Trouble Sleeping? Here's What You Can Do

Hello, my loves. I am so happy to see you. I wanted to talk with you guys today about sleep. And sleep is such an important part of the anxiety journey. And the ironic part about it is, is when we're anxious, it's harder to sleep. And then if we are having a hard time sleeping, we can get more anxious about sleeping, and then we don't sleep, and then it spirals. Right. I have been getting lots of comments from my warriors about how sleep is just so difficult. And so I wanted to talk about that today. And a couple of really important tips in terms of sleeping is to identify what the obstacle to sleeping are. And so there's really basic things that can prevent sleep. For example, using screens an hour before bed, having an uncomfortable bed, having noise. There's lots of things that are really, we talk a lot about with sleep. But then there are also really sneaky little culprits of sleeplessness that can sneak in there. And so I want to talk about some of those today and give you some tips. And thank you so much, Haley and Nicole, for being here. It's so fun to see you. We're talking about sleep and how important it is and how it's a really big deal right now. A lot of people have been connecting with me, and they're either oversleeping or they can't sleep enough. And so I started to talk quickly about how sometimes the causes of sleeplessness are things related to sleep hygiene. But there's other sneaky things that can cause problems. Sleeping. One is a part of ourselves that is opposed to sleeping. And parts work can help us figure out what that is. And so to tell you a little bit about my own story is that several years ago, a while back, I was anxious and I was on this treadmill, metaphorically speaking, of working harder, work harder. Don't forget things. Keep working. The harder that I worked, I thought that I would be less, less stressed. And it was really, truly the opposite. I found that the harder I worked, the more stressed I got, the worse my sleep became. And then I would start noticing I was laying awake in bed and I couldn't sleep. And then I started fixating on the fact that I couldn't sleep. And then as it got worse, I would lay awake for six hours, and then I would go an entire night. And then the next day, my body was responding to the fatigue by releasing stress hormone. And so your body might release cortisol, and then you can get that wired and tired feeling. Have you ever had that before? I was constantly in a wired and tired state. And then I just got so depleted. After several months of this going on, my body was switching over to what felt like adrenaline. So I was just running on pure adrenaline and I wasn't sleeping. I was getting more anxious. Adrenaline was surging through my body. Then I started getting hypnotic jerks. And I know one of our warriors has talked about this specifically. And a hypnotic jerk is when you lay down to go to sleep. And as you're falling asleep, the body jerks awake. And it can be a literal spasm of a muscle. Sometimes people jerk so intensely, they wake up the person in bed next to them. And so that is typically caused by an accumulation of stress hormone or the crisis kind of fight or flight hormone in the nervous system. And so there's a lot of different things that we can do to counteract that. But what I want to talk about today is that sneaky little part. I've been really interested in talking with you guys about parts work because that is the foundation of everything that we're going to be doing today. And hurrah. Kate is here. Hello, honeypants. I'm so delighted to see you. And Jared, my love, I love it. You haven't missed a single single one. You are my hero. And we're talking about how insomnia can come from anxiety. We're talking about how stress, anxiety can really mess with our sleep. So we talked about there's a couple of really basic things that you can think of. Let's talk about good sleep hygiene. You can find lists of those all over the Internet. Turn the screens off an hour before bed. Make sure that your room is nice and quiet, that it's not too hot or not too cold. Really, really basic things like that. But then we were talking about how there's this part that can come in and how a part of us may actually be an antagonist to sleep. So what do I mean by that? So as I was talking about, I was telling you guys my own story of dealing with horrific insomnia that went on for months. And it was accompanied by panic attacks and working too much, and it was really terrible. And then my body started just living off of adrenaline because I wasn't sleeping and. And producing spasms and hypnotic jerks, which is that jerking on, falling asleep. And so the work that I was doing is I was taking all the right supplements. I was doing all of the exercising. I was listening, like Jared was saying, like, listening to amazing instrumental music, like I was doing everything right and it wasn't working. And so parts work allows us to an invitation to dive deeper into what's actually going on. And we're going to actually. I have a surprise, you guys. I am interviewing somebody later today who is a genius, brilliant, beautiful warrior. We're doing a video interview, and I'm going to be sharing with you this video interview. Oh, my gosh. I just went on, like, a rabbit trail there because I'm so excited. And so to circle back, we gotta examine the part. And that's part of the thing that she and I are gonna talk about, is that there are parts of us that really wanna sleep, but there's actually a part of you that doesn't. And so we need to know who that part is, what that part's unmet need is, what that part is attempting to accomplish, and what we can do to allow that part to feel safety in going off of center stage so that you can take center stage and you can actually run your show. And so we did. I've been doing a lot of spontaneous Facebook lives this week because, babes, I am so inspired by all of you. I'm just, like, on fire. This is my jam. This is my favorite thing, is living on you and being transparent about my story so that you can be transparent