I had another interesting and challenging session with the occupational therapist yesterday. Reviewing the daily activity diaries I’ve been keeping for her, we see that I’m definitely making progress. I’ve been able to do what seems to me, considering how my life has been over the past few years, a staggering amount of things: work-type/mental, outdoor/physical, social, trips, etc. I am definitely feeling more in control of my daily life and my condition now than I was 3 months ago. One area I have not yet nailed is that of getting sufficient rest and, specifically, relaxation throughout the day in order to ‘top up my batteries’. I tend to get engrossed in one task and carry on doing it for longer than I ideally would; I have got better at that over the past few weeks, but what I then tend to do is, rather than getting some rest to help me cope with the activity I’ve just been doing, I fritter away time and, more importantly, energy, either playing on the computer (writing emails, surfing the internet, chatting on a message board, etc.) or just watching TV or reading – displacement activities to quell what I think is an underlying sense of boredom and restlessness. The real value of regular rest and relaxation – that it helps to sustain levels of better health, which allows me to continue doing those things I enjoy doing – is finally starting to sink in, I think, and this should help me to prioritise rest rather than seeing it as something which I’ll do if I don’t have anything else to do.
I was also given some new tips on improving my sleep. I’ve not found the so-called ‘sleep hygiene’ approach helpful before, but these tips were similar in nature (and might be blindingly obvious to a lot of people) in that they were ways of preparing the body and mind for sleep. A sort of Pavlovian response thing. Frankly I’ve never had ways to prepare myself for sleep; throughout my life I’ve dealt with the problem by making myself so tired that it was impossible to stay awake any longer. (I think there’s an element of the restlessness/fear of boredom that I mentioned above in this.) I’d love to have a different relationship to sleep. So an hour before I wanted to be asleep last night, rather than slumping in front of an extra hour’s TV, I had a hot shower, got into bed, read an easy book for a while and then switched off the lights and listened to my relaxation tape (now that really does produce a Pavlovian response in me, after the hundreds of times I’ve listened to it!). I did get to sleep in probably not more than half an hour (good going for me), and slept through until about 7 this morning. This is promising.
So, two things for me to prioritise at the moment until both, hopefully, become second nature.
30/08/07 @ 10:18