Goodnight Mind (7 page)

“I Have Too Many Responsibilities to Create a Buffer Zone.”

If you cannot imagine establishing a Buffer Zone because you are busy meeting the needs of everyone around you right up until the moment you get into bed, it may be time to assess whether
you yourself
should become a higher priority in your life. You may be Super-Mom or Super-Dad, Super-Friend, Super-Wife or Super-Husband, Super-Employee, or Super-Boss, but if you play this role to the exclusion of your own needs, you may become your own archenemy.

You may have convinced yourself that you do not require leisure or rest, but all human beings have needs, and these needs cannot come second to everyone else’s needs without a cost. At a minimum, the cost is poor sleep, but you can also expect other negative health consequences. If you do not take care of yourself, you will have less to give to others. Consider some of the following strategies, designed to help you to start to prioritize your own health and well-being:

• Think of the needs of the people who currently depend upon you. Now think of your own needs. Is your list of needs shorter? If so, why? How are your needs different from theirs? Why are you an exception? What is missing from your list of needs? Add to your list of needs and make time to de-stress and unwind every single night.
  
• Know that you will be more effective at providing help to people who depend on you if you make it a priority to take care of yourself.
  
• Remind yourself that everyone needs a break daily.
  
• Say no to at least one request this week.
  
• Set limits with those who demand too much of you.
  
• Let people know that you are making a change in your life and that, except for emergencies, you are unavailable each night starting at ___________ o’clock.
  

If you are concerned that you will have trouble implementing a Buffer Zone because you find it difficult to disengage from work, it may be time to assess whether your relationship with work is potentially harmful. An imbalance between your work life and your personal life may be behind your sleep problems. Are you obsessed with work to the exclusion of other things in your life? Some people work as though they were addicted to working. Have you convinced yourself that you have to work harder than everyone else? At your place of work, are you always the first to arrive and the last to leave? Has anyone ever accused you of being a workaholic or a perfectionist? Do you feel as if you are addicted to work? Work and your professional identity may be overly tied to your self-esteem so that you over-allocate time to work pursuits. Do you feel badly about yourself when you are not doing work? Do you view non-work activities as a waste of time? Do you believe that any idle time should be filled with some
useful
activity toward a goal? Have you come to devalue activities done for the sake of leisure or rest? If so, here are some things for you to try:

• Ask yourself,
  Why am I the exception to the rule that human beings need rest and relaxation?
  In other words, challenge the idea that you do not require rest or pleasure in your life—all human beings do.
  
• Imagine what would happen at work if you were incapacitated in some way. Would the business cease to exist, or would it find some way to make up for your absence? Challenge your tendency to overestimate your importance at work. Paradoxically, people who take breaks and recharge are often more productive at work.
  
• Experiment with putting some rest and pleasure into your life and taking away some of the time currently allotted to work. For example, if you are working more than eight hours a day, commit to leaving work at an earlier time this week. Spend that extra time doing something enjoyable.
  
• Shorten your to-do list this week to essentials only.
  
• In your own personal currency (i.e., in your mind), consider increasing the value of moments of pleasure and decreasing the value of accomplishments.
  

Summary

Like any other human being, you need time for rest and relaxation. This chapter explained how having a Buffer Zone can help your mind prepare for sleep by putting the day’s activities and worries behind you. It is easy to create a Buffer Zone: about an hour before getting ready for bed, begin to transition away from your “active self” by restricting your activities to those that are relaxing and enjoyable to you. Taking this time for yourself and leaving behind work or personal responsibilities at the end of the day will help you get a better night’s sleep so that you can be at your best tomorrow. Far from being wasted time, a Buffer Zone will help you be more productive in your “on” hours.

Chapter 6

Relax Your Body to Quiet Your Mind

T
he previous chapter provided strategies for winding down so that you can leave the day’s excitement and tension behind. Although setting time aside to unwind is essential, sometimes setting time aside is not enough to produce relaxation and you may need a deliberate strategy; that is, an active relaxation practice. If you find yourself tense or anxious, starting a formal relaxation practice may be just the solution for you. There is reason to think that a relaxation practice alone may help those with sleep problems, but if you combine a relaxation practice with the other strategies in this book you will see a more thorough improvement in your sleep.

“Just Relax”?

Are you particularly tense and anxious at night? Are you frustrated by your seeming inability to relax? Just as difficulty sleeping makes many people anxious, difficulty relaxing can produce anxiety. Perhaps you have already tried relaxation for your sleep problems and felt more anxious because you were unable to relax. Even if relaxation did not seem to work for you in the past, it does not mean a relaxation practice cannot benefit you at all. You simply need to keep the following keys to success in mind.

Practice, Practice, Practice

The ability to relax is a skill and, like any other skill, it requires practice to attain. Learning to relax is like learning to play the piano: you will not be a virtuoso after one lesson. Similarly, you cannot expect to sleep soundly on the first few nights you practice relaxation. You are retraining your body and building a skill. Setting unrealistic expectations will lead you to quit prematurely.

In his book
Full Catastrophe Living
, Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, a renowned expert in stress management, suggested that starting a practice, such as a relaxation practice, is like weaving a parachute (1990). You would never choose to start weaving your parachute when you are already falling—you would want it done in advance. In other words, relaxation strategies must be learned and practiced ahead of time, so that when you are in an anxious state, you are able to simply pull the rip cord of your relaxation parachute and begin to relax. So commit to practicing a relaxation strategy daily for several weeks, and you will be amazed by the result.

