A night can still be tough despite the "right" actions
Hi friend,
I don’t know if I have ever emphasised it in a separate text, but I feel like this needs to be said over and over:
It’s okay when things don’t turn out the way we’d like them to despite doing everything perfectly.
Sometimes people reach out with frustration: “I don’t understand. I do everything what I am supposed to. I am becoming more and more open to experience wakefulness, and I am accepting and being kind to myself when anxiety shows up. I stay positive, I engage with life, but I still get these nights when things just aren’t good. I don’t know what I am missing here!”
Needless to say that when we put a lot of effort and soul in this process and don’t see the desired output, our old friend doubt shows up and starts to question everything:
🤔 “Am I doing it right?”
🤔 “What if there is something wrong with me?”
🤔 “What if I need to keep looking for other solutions?”
🤔 And the most common one: “What if by accepting wakefulness I am training my brain to be more awake?”
These questions aren’t new or unique, I hear them on a regular basis. Heck, I myself had these concerns too.
Here is the thing: if you think that something might be off-balance health-wise, by all means, do investigate this with your doctor. If you think that you’ve settled down on acceptance teaching too early, and there is still yearning for the ultimate solution which you haven’t found yet – keep exploring! No one prevents, nor should they prevent you from finding your path. You might still come back to acceptance eventually, but at least you’ll know that you did everything you could in your power.
That being said, these doubts are a part of our automatic problem-solving mechanism that created fear-based insomnia in the first place. The brain doesn’t feel safe enough to accept and allow wakefulness, and so it finds arguments and reasons to not do that. And these arguments and reasons might be very convincing and logical - that’s the power of our brains!
So when things go flat and we are stuck – it seems like we do everything right and yet it doesn’t show up in the sleep outcome – there is usually a subtle yet powerful belief that holds our process back. The belief that “If I do everything right, sleep has to happen the way I want it to.”
And that belief contradicts the very nature of sleep - a passive process which no one can control through will.
The truth I’ve been observing on my recovery path over and over was this:
I could do everything perfectly right and my night could still be tough.
I will repeat this once more in a slightly different way:
Even if we let go of all sleep efforts, become utterly accepting of anything, stay self-kind and non judgemental, etc… the night can still turn out to be not what we’d like. And that’s okay.
Nothing that we do can secure a good night’s sleep. Even our flawless execution of the principles of non-attachment doesn’t ensure that. But a night of peaceful and effortless sleep still can happen! It’s not excluded as a possibility – it is a very real possibility. However, when it happens, it does so not because of something was done “right”, but in the absence of pressure (to do everything right).
Sleep always comes in its own time; all we can do is to step away from the steering wheel and let the body do its job no matter what that looks like on a given night.
And when we accept the reality and accept that some nights can be rubbish “just because“, things paradoxically become easier. It’s like we suddenly obtain a permission slip to have a random “bad” night without an obligation to figure out how it happened. We are still willing to do all the inner work that needs to be done, but we come to terms that even if we do everything right, the night still might not be our favorite.
So one more time:
A sh*tty night can still happen despite our perfect job.
Taking this as a part of the journey removes a lot of pressure to be more “perfect” and more “correct”. It replaces conditional acceptance (which is, frankly, good for nothing) with the unconditional one. It helps us not to dwell on tough nights and just keep moving, because we know that we all have our “good“ and “bad“ days even if we did our best.
If this letter resonated with you, give it a ❤️ and make sure you are on the subscriber list to not miss the future letters!
Take care ❤️
Alina