Rumination – Kitty Wheater

Trouble Sleeping

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. Open to all, you can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

‘It’s late and I’m feeling so tired,’ sings Corinne Bailey Rae. ‘Having trouble sleeping…’

It’s a sentiment familiar to many. A King’s College London study finds that two thirds of us have experienced some negative effect on sleep since the pandemic began, with a disproportionate impact on women, young people, and those facing financial difficulties. Intriguingly, though, most of us are sleeping more than we did pre-lockdown. With commuting shelved, and no pub to go to on a Friday night, total sleep time is actually up – it’s just not so restful.

So what might this look like? You may find yourself sleeping in fits and bursts, with long periods of wakefulness in between; waking groggily early in the morning, and watching the clock until it’s time to get up; finding it hard to fall asleep at all. You may have unusually vivid dreams, and remember more of them when you surface. If you have recurring stress dreams, or nightmares, these are probably putting in more of an appearance during your slumbering hours at the moment. They may be specifically about the pandemic, or they may be older stress patterns, flaring up with new potency thanks to the extra layer of lockdown worry-fog.

As we go about our days tired and stiff, the worst part of disturbed sleep is often creeping dread or anxiety about it. Sleep can become a place in our minds that is not restful, a sanctuary to enter at the end of the day, but rather a site of stress and fretfulness. We fear not sleeping – or if we sleep and have nightmares, we fear sleep itself. The other week I came across a passage that captured this cycle perfectly, in The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. An autobiographical children’s book, it depicts a ferocious seven-month winter in the tiny settler town of De Smet, South Dakota, in the 1880s.

Sometimes in the night, half awake and cold, Laura half-dreamed that the roof was scoured thin. Horribly the great blizzard, large as the sky, bent over it and scoured with an enormous invisible cloth, round and round on the paper-thin roof, till a hole wore through and squealing, chuckling, laughing a deep Ha! Ha! The blizzard whirled in. Barely in time to save herself, Laura jumped awake.

Then she did not dare to sleep again. She lay still and small in the dark, and all around her the black darkness of night, that had always been restful and kind to her, was now a horror. She had never been afraid of the dark. “I am not afraid of the dark,” she said to herself over and over, but she felt that the dark would catch her with claws and teeth if it could hear her move or breathe.

It’s a poignant description of how fear can flavour sleep and the wee hours. Unseasonal though The Long Winter might be, there’s reassurance in knowing that trouble sleeping, in the face of trouble, is an age-old experience. The psychological impact of endless howling prairie blizzards, with no end in sight, is not unlike that of being steeped in uncertainty and hard news.

So how might we look after ourselves in the face of sleeping troubles, and soften some of those internal blizzards? Here are some ways of responding, when sleep goes haywire.

1. Find Your Rhythm

Your body has powerful circadian rhythms. It wants to rest, and when it doesn’t, it will find a way to make it happen – as we’ve all discovered at one time or another, falling asleep after lunch. Fortunately, there’s a lot of wisdom out there on sleep hygiene: practical steps to realign the body’s sleep/wake cycle. During a tricky sleep patch, it can feel as if it will take forever to get back on track. But our circadian rhythms thrive on routine. Sleepio, for example, is an effective cognitive behavioural therapy app, that intervenes pragmatically and quickly to reset sleep patterns. But a few simple steps – a time limit on your smartphone in the evening; re-establishing some daily exercise – can also promptly make a difference.

Simple though such moves are, entrenched habits often get in the way. A quick message turns into twenty minutes on Twitter; rain clouds gather, and your walk looks less than inviting. Autopilot is a powerful thing, so outsource the willpower on this. Delete that app, and charge your computer in a different room overnight. None of us can quite be bothered to walk next door, at 3am, in order to scroll through BBC News.

Part of the misery of sleep disruption is that it can feel mysterious. If it has been relatively short-lived, cast your mind back and make a note of what triggered it. Often this is something quite straightforward. It could be that the heat kept you awake, that you missed a walk or online exercise class one day, or that a difficult message last thing at night had you up for hours. Re-establish your usual routines as soon as you can, bookmark any difficulty that requires some attention, and be patient with yourself: you will be a little slow and tired at first, but you will find your rhythm soon.

2. The Tell-Tale Mind

When it feels, as it did for Laura Ingalls, that the dark awaits you with claws and teeth, this is because your stress system is amped up. Thoughts scurry around in the mind, and your body holds itself up away from the bed, poised to fight or flee. As you try ever harder to fall asleep, rest seems more and more elusive, and you worry ever more about what will happen tomorrow.

The mind tells powerful tales about the past and the future. As if its usual fears and worries weren’t enough, many of its stories may be about what will go wrong if you don’t sleep enough, or what has happened to cause your restlessness. We may try to fight our thoughts, angrily batting them away, generating more thoughts about how badly this night is going. Remind yourself that thoughts are not wrong: they are your mind trying to help, but because you are tired and stressed, it is helping in a way that is tired and stressed.

Instead of trying to stop the thoughts, see if it’s possible to label them gently as they come up: ‘here is planning; here is self-criticism; here is prediction.’ Thoughts, you will notice, come and go: they are flickering, not solid. So you might imagine that your thoughts are like a waterfall, and that they can just fall past you as you sit beside them. You may get a little damp, but the thoughts need not drench you; and imagine that your seat beside them is soft, and comfortable.

3. Creature Comfort

When the mind is whizzing with memories, and plans, and what-ifs, the body as it lies here is not the past and future. It’s just the back, and the backs of the legs, and arms and head, against the sheets and pillows. So gently practice bringing your attention into the places where the body is held up: the surface of the skin, the texture of the sheets. When your mind veers off, acknowledge the story it tells, and just come back. You are reminding yourself that you are a body, safe and supported in this moment, in this space – nowhere to go, and nothing to do. Often, people find that a body scan helps provide some structure for this. It’s something you can do with the track a few times, and then just by yourself.

Often, as the mind quietens, sleep comes naturally. But sometimes you may realise that you are physically uncomfortable. You may be too hot or cold; you are hungry or thirsty. Tune in to what you most need, in this moment, and give yourself permission to follow it through. We are creatures, not floating brains.

‘Daytimes were not so bad as the nights,’ Ingalls Wilder wrote. ‘The dark was thinner then and ordinary things were in it.’ And so in daylight hours, when the dark is thinner, give some attention to the ordinary things that may make your sleep more comfortable. A soft blanket, a fresh pillow, a turned mattress; an open window for the smell of summer air; and something lovely to look at, when you open your eyes in the morning.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Interrupting a Spiralling Mind

This piece was first posted on For Times Like These: Blogs from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy to help us through COVID19 lockdowns and meltdowns, and to raise our spirits.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the mind usually reacts to stress and difficulty. One typical reaction is that we ruminate: the mind creates an endless thread, infinite possible scenarios in the imagination, all with the underlying sense that if we can only think of everything and pre-emptively solve it, we’ll be ok.

Sometimes we do eventually wind up at a solution, and it’s that sense of hitting the idea jackpot that reinforces the compelling feel of this mental process. It works! We think. Except, of course, all the times that it doesn’t, and instead keeps us up at 3am, or side-tracks us on an afternoon of remote working…

Unpleasant though it can be, a spiralling mind is a fascinating thing to watch. ‘I am an old man and have known a great many troubles,’ Mark Twain is reported to have said, ‘but most of them never happened.’ If you observe closely, there will be an initial trigger: it could be an article or Twitter post that you read, a comment from a friend, a frustrating email. Sometimes, the trigger is itself a creation of the mind. An apparently harmless amble along a familiar mental track takes an unexpected twist, and then, like racehorses out of the gate, we’re off, thoughts bolting for the distant finish line.

When the trigger for a spiralling mind occurs, if you were to slow the moment right down, you would notice two things happen next. First, something physical: a lurch in the stomach, a stony cold feeling in the face, shoulders hunching, chest tightening. These bodily signs are completely normal. They’re an indication of the second thing: an emotion has been triggered. Fear, anger, sadness, and anxiety all show up in the body, and we often feel them physically before we realise that they’re present.

It’s emotional charge that gives the spiralling mind its energy. Emotions are the wind in the mind’s sails. You will have noticed this in good moods, as well as bad: an excited mind will spiral joyously, just as a sad mind will spiral despondently. This makes sense when we consider that emotions are a call to action – a sign for us to attend, and take care. Our mental resources prick up their ears, and get to work.