You may be worried that your body
cannot
relax, but this is exactly why you need to practice. Even if you believe that your body is incapable of relaxing, you can notice subtle changes in your sensation of muscle tension if you pay close attention. Your body’s relaxation system is not “broken”; it just needs a tune-up. The tune-up process starts with observing the difference between how it feels when your muscles are deliberately clenched and the sensation of releasing that tension. By focusing on the difference between these two opposing states, you will see that you
can
relax, at least to some degree. With practice, and patience, it will be easier for you to relax, and your sensations of relaxation will grow deeper.

Relax about Relaxation

There have been many different tests of one form of relaxation versus another in helping people overcome sleep problems, with no clear winners. You should thus feel free to explore different methods of relaxation, seeing which methods feel best to you. Approach relaxation with a curious and open mind-set. (Different relaxation strategies are described later in this chapter.) Relax your expectations, because in the beginning it is more about learning than achieving any specific state of relaxation.

Practice When You Are Awake

Often, people try to practice relaxation in bed, in hopes that it will act like a sleeping pill, but this is not likely to be effective and may be frustrating and discouraging. To be effective in bed, relaxation needs to first be learned outside of bed, through practice and focused attention. You will know that you are ready to start using relaxation in bed when you notice that you can transition into a state of relaxation during your daytime practice.

Learn How to Step on Your Body’s Anxiety Brakes

Although you may not like anxiety, you could not survive without it. In an emergency situation, anxiety grabs your attention and allows you to respond either by fleeing the situation or by summoning extra resources so that your body can manage the emergency. The human body has complementary systems that control physical activation and deactivation as well as relaxation and tension. You can think of this system as similar to a car’s brake and gas pedals. To drive, you need both the gas and the brakes. In your body, the “gas” is the
sympathetic
nervous system, and the “brakes” are the
parasympathetic
nervous system.

When you need to move in a hurry (as in an emergency), your sympathetic nervous system becomes active and your heart rate increases, you start to breathe more quickly, more blood flows to your large muscles (in your arms and legs), and physical functions that can be postponed, such as digestion, are temporarily put on hold. This is like stepping on the gas. This is the system that helps you when you need to run away from or directly face a threat, such as an intruder. This system is also active even when the danger you perceive is not a “true” or immediate emergency. For example, if you are feeling anxious about something that may never happen or will not happen for several days, this system can still become active and produce sensations of alertness, tension, and anxiety.

Naturally, it is unwise to sleep if you perceive danger. In other words, the sensations produced by an overactive sympathetic nervous system in response to a real or imagined danger are not conducive to sleep. You cannot sleep when your sympathetic nervous system is overactive: you first need the parasympathetic nervous system to step on the brakes. When the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, your heart rate decreases, your breathing slows, the blood flows evenly throughout your body, and important physical functions such as digestion resume. It is a system responsible for rest and restoration. If you were to learn how to step on your brakes at will, you would have a powerful tool at bedtime and would no longer be bothered by a noisy mind in bed.

Make a Plan for Relaxation This Week

Making a change in your routine can be difficult. The easiest way to maintain a change in behavior is to make a plan for how it can become a habit. Now that you know that chronic tension may underlie your insomnia and that managing this tension requires practice, it is important to prioritize this practice over the next few weeks. Look at your current schedule and set aside at least twenty minutes per day for this practice. Over the coming weeks, keep track of how often you are actually able to stick to this commitment. On days that you did not stick to this commitment, what got in the way? Take some time to understand why you did not do it. Do not criticize yourself for not engaging in your relaxation practice; instead, set aside some time to troubleshoot what went wrong and how you may be able to make an adjustment.

The most common obstacle to making relaxation a habit is a perceived lack of time. If you do not have twenty minutes in your day to attend to your health, you are likely overscheduled and this may be the source of your tension and noisy mind at night. Once you have made some time in your schedule, try to arrange some time in which you will not be interrupted. Put away your personal electronics and/or set your phone to silent. If you have children, arrange for child care or engage in this practice after your children go to bed. Tell your spouse, partner, or roommate that you are embarking on a relaxation program and would appreciate some quiet time each evening. Make a change over the next month and see the benefits of a relaxation practice.

Relaxation Strategies

As we mentioned, no particular relaxation strategy is better than another, so try out a variety of strategies and determine which ones suit you best. You can create a list of relaxation strategies to try over the next few weeks. Below, we provide a few tested strategies, but keep in mind that many more exist. There are many other self-help books, such as
The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook
by Martha Davis, Elizabeth Robbins Eshelman, and Matthew McKay (New Harbinger Publications, 2008), that are devoted to relaxation strategies.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is a very commonly used relaxation technique. This exercise will teach you the difference in sensation in each muscle group between holding muscle tension and then releasing the tension; that is, muscle relaxation.

The instructions below will walk you through the exercise. Because PMR is meant to be done with the eyes closed, the italicized passages can be your script if you wish to make a recording to guide you. Take your time with each muscle group, and pause for about fifteen seconds or more between each muscle group. Or you can use the recording of this exercise at author Colleen Carney’s Ryerson University web page:
ryerson.ca/~ccarney/
. There are also many CDs on the market that will guide you through PMR.

As with any relaxation practice, start by finding a comfortable position, either seated or lying down. Take a deep breath, hold it for a few moments and then slowly exhale. Prepare your mind for a practice focused only in the here and now. You are devoting this time to paying attention to your body and learning the sensation of the release of muscle tension.