Disturbed sleep
Did you sleep well last night? Was it a bright fresh morning or did you have to pull yourself out of bed? If your night didn’t go so well chances are you were tossing and turning. Maybe you were thinking about all those thoughts you buried away during the day. The thoughts and feelings you keep hidden behind a wall because what’s required of you during the day needs to be attended to first. Then as night falls and your head hits the pillow, that mental wall comes down and those thoughts and feelings surface into your conscious mind. Now the peace of the night has been disturbed and while it’s your time to lose consciousness, instead you toss and turn attending to what had been ignored during the day.
Maybe you are calling it insomnia or restlessness. Have you ever considered that it’s simply your time to have this inner dialogue? Time to talk to yourself. Maybe you are going over the happenings of the day. Conversations had. Decisions made. Pain or fear felt. Suddenly the heart is feeling heavy and anxiety is taking center stage in the stillness of the nighttime. This weight in your mind is keeping you awake.
The ticking hand on the clock doesn’t stop though and before you know it the night has passed and the sun rises. The cause of disruption of sleep doesn’t disappear with the night. Instead it lingers. Hence you find yourself dragging your feet. Maybe you wake up with a headache or you are unusually irritable early in the morning. You feel impatient and on edge as you snap at someone for no valid reason.
Now you are wondering what’s wrong with you? The weight of those thoughts or feelings is invisible. Therefore, you don’t understand it so easily. Your innermost feelings and thoughts are your emotional baggage. You confront them in the dark and then raise the wall again during the day, becoming oblivious to the fact that they are the root cause of how you behave during the day. Instead you call it lack of sleep or simply, “I’m having a bad day.”
What you really need to be doing is addressing those thoughts and therefore lightening the load in the head. Maybe talk to a close friend or even simply write down what was bothering you in the night. If self-therapy isn’t healing enough get professional help. Those thoughts and feelings may not completely go away. It may not be an easy fix but you might feel lighter or less anxious. Not ignoring those thoughts and feelings might actually help in easing the hold they have on your mind. Maybe then you might automatically fall into a deeper restful sleep rather than a disturbed one?