The trickiness of a spiralling mind is that because of its very energy, it rapidly takes us far away from whatever initially needed attention and care. It will zoom into past, future, and parallel universe, at great speed. Indeed, if you watch the spiralling mind play out, it has the rapidly rotating quality of a hurricane: it hoovers up every relevant fragment of memory, attention, and imagination available. What is ‘relevant’ is governed by the emotional charge. If you are feeling low, memories of previous times you felt low will play across your mind, as if feeling rubbish right now weren’t bad enough. This, incidentally, is why recurring depression feels so hard, because actually it’s not just the weight of this moment on your shoulders; it’s the weight of every other low moment you’ve ever had, bearing down on this one right now.

As well as dredging up the past, and making predictions about the future, the spiralling mind will hone in on everything in the here and now that seems to back up those racing thoughts. Run out of milk? Worry about that, too. Friend not picking up their phone? Fuel to the fire.

When we recognise this process, it’s tempting to get in there and problem-solve. How can I make it stop? Why am I up at 3am yet again? But at this point our problem-solving is running off the storm system itself. When the hurricane of thoughts, emotions, and body sensations gets going, we need something equally powerful to interrupt it – but of a fundamentally different nature.

If the spiralling mind runs on habitual networks of memory and hyper-vigilance, we need deliberate, open, and embodied attention. One of my favourite definitions of mindfulness comes from Ellen Langer, who describes it as ‘…a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context’. The spiralling mind cannot survive an open, flexible, and inquiring awareness, just like wildfire cannot leap across a big enough gap.

The Three-Step Breathing Space

Zindel Segal, one of the creators of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for recurring depression, describes how he, Mark Williams and John Teasdale created a short practice intended to make just this gap. The three-step breathing space is ‘about moving attention in specific ways to help us free ourselves or to get unstuck,’ he writes, and you can try this lovely guided track for it from Mark Williams.

Sometimes called a three-‘minute’ breathing space, the practice can be done in just a few minutes, or extended to longer if you wish. It has three key parts:

1) Acknowledging what’s here in your experience right now: your mood, thoughts, emotions, body sensations. There’s no need to change these, just notice what’s here, with some friendliness.

2) Gathering the attention to the sensations of the breathing somewhere that feels steady, like the abdomen. Notice this in-breath, and this out-breath, just as they are, breathing themselves.

3) Expanding the awareness, to include the whole body sitting, standing, or lying down, just as it is, being itself.

Practice this a few times with the track, and then try doing it by yourself: the beauty of the breathing space is that it’s portable. To remember its steps, you can use the acronym AGE: Acknowledge, Gather, Expand. In our mindfulness courses, we encourage people to practice it two or three times a day in ordinary moments. This helps train the attention to follow its hourglass shape – broad awareness, narrow, broad – so that in those moments when the spiralling mind’s tug is strongest, we have this internal resource at our fingertips.

The breathing space is a short practice, invisible to the onlooker, and can be easy to underestimate. Yet course participants and trainee teachers tell me that there have been times when the breathing space has saved their lives. It does not fix our problems, or make situations go away; at the end of it, there may still be strong thoughts and feelings around. Things still need our attention, and action.

But what the practice does is create space. Space, far from being a vacuum, is potent. Sometimes, it is enough at the end of a breathing space to notice, ‘wow, I really am upset right now,’ and to attend to that with care. At their simplest, the gap around the wildfire and the pause in the storm offer a chance for this moment to be different than it would have been otherwise. Short, and deceptively quiet, there are days when the breathing space’s slivers of difference make all the difference.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Responding Wisely to Fear and Worry

This piece was first posted on For Times Like These: Blogs from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy to help us through COVID19 lockdowns and meltdowns, and to raise our spirits.

The spread of coronavirus around the world is creating ‘understandable fear and worry,’ writes Willem Kuyken, director of the Oxford University Mindfulness Centre. ‘This is a double edged sword that on the one side is an appropriate call to action and on the other can create panic, reactivity and additional problems…A public health and psychological response, together, can help us find a way through these challenging times.’

What might such a psychological response look like? In the current climate, equanimity – engaging steadily, pragmatically, and with care – may seem a quality easier said than done. That is why mindfulness is inherently a practice, and not just something good to talk about. To respond wisely to fear and worry, we look this week at how the mind typically reacts to difficulty, and then we look to Tara Brach’s practice RAIN: Recognise, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture as a way of working with it.

