"Hello Darkness My Old Friend" infamous words sung by Simon & Garfunkel but also the words I speak to myself as I lay in the darkness of my room, checking my phone and it's around 1am and not the first night I find my thoughts keeping me awake. Do you ever get home from a full day of work or studying and feel so tired you could literally drop on the couch as soon as you arrive and fall into a deep slumber? Yeah this gal does too, but I can count on one hand how many times my brain actually lets me go to sleep early.
I have not had a good nights sleep for about hmmm five years now but last year my sleep was really taking the piss, I barely slept and had just started studying at University so between juggling my job, home life and study my sleep decreased even more than what it already was. I feel like my body over the years has trained itself to work off of five hours sleep max but I really wanted to revert these bad habits and try my hardest to have a normal sleeping pattern again. There was a point where when I was sleeping I would have really graphic nightmares so I feel like this as well as my anxiety lead to my sleep being more impacted. My counsellor; Julie advised me to keep a dream journal as this would help with getting my feelings onto paper and then trying to figure out what it all meant, I found this helped with figuring out what I was suppressing during the hours I was awake, I would sometimes wake up already crying and by keeping this journal it enabled me to reflect on what was going on. In 2016 I attended a seminar about mental health and how to cope with anxiety and depression.
At this point I’d try anything....
At this seminar the speaker spoke about meditation and new apps that can enable you to deal with anxiety and help with going to sleep by listening to sleep stories. At this point I was willing to give anything a go, so Pat and I would get into bed, pull up the doona and play the meditation recordings off of my phone. The first night we did it I didn't get through the first sleep story and was out like a light! *hallelujah* I thought to myself the next morning. We did this consistently for a week until one night I heard the whole sleep story right to the end and look over to my left and pat was out like a light. The one week of blissful 8 hours sleep was over, yet again.
Everything is so quiet, but your mind....
Most nights I would lay in bed and go over and over again what happened to mum, night time can be an extremely lonely time even when your best friend is sleeping right beside you. Everything is quiet and dark and you literally are only stuck with your own thoughts while everyone else is asleep. I would often lay awake at night and google insomnia and different ways to deal with it, nothing really seemed to work for me. Talking about what was going on in my mind was the only thing that would help, I would often ring my sisters or my best friend and talk about how I was feeling, you know how frustrating it is when you can't sleep on a regular night and then throw on top of that a lot of emotions and hey you got one girl with bags under her eyes that definitely were not designer.
Apparently exercise just isn’t for getting your body bikini ready....
I decided to start working out more often, whether it be morning or night and I really started to appreciate the benefits of exercise, not just the mental health benefits but also how it made me feel more tired than usual and allowed me to fall asleep a lot earlier. I found that even an hour a day would attribute to my sleeping hours increasing. Some nights I still struggle to fall asleep, I have tried herbal sleep teas, I have tried herbal relaxation tablets and honestly nothing was working that well for me, I could not talk up exercise more than I do, whether it be walking the dogs in the afternoon or going to bootcamp I find this all helps to clear my mind of any negativity and get those endorphins running.
Anxiety controls most parts of your everyday life, everyone who has anxiety or depression suffers from it differently, there are different severities of anxiety and lots of different reasons what may trigger someone. From a bath mat not being in the right position or trying to leave home 40 minutes early to get to work, when it literally only takes 15 minutes, because you’re so worried and conscious of time. I would catch myself questioning conversations I had with people, did I say the right thing? Could I have said more? You literally overthink everything.
With daily exercise and trying to keep on top of what can trigger my anxiety I have found I am coping a hell of a lot better than I used too....
Let people in, don’t be afraid to let someone know you’re struggling. I owe conversations to my nearest and dearest for saving me from the darkest points of my life.
