Counting sheep

Sleep has been a topic of conversation around the office lately. My boss underwent a professional sleep analysis a week or so ago to determine if she has sleep apnea, and if so, what she might need to do about it. So just before getting started with a meeting last week, those gathered around the conference table listened to her story and entered into the discussion about sleep. Seems that everyone had some sort of sleep aberration, either not getting restful sleep, falling asleep too quickly, or breathing (polite way of saying snoring) problems.

I think I could check off a few of those from the list. Through the years I’ve had all sorts of cycles that seemed to interfere with restful sleep. I just read an essay by an inspired blogger over at f8hasit regarding sleep deprivation and it reminded me of a time when I found it very difficult to fall asleep. Seems that I could just not stop thinking, planning, worrying, listing.

Back in those days, I had been to some exercise and yoga classes that ended with a few minutes of facilitated relaxation. It was nice. It went something like this:

Imagine yourself lying on a tropical, warm beach.
The tide softly washes up to your ankles and you feel your feet and ankles relax.
The tide continues to wash up to your legs, torso, arms, etc….bringing relaxation to your entire body.

So when I was having insomnia problems, I decided to try this out for myself. It went something like this:

Imagine yourself lying on a tropical warm beach.
The tide softly washes up to your ankles and you feel your feet and ankles relax.
The tide washes up to your legs, torso, arms. Soon you are floating, weightless in the warm water, fully relaxed.
Beneath the surface of the water there are dozens of sharks, jellyfish and scratchy seaweed. Yikes! Get out of there!

OK, so I figured out how to sabotage my own relaxation process. Typical. I'll probably not going to try that method again. Back to counting sheep.