I want to talk this week about sleep, but a slightly underappreciated aspect of good quality sleep. We’ve talked a lot in the past about having a sleep staircase, which essentially is a sleep preparation schedule. It’s a series of steps that take you from sympathetic to parasympathetic dominance to get you into that sleep state.
We talk a lot about temperature of the room, the darkness of the room, not having anything charging in the room, no flashing LEDs, and about being cool in the bedroom.
But one thing we don’t talk so much about is safety.
In order to sleep well, we must feel safe and for many of us that might not be the case at the moment. We might feel threatened by work situations, by personal situations with the current concerns of Coronavirus. We may not feel safe in our home. We may not feel safe in the relationships we’re in.
I don’t necessarily mean in danger of a physical threat, but other kinds of threats – emotional threats. And with most of us working from home, or self-isolating this can become a problem and have a big impact on our sleep as well as our wellbeing.
Sleep and safety are really quite closely linked – so it’s worth having a little bit of a think about this.
If you struggle to sleep, do you feel safe in your physical environment, with your current situation, in your relationships?
When you’re going to bed, are you allowing your mind to relax, or is it still in that sympathetic dominant state because you feel under threat?
As human beings, we like to feel safe and it’s an integral part of our wellbeing.
The takeaway from this is simple…
If you’re struggling to sleep, have a think about how you can make yourself feel safer in all the different contexts and associations of that word.
We have more information about sleep in these videos below:
As always, if you have any questions please do get in touch here: leanne@bodyshotperformance.com.
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