on the news we are faced with world events that are terrible but out of our control. How can we solve the Brexit situation? How do we stop gunmen killing children in schools in America? How do we end suffering in Syria? We feel we cannot ignore the chaos and hurt of the world, and yet it hurts us to witness it every day. Without considerable resources, we often feel powerless and frustrated to improve the world, and that can be incredibly stressful.

Despair is a common experience we all share. We feel it during difficult times in our lives. We sometimes despair about our work, our relationships, our financial situation, our love life (or lack of it), and of course we despair over world events each time we tune into the media. Typically, this feeling dissipates and quietens down until the next time, but sometimes it actually gets deeper, takes control of us, and forms a clinical condition where we constantly feel hopeless, pessimistic and powerless. Ultimately, we feel out of control.

We cannot control the government, the weather, other people’s opinions, our spouse, but we can take small steps so these feelings of despair don’t overwhelm us. This is generally true in counselling, where my clients are not always able to change the circumstances of their lives, but when they realise they can change the way they feel and think, it is significantly more empowering than continuing to think that if they could just control circumstances they’d feel better. We can’t un-do the past, but we can control how we deal with it in the now; we can’t control how others behave, but we can control how we react.
So how do we begin to take control when we feel despair at the world?

• An obvious way to take control is to limit our exposure to news that distresses us, whether it be the television or social media such as Facebook, learn to switch off when you start getting overwhelmed.
• Experts suggest we can instead think about how to improve things that matter closer to us, such as our home, family, community, etc. Sometimes we can become so consumed by the suffering of animals and people in other countries that we overlook what is happening within our neighborhood. What about old people who are living alone, or kids that need a steady and loving foster-home, or local animal shelters that need people to spend time with the dogs and fund raise so they have warm bedding? You might not have wealth in terms of money, but likely you have gifts and talents, such the ability to organize a bake sale, help in a neighbour’s garden, or write an email or letter of support and encouragement for someone who is going through a tough time.
• If you feel particularly powerless some days, then do something small such as cleaning your bathroom or having a turn out of your wardrobe, so you get a sense of accomplishment.
• Seek solace in other people. We can get lost in the fog that pervades our minds sometimes, and talking to a wise and trusted friend, or having a session or two with a counsellor, can help to clear that fog.
• Recognize when the best thing you can do is take care of yourself: eat, sleep, nurture yourself so you can regain some perspective.
• Be aware of signs that your emotional bank account is becoming exhausted. Those bad news stories about the world may be the final straw rather than the real cause of the problem. If you are more tearful or angry than usual, then you need to retreat and take stock so you feel less over-extended. Be honest about your priorities and where you are expecting too much of yourself.

Ultimately, we need to find ways to feel more in control and hopeful about the world, and our small place in it. A sentence that sticks in my mind from something I once read is that “people can live weeks without food, days without water, minutes without oxygen, but not a moment without hope”. And if you sometimes think the world is going crazy, you might be reassured to know that according to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, the human race is now healthier, more prosperous, and safer than ever before. The problem, he argues, is not the state of the world, it is our bias towards a negative representation of it. So, take heart, and take control of your thoughts, and the world will seem like a better place where courage and compassion can triumph over despair.

Dr Jules

If the subject matter in this article resonates with you, then counselling might be a good option to help you to move forward. I offer a free 20-minute consultation so we can explore how I might be able to help you.

These are worrying times and health professionals around the world are seeing a rise in rates of depression and anxiety (Daily Telegraph). In addition to people’s general everyday problems, we are being bombarded with stories about Brexit, political instability in the world, threats of nuclear war, and catastrophic weather events, to name but a few. We are increasingly isolated and feeling our sense of social support comes from online sources such as Facebook, the world where everyone else is having a great time.

When we start to feel overwhelmed with stress, there are ways we can begin to regulate our emotions, usually by choosing to tone down negative emotions such as worry. The key word here is ‘choose’. We can choose how we direct our focus and our energy, and that in turn will change how we feel.

Most of us already have tactics to help us feel better. We might go to the gym, meditate, put on music or mindless TV, or we might listen to podcasts and audio books while we go about our day. Here are some tips that you can add to your toolkit to help you reduce your worry load:

• Limit your access to social media from time to time. It’s great to be in touch with everyone, but sites such as Facebook have also become a place where people express opinions and say hurtful things, or post items others find distressing. At times the constant newsfeed can contribute to you feeling like you are on overload. It is not always, therefore, a helpful distraction, or a positive substitute for real human interaction. So, plan to take some apps off your smartphone and make your access harder, then you can tune in for limited periods just to be in touch with people that matter, without being distracted by the ‘noise’.
• Focus on your breathing. Take a moment to be aware of the air passing in and out of your body, keeping your mouth and eyes closed, and keep your mind focused on that sensation for five minutes if you can. Be aware of the sensation of the air on your nose and how the temperature changes as it enters your nostrils and passes down into your airways, then how it feels when you breathe it out. You can count when you breathe in and out if that helps you to tame your busy brain and stay focused on your breath.
• Do not ruminate. When I see anxious clients, they usually have a subject they are focusing on exclusively, often an area of their life where they feel out of control, and it causes their mind to race. An old trick to remind yourself when you are falling into this pattern is to put an elastic band on your wrist, and each time you find your mind going back to this unhelpful place, ping the elastic band on your wrist to give yourself a little ‘snap out of it’ reminder. Then ask yourself what is one thing, however small, that you can do to begin to take control of the situation? If it is a natural disaster, can you make a donation? If you are worried about how Brexit is affecting your life, can you sign a petition or write to your MP? Can you start to make a list of pros and cons for a potential decision, or talk to someone in the same boat as you? You might not be solving the problem entirely, but do something proactive and feel better about the fact that you turned worry into action.
• Don’t let your thoughts stay trapped in your head, where they seem to form a kind of seething soup of worry. Find ways to get them out. Writing them down often helps, as does saying them out loud when you are alone. Just reading or hearing them can help you start to make sense of them.
• Get out there and talk to people. Contact friends and tell them you need to catch up, go to a public event where you have people around you, volunteer to go and walk the dogs at the rescue center or help at a local foodbank, join a class or a group, or start one yourself. There are often plenty of people like yourself who might jump at the chance of a get fit or weight loss support group, or a regular book club to help get through the long winter evenings. So, if you don’t see what you want out there, then start it. In short, being around other people is good for mental health, while isolation is bad. And the old adage that a problem shared is a problem halved still holds true, so don’t keep your worries to yourself.
• If you find your worries and anxiety are starting to make you feel unwell or unable to cope, then go see your GP and consider seeing a counsellor. It isn’t always possible to do it by yourself, and even health professionals and therapists need some extra support now and then.
  

Dr Jules

If the subject matter in this article resonates with you, then counselling might be a good option to help you to move forward. I offer a free 20-minute consultation so we can explore how I might be able to help you.