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Self care

Searching for a good night’s sleep

by Margaret15 Comments on Searching for a good night’s sleep
Searching for a good night’s sleep

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s been having trouble sleeping lately.

I fall asleep easily enough, but I often wake in the middle of the night and work myself up into a state of anxiety about everything that’s been happening. I go down a rabbit hole of imagining what bad things might happen to family and to the world in general. This is weird because I’m normally a very positive person.

Ironically, my anxiety is often made worse by worrying about how much sleep I’m NOT getting. I wake up, look at the clock and do a quick calculation about the number of hours until I need to be getting out of bed and doing something productive and start freaking out because everyone knows we need seven or eight hours a night, right?

Well, wrong apparently.

Although it’s a commonly held belief that you need eight hours of sleep every night, there’s no real evidence to support this, and when you think about it, it makes little sense that we would all need the same amount of sleep, or that we need exactly the same amount of sleep every night.

It’s much more likely that we would need different amounts of sleep depending on the amount of exercise we’ve been doing, how old we are, how tired we are, and whether the kids have been keeping us up all night.

I listened to an interesting podcast the other night (when I wasn’t sleeping) on Insomnia Myths and Misconceptions, presented by psychologist Nick Wignall, in conversation with sleep physician Dr Daniel Erichsen, and they had some interesting things to say.

The idea that you need eight hours sleep for optimum health and productivity is based on a study where ‘good’ sleepers (people who say that they wake up well-rested) claimed that they usually sleep for eight hours a night. Scientific studies of these same people showed that they actually sleep for about seven hours a night, but of course it varies from person to person. So the eight hours a night rule is really just what people thought was a good number of hours, rather than being based on fact. But the focus of the podcast was on what causes insomnia and this is the bit that I found interesting. According to Nick and Daniel…

The biggest cause of insomnia is worrying about not sