Sleep Deprivation

Wow. I’m dragging today. I officially go around 50 minutes of sleep last night. I couldn’t sleep. I tried doing my meditation exercise from my class. Made it through the full 45 minutes and I was still wide awake. Granted, I had things on my mind, but lately I’ve been able to put things aside and haven’t had a huge problem with sleep. So, I got up for a bit, went back to bed when Kristin finally went to bed (around 1). She was snoring in a few minutes. I stayed there for about an hour before I finally got up. I decided I would search iTunes for some sleep meditation tracks.

So I start sifting through them. Started the search with “sleep meditation” and moved to “guided meditation” since I tend to relax more with guided meditation than other versions. So the search for the perfect track turned out to be fairly difficult. Which begs the question: why are most meditation CDs done by creepy men? The only two women ones I could find on iTunes sounded like they were high or something. I finally found one that had three different sleep tracks, each about 25 minutes long. It had good reviews, and the guy’s voice wasn’t too bad, so I decided to download it. By this time it was about 3 a.m. (yes, it took me a full hour to figure out what meditation tracks I wanted to buy). They took FOREVER to download because they were such huge files. It was 3:45 by the time I got them downloaded and put on the iPod and headed back to bed.

I started with the first meditation track. It was called something like sleeping with self hypnosis. It started off okay. He said to listen to the sounds outside of the room. I couldn’t hear anything because I had the ear buds in. Then he said to listen to sounds inside the room. All I could hear was Kristin snoring and the cat purring on my pillow. I realized that sleep was really not going to come easy even with new meditation material. I tried to focus on the guy’s voice and what he was saying, but I realized that it reminded me of a therapist I saw several years ago who always wanted to hypnotize me. I would always tell him no because, frankly, the idea of being hypnotized scares the crap out of me. As the track continued, I realized the therapist had used the same imagery of going down 20 steps to relaxation. Before last night I never realized he had actually tried to hypnotize me, though, and so it freaked me out. Obviously, at the end of the 25 minutes, I was still wide awake.

The second track was called yoga something for sleep. It wasn’t like you had to do yoga moves, but, similar to the meditation I do for my class, it was all about becoming aware of different parts of your body. Jon Kabat-Zin’s version is very slow and deliberate. When I first started listening to it I thought I was going to go crazy. I would think “are we really still on the little toe of the left foot?” This guy’s was fast. Just as I began to visualize my little toe he was on to another part of the body. It wasn’t restful at all, so of course at the end of the 25 minutes I was still wide awake.

When the third track started I realized it was after 4:30. My alarm was set for 6:15. No good. The third track was called deep sleep meditation with ocean sounds. Nice. This one would surely put me right to sleep. So I’m listening. He’s talking. “Drift.” He said. So I drifted. “Float.” He said. So I floated. It was truly lovely (even with the snoring and the vibrating cat next to me). At one point he said “now listen to the music and the sounds and drift into a deeper relaxation.” So I was totally doing that – finally starting to drift to sleep when all of a sudden he started talking again and I jerked awake. “SHUT UP!” I yelled at him. I had been so close! I had to laugh, though, because he was talking about sending thoughts into the subconscious (I’m guessing he assumed most people would be asleep at this point) – things like “I’m calm.” “I’m happy.” “I am satisfied at my job.” “I work hard.” “I am a good person.” It was weird. And there was no way I was going to fall asleep after that.

Around 5:30 I considered just getting up but decided to give it one more shot. I threw the iPod on the floor and tried my old trick of counting backwards. It must have worked because next thing I know it was 6:15 and my alarm was going off. Two Excedrin and two Diet Cokes later, here I am. Falling asleep at my desk and waiting for my phone to ring. It’s gonna be a loooong day.