about yours and heal. And so when we're doing parts work, it's all about finding the strategy that helps you get to some of those deeper messages and those deeper components of who you are. In one of my previous videos, I taught you guys about sand tray, and I actually still have it set up. Remember, we talked about the bear and how this bear, for one of my patients, was representative of this part that silenced her and shut her down and created this closing sensation. And so we can represent those parts with images, which could be a photograph or a toy or a figurine. We talked about identifying it with drawing. Just like when you have this feeling of jerking, of starting in your sleep, of feeling really anxious, whatever it is, of drawing that and then externalizing a representation of that. But there's another way that you can do it, and it's called somatographic imagery, and it is incredibly effective. This was what, like, saved my life when I wasn't sleeping, was using this. And somatographic imagery is a mind body technique that allows us to get to the parts of the body that aren't letting us go to sleep that are totally unlogical. Because you can tell. Like, I could lay in bed and tell myself, like, you need to sleep. You're going to feel terrible tomorrow if you don't. Right now is not the time to be responding to that email in your head. The logical part of the brain doesn't always communicate effectively with the other parts of the the brain. And so we have the logical prefrontal cortex, we have the emotional midbrain, and then we have that brainstem producing the hypnotic jerks, the spasms, the fight or flight, that wired and tired feeling that you're experiencing. And somatographic treatment, Somatographic imagery actually goes into these deeper parts of the brain and allows you to gain information about in what way they're out of balance so that you have the power to rebalance them. And I'm actually gonna be doing a webinar teaching you exactly how to do that. And Babes is totally free. It's going to be amazing. And so set aside 45 minutes when you're not gonna be interrupted where you have time, it's quiet, you can be with yourself. And I'm gonna walk you through the four most powerful steps of getting into that deeper messaging from your brain and body to figure out what. Why your sleep isn't working. And so I know that one of the most important ways that you can prepare for somatographic imagery is to start practicing when you have that part is to start drawing it. So, Haley, you actually mentioned that you had a hard time sleeping last night. If you've been laying there and it's been about 20 minutes, actually get up out of bed, and then I want you to have a piece of paper in the next room, and so go somewhere where the light is really dim, really dark. And I want you to get a piece of paper, and I want you to just notice where in your body you're feeling those sensations. And my beautiful soul sister lafrancis is here. I got my purple color. And I want you to get, like, ideally, I would have prepared by finding my box of colored pencils, but I want you to just notice. And so for me, when I'm having a hard time sleeping, I always feel it in my chest. I know it. And so after 20 minutes, if you're laying there and you can't go to sleep, or if you're falling asleep and you jerk awake, I want you to find. Notice that part, close your eyes, get out a piece of paper, and then just, like, scribble, put on that paper, like, whatever feels right to you, and articulate it on the paper. And so it doesn't have to make sense. It could be, like, squiggles. It could be a drawing of a house. It's just like, whatever you see in Your mind's eye, when you notice that jerk, that spasm, when you notice that tension in the chest, when you notice the restlessness in your legs, I want you to notice that physical sensation. And then just like scribble, I want you to just scribble anywhere you can. And you can use as many colors, I want you to use as many shapes as you want to. And then, so here's my scribbling, and I probably would scribble a lot longer if I wasn't on a live. But so you scribble it. And then I want you to do something. This is. This is the really cool thing, is I want you to take a color that feels right. I have orange. And I want you to draw yourself on this piece of paper. And the self that I want you to draw, the self that feels like it's having this experience. And so when I did this assignment, I was just to bring you guys up to speed. Who just joined us is I was talking about how anxiety and insomnia or having a hard time sleeping are so intimately related, and how sometimes your brain doesn't communicate well, and you can logically know till the cows come home that you have to sleep, but your body's like, nope, I'm going to shoot out adrenaline right now. And you're going to have spasms and anxiety and restlessness. And so we're pulling out that part that's feeling the spasms, that's feeling the anxiety, that's feeling the restlessness. You're going to evoke that just the best you can. You're going to scribble those feelings on a piece of paper. No logic. Just put it down. And then the first step is to get that down. And then step two is to put that part, draw who that looks like in your mind, onto the scribble. And so when I drew this, and I remember this like it was yesterday, is I actually. And I'm not an artist, kids, but I drew myself here. And so then that's interesting. So you put yourself there. And then if you want to get a different color, the third phase is so you draw your anxious self or your sleepless self, and then you draw your now self. And so it's a different part, right? There's like the now me, the me that's talking to you, the logical me, the doctor me. But there's also a part of me that sometimes doesn't sleep well, and it's very annoying. But we're working on it, right? And I'm gonna help you. So I want you to draw the anxious self that isn't sleeping. And then I want you to draw your now self, the now self being like your dominant self, your self that's like really dialed in, like your true self, your confident