How to turn bad decisions into good ones
We are really quick to judge ourselves for decisions that we’ve made when we were in a difficult moment.
For instance, in the midst of your sleepless night, you gave in and took a sleeping pill. Or felt that it was a too short night and decided to sleep in. Or felt anxious to sleep in your bed and escaped back to the living room again. Or took an innocent nap during the day and now it feels like a crime against your sleep drive.
Now, those decisions it might feel like you’ve broke the rules, showed weakness, and now your progress is sabotaged.
But you know me, I’m always on your side ❤️. And I don’t think that you’ve ruined your recovery by acting on sleep anxiety. Not even a bit. In fact, I was constantly breaking the “rules” on my recovery path. That’s so human!
Yes, it is good to be mindful of sleep efforts and not let a fear of losing sleep dictate how we should behave. Yes, we need to show that we aren’t scared of sleeplessness if we want to set ourselves free from insomnia. In an ideal world, we would understand it from the first time and our insomnia life chapter would be soon over. But we are not even nearly in an ideal world, and mistakes are allowed.
Decisions that have been made are in the past now, and we can’t change the past. Should we let them affect what happens next? I don’t see the need in that. In fact, we can reframe our “slips” and make them work in our favour!
Let’s think of it this way: sometimes our emotions can be too strong to handle them on our own and we need something to create a buffer between us and our anxiety. We just needed a break and if taking a sleep aid or moving on the couch could provide that buffer for some time, then we can think of it not as a sleep effort but rather an act of self-care.
In that difficult moment, whatever you did was perhaps the best thing you could have done for yourself. That’s self-care right there!
So instead of judging yourself for the past decisions, how about we agree that those decisions were done from the place of self-care and not from the place of fear – and move on?
What’s new 👀
Since the last time we spoke, I published two new videos and if you haven’t seen them yet, I recommend you check them out because it could be easily that missing piece of the puzzle in your recovery journey!
Take care ❤️