Our psychological reactions to difficulty, stress, and uncertainty are made up of many interlocking layers. There may be initial anxiety: thoughts take the form of questions – ‘what will happen?’ ‘What should I be doing?’, or images, or statements: predictions about the future – ‘THIS will happen’ – that feel just as real and solid in the moment as this screen in front of you now.

When difficult emotions and thoughts come up, the mind catapults into its age-old protection and survival mode, and so our secondary reactions usually fall into one of two camps: avoidance, or ‘fixing’. Avoidance strategies are myriad: distraction, procrastination, various kinds of addiction, and so on. In ‘fixing’ mode, the mind jumps in and tries to help. We may ruminate, creating endless lists and possible scenarios in the imagination, all with that underlying sense that if we can only think of everything, we’ll be ok. We may scroll repeatedly through Twitter for opinions and news. We may clean the Co-op out of tinned sweetcorn.

Avoidance and fixing both have their place. The mind is after all trying to protect us; it is important to give yourself psychological respite from difficulty, and to act sensibly to safeguard your health. If you have a history of trauma in particular, it is wise to tread lightly when working with fear and worry: sometimes right now is not the time to try a new strategy, and that is ok.

So wise avoidance, and wise action, are vital – and often have a sense of clarity to them. But the most intense varieties of avoidance and fixing, like denial or panic, often feel foggy and blobby. If we were to put them under a cognitive microscope, we would see that they are made up of layer upon layer of inter-reacting thoughts and emotions, whizzing around and feeding each other without interruption. We rarely notice all the elements of this complex inter-reactivity happening, because the protect-and-survive mode of mind is so powerful. We may only be aware of a sense of compulsion, escalation, and conviction about the truth of the potential scenarios playing across the cinema-screen of the mind. And so getting stuck in avoidance or fixing typically happens when we are most frightened of, or angry about, our own fear and worry, so that we do not fully acknowledge and investigate it, enabling clarity of thought or action, but rather compound it.

It is important, therefore, not to bat away our anxiety, fear, or anger, but to recognise it with care, curiosity, and gentleness. To notice what’s here, it helps to drop in some questions: what emotions am I feeling? What thoughts are coming up in the mind? Recognising and naming difficult thoughts and feelings can bring a sense of clarity. OK, anxiety is here. So that’s what I’m feeling.

Once we see what is here, it is important to allow it to be here, again bringing as best you can a sense of gentleness to your emotions. You might even mentally note, ‘it’s ok that I feel this’; ‘it’s understandable that I am thinking this’. Allowing our fear and worry to be here in experience is not the same as saying that the situation is ok. Rather, it is acknowledging that it is ok for you to feel the way that you feel about it. Wanting to get rid of those feelings and thoughts, instead of allowing them to be there, is what tends to drive a sense of denial or fear.

Once we have recognised, acknowledged and allowed what we are feeling, Tara writes, we can investigate this experience a little more. ‘To investigate, call on your natural curiosity – the desire to know truth – and direct a more focused attention to your present experience. You might ask yourself: What most wants attention? How am I experiencing this in my body? What am I believing? What does this vulnerable place want from me? What does it most need?’ Notice if the mind tips over into rumination or avoidance again, and as best you can, bring it back to a sense of embodied listening. ‘Whatever the inquiry,’ Tara writes, ‘your investigation will be most transformational if you step away from conceptualizing and bring your primary attention to the felt-sense in the body.’

When we gently attend to and investigate our intense experiences with a sense of care and curiosity, we can nurture and tend wisely to what we have discovered. It often helps to drop a question into the mind, like a pebble in a pond: what does this need?

Often a thought or an image will arise in response to that question. While denial mind would have us continue on autopilot, and panic mind would have us do the biggest thing imaginable, often the small things are powerful: remembering to eat lunch, or drink a cup of tea; a phone-call to a friend, or a particular action or conversation. When we create space through reflection, sometimes a certain line from a poem, or something someone once told us, emerges as a source of comfort, wisdom, and good sense.

On that note, I leave you with my favourite poem on this theme, below.

If you can sit quietly after difficult news;

if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm;

if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy;

if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate;

if you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill;

if you can always find contentment just where you are:

you are probably a dog.

By Jack Kornfield, after Rudyard Kipling

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.