self. I want you to draw her. And so when I did this exercise and I drew her, I actually felt like she was on the outer edge and she's like facing all this chaos and she had a shield. So what this is doing is this is providing us a way to externalize these thoughts, these emotions, these experiences that we're having, and then put them on a piece of paper and then we can start to figure out what the heck this means. To just the random scientific eye. We could be like, yeah, Cain's cane scribbled. But if we look deeper, there's so much that we can get out of this. So I see sharp edges, I see chaos. I see that my little self is so much smaller relative to everything else, just kind of pushed out into different parts of the space. And so we're able to start to use our logical brain and our emotional brain to apply meaning to that. And. And this is part of somatographic imagery is I'm trying to teach you in, like 10 minutes here, what we're going to be diving into in so much detail in somatographic imagery, and we're going to be doing an exercise that's going to help you get into your nervous system and get into your body and figure out, look, Francis, you knew I was going to do stick figure, babe. And to figure out what is this anxiety trying to tell me what unmet needs to be. Does this anxiety have. How is this sleeplessness trying to serve me? And babes, the number one thing that I thought that I learned that my sleeplessness was trying to do is it was keeping me hyper vigilant. It was trying to protect me from feeling vulnerable. It was trying to keep me alert and awake so I didn't forget and miss anything. And this wasn't happening in my logical brain. It was all in my unconscious brain. And it was hypervigilance from a little me. And doing this exercise gave me access to that because of just my logical now self. Like, if this girl holding the shield self, if we just talked to her, she'd be like, yeah, I'm super stressed out and my annoying self can't sleep. And that would have been it. But this exercise allowed me to get creative, go a little bit deeper and speak to a part of myself that was otherwise inaccessible. And oh my gosh, it gives Me goosebumps to think about that. Because, love, this is life changing. This is the stuff that you have to go to years of therapy and sit on a couch and spend tons of money to do. And I'm going to teach you how to do it on your own with me and with our warriors. And so really, I want to get you excited about the somatographic imagery webinar because I care so much about you getting your life back. I hope that it comes out in my videos. I really, really care about you. And my mission is to put a comma at the end of your sentence. You are not an anxious person. You have a part that's anxious, you have a part that is hypervigilant and doesn't want to sleep. And our job is to honor that space, heal that space, be in that space, and then transition through that space. And this is what we're going to be doing together. So I have a couple of action items for you. Number one, if you go to bed tonight, tomorrow night, next week, after 20 minutes, if you're not sleeping, get up, go into another room and I want you to scribble. And then get into the warriors group is number two. And then post that stuff in the warriors group. And let's talk about what came up. I've been doing spontaneous videos in there and answering questions, and you just never know what might resonate with you, what might be there, what might be an opportunity for deeper exploration. Exploration. Like babes, we're getting into the subconscious networking and wiring of your brain. And the research shows that we can change that. And my experience shows that we can change that. And I'm gonna help you do that. So number one is if you can't sleep, don't just drug yourself. I mean, sometimes babes, you got sleep and you take the valerian and that's okay. But use this as an opportunity to figure out who she is. She is desperately asking to be heard and she deserves to be heard. And I'm going to help you do that. And so action number one is if you can't sleep after 20 minutes, get up and I want you to scribble. And when you scribble, just scribble all your feelings. And then I want you to draw your little self, or the self that's coming up. And then I want you to draw your now self, take a picture of it. And then number two, get in the warriors group and I want you to post that if you feel comfortable and safe. And we're gonna work through it. And then number three, is sign up for the webinar. It's 45 minutes of your time and I promise you're gonna get something out of it. And it's totally free. No pressure. It's just me and you and 45 minutes of amazingness. And so I love your comments, I love your questions, I love your participation because this is my purpose. This is why I'm here. This is what sets my soul on fire. And this is all free because we need this goodness now more than ever. And so Haley Taylor is a warrior who helps me keep organized. And she just put the link to the warriors group in this chat. So if you don't see it on the page, just scroll through the chat and she has the link there. It's Anxiety Freedom Group. And so get in there and then you're going to be getting more information about the webinar. But we also have a seven day Anxiety Freedom onewe challenge that we're doing right now in the group. And so check it out. And we've had some people in there who've been posting some of their activities that they've been doing in that and it's been really super cool. So I hope you love it. I love you all. And I will be back here on every Wednesday and every Friday this time. And so join me. It's also recorded if you can't make it. No problems, my loves, but I honor you. And if you have a hard time sleeping, maybe pull this up and listen to it. And then let's scribble together. Let's draw that stuff because this, my love, is an invitation for deeper healing. And you can sleep again. I slept last night. You can too. All right, so I am going to log off and I will be back. And I'm looking forward to seeing you guys again on Friday. Take care.