Sleep

Today I’m going to present a challenge from the card game “Bounce Back.” The game is a tool that we have been using in teaching the skills and attitudes of resilience. It is a serious game that asks you to apply the skills and the attitudes of resilience to a specific challenge and describe how you would respond to that challenge using these skills. Just like life, we don’t know what challenge we will be dealt.               

Here’s one that relates to a problem that many of us have. The problem of not getting enough sleep, or at least not getting enough of restful sleep. This is the situation.  When you attempt to sleep at night, you find that most often you have a hard time getting to sleep. You’ve been mixing booze and over-the-counter sleeping pills which often cause you to be very groggy in the morning. How would you use the skills and the attitudes of resilience to deal with your problem with sleep?

Here are some of the suggestions that we would have about ways you might deal with the situation. Again, these are only suggestions. Every situation is different, as is every person. Take some time to think about this and what skills and attitudes you might apply to the situation.

First of all, take what is going on with your problems with sleep seriously. Take care of yourself. Mixing alcohol and over-the-counter sleep medications is not a good idea. They will only tend to make your problems with sleep worse. Talk with your primary care physician about what suggestions he or she may have. And talk with other people about what they have done. Many people make use of relaxation strategies or meditation as a way of helping them to relax enough to be able to fall asleep and stay asleep. A good thing about a non-medication solution is that it is not habit forming. Not habit forming in a negative sense. You may find that using the breathing or relaxation strategies may be something that works so well that if you wake up in the night, you can use it again to get back to sleep. Communication is part of helping yourself to take care of yourself.

Also, be aware of the feelings that may be interfering with your sleep. Are you feeling extremely anxious about something right now that may be disrupting you getting to sleep? Do you need to deal with these feelings or discharge them or talk about them? Managing strong feelings can be a part of the solution.

Now, you may have come up with other skills and attitudes that you could apply to this problem. As we said earlier, every situation and every individual is different. Again, we would encourage you to think this through and to talk with others about how they have dealt with a similar challenge or how they feel they would deal with this problem if it was theirs.

Again, take this problem seriously. Sleep serves a critical function and is vital to ourhealth. For example, it is the period during which short-term memories are transferred into long-term storage. Without sleep, we may experience memory problems.