Which decision will make me feel more okay inside?
Let’s dive a bit deeper into our fears and desires. Whether it is the fear of losing sleep and the desire to be a normal sleeper again. Or any other fears and desires in life where our thinking goes: I’m okay with this and not okay with that.
I believe this is the thinking from which all sorts of suffering stem.
‘I want to feel okay’
I recently have listened to the Mayim Bialik's Breakdown podcast (who doesn’t know the name, she played Amy from the Big Bang Theory), an episode with Michael Singer. I haven’t heard of him before but in that episode he said something that resonated deeply with me. All our chases for things in life – whether it is something tangible or intangible – it is all about feeling okay inside.
And this what happens just before we begin to sleep well again: we relax into knowing that there is nothing wrong with us, that being awake is okay, that we are okay no matter how the night goes – and that feeling communicates to the mind that we are safe which puts our minds at peace… and this is when sleep comes as usual.
On the insomnia recovery path we constantly have to make decisions and we all know how scary and uncertain that feels. We think that there is something we can do that will put us to sleep and rid us of anxiety. We think these are the only conditions that will make us feel okay. But since neither sleep nor state of calmness can be obtained with force, we get frustrated because our actions never lead to the desired outcome.
But what if feeling okay can be obtained from other places, without waiting for sleep to come back?
For a moment, let’s shift the focus away from trying to get sleep and get rid of worry – there is nothing we can actively do about it anyway – and ask ourselves this: ‘which decision right now would make me feel more okay inside?’ Note, that I’m not asking for an ultimate answer that would solve the problem for good, but for something that would bring a bit more relief into the present moment.
I’ll give an example.
If I’m deciding between going on the couch or staying in bed: what would make me feel alright in this moment? Perhaps staying in bed feel more okay in this instance. In five minutes I can ask myself again: what would make me feel alright in this moment? Maybe now, the decision leans towards the couch. No matter how often I ask myself this question I know that I am free to choose whatever make sense to me in that particular moment. Because in reality it’s all we have!
And when we do it consistently, hundreds of tiny decisions like this create one long moment of feeling okay. And we do it until it feels so natural that we don’t have to ask ourselves this anymore. We just feel okay all the time… and beautifully we sleep like we slept before insomnia – without doing anything about sleep itself.
Take care,
Ali