Weekend Log: How to get a good night's sleep

Hey hey, Midlifers …

I am writing to you from my bed and it is much later than I want it to be right now. I turned my phone alarm off instead of hitting snooze at 5 a.m. and now it’s way past the time I usually like to start having these conversations with you.

Now that my slumber is powered by Progesterone with a dash of magnesium glycinate, I sleep like a rock most nights. I often don’t even get up to use the bathroom, which is a low-key miracle. I used to wake up a few times to pee and now I power right through for usually about 7-8 hours of deep sleep. The downside is that I am not always conscious of my hand slapping the phone to snooze and lately, I’ve been feeling a little groggy when I first wake up.

My solid sleeping schedule has also gotten an assist from me not carrying a big emotional load right now. Of course, there are always things I can ruminate over and not want to let go of, like my dog when he gets one of those rubber bones he loves out of his toy basket. He chomps down on the knobby end of it and presses the rest of it hard against any surface he can find and then he just sits there, breathing hard and pressing his face onto the rubbery bone. It can be the couch or the side of the big ottoman we use for a coffee table. Lots of times it’s my leg. He just keeps walking about with the bone squeezed tight in his teeth and finding places to press down hard because somehow, this brings him pleasure.

Don’t get me wrong: if left to my own devices, I can start going down some mental rabbit holes while lying in my bed at night that are not pleasurable. I’ll find just the right traumatic event to grab onto and start pressing hard into the memory. One minute, I’ll be thinking about what herbs I want to buy for a little pot I picked up at Target and the next, I’m replaying my wedding day and then falling further down the hole into my childhood and finding memories to grip tightly in my thoughts, leaning hard into the negative stories I tell myself about these events.

Lately though, I have found a tool to help give my busy brain something to anchor onto to cut down on the ruminating and negative thoughts.