Mindfulness

       Every therapist I’ve been to has tried to get me on board with mindfulness, which is basically a type of meditation, but I’ve always been very resistant to it because there is no way I am going to sit and meditate or listen to zen recordings, etc. The therapist I have now initially tried to get me on board by introducing me to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy but I only lasted a couple of chapters. It doesn’t matter how much it will help, I am never going to sit and think of meadows or chew my food a hundred times trying to identify each individual flavour. That’s just not happening. However, she recently started me on Dialectical Behavioural Therapy which takes a very different approach and so far seems actually doable. Now, I have been seeing my current therapist for about 18 months and she has been through almost every type of therapy out there with me, all of which have failed miserably. I give them a shot but usually end up thinking that the exercises are stupid and ineffective so she was relatively surprised when she managed to finally find something that I was on board with. 

       The main reason for starting me on this type of therapy was that I experience very extreme emotions and am incapable of calming myself down so I get desperate and turn to other people to talk me down. Unfortunately, most of them are just scared and overwhelmed by it (and probably not all that pleased either) so it ends up damaging the relationship. This type of therapy starts by teaching you distress tolerance, giving you ways to self-soothe when these emotions hit. In my opinion, this is way more effective than writing out your thoughts and trying to tell yourself they aren’t true. I haven’t experienced one of these episodes since I started this therapy so I don’t know how well it works for me but it just seems much more practical. It is also applicable to trying to fall asleep, something I often have trouble with, because falling asleep requires you to be able to self-soothe (apparently this is a skill I never learned). Anyway, I have now moved on to the next section of the workbook which is mindfulness and geesh why couldn’t all the other books be this straightforward?! Within the first two pages of the chapter I knew exactly what mindfulness entailed and how to practice it without meditating for an hour. Basically mindfulness is just being aware of the present moment, recognising when your attention wanders, and bringing your focus back to the current task. How difficult is that to explain? And you can practice it at any time: when you’re reading, watching TV, having a conversation, etc. As you continue to read they do give specific exercises you can do, some of which involve picturing meadows and clouds, but they are just options so if you aren’t into it you can just stick to the basics. Eventually all this practice is supposed to improve your concentration and reduce the time you spend worrying about future and past events, making you happier and less anxious, so we’ll see how that goes. For now I’m just glad that I don’t have to meditate every day.

Zzzzzzzzzz...

Guess how many hours of sleep I got last night? 

Three.

I didn’t fall asleep until 4:30 am and then was wide awake by 7:30 am (luckily for me, a lack of sleep doesn’t turn me into a zombie anymore). If this was just a one-time thing, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but I have struggled with sleeping for as long as I can remember and do you know how annoying it is to lay awake for hours on end, desperately wanting to fall asleep? Even as a kid I would spend hours trying to fall asleep and then would wake up again in the middle of the night. The same happened all through high school (no wonder it was so hard to get me out of bed for school in the mornings) and through my undergrad. I have spent countless nights tossing and turning or pacing around my room because I just couldn’t shut my mind off long enough to fall asleep, either that or I wake up at 4 am raring to go. During my undergrad, when I was misdiagnosed with depression, my sleep troubles were attributed to that and I was put on sleeping pills because nothing else would work. Then when I received my bipolar diagnosis, I figured that that was causing my sleep problems because for a little while after starting the antipsychotics I found that I could fall asleep easier, my mind didn’t race as much. However, those effects wore off and so far no changes to my drug regimen have been able to permanently solve my sleeping problem and it was then that I determined that the ADHD was actually responsible. This is the only thing that really makes sense because the sleep troubles started before the bipolar kicked in during high school and when I looked into it some more, I found that many people with ADHD report having difficulty falling and staying asleep.

So what do you do about it? Unfortunately, sedatives are out of the question because they’re not meant for long-term use and melatonin tablets don’t seem to do it for me. Right now, my psychiatrist is altering the antipsychotics but I believe that that will only be a temporary solution to the problem as I seem to build up a tolerance to the sedative effects very quickly. However, there is something I came across recently that may have some merit and could be worth a shot in the future. When reading up on ADHD and sleep trouble I came across an article that suggested taking a second dose of your stimulant medication at bedtime. And why not? You use it during the day to calm your system and keep you on task so why wouldn’t it do the same at night, keeping you on the task of falling asleep? Now I’m sure a lot of you are skeptical of me calling falling asleep a task but when you spend countless nights wide awake in your bed because your mind won’t shut off, falling asleep really does become a chore. There’s a quote saying that falling asleep is the easiest thing to do, all you have to do is close your eyes and drift off, and I read somewhere else that it takes the average person 7 minutes to fall asleep…who are these people?!?! Sleeping is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, hopefully not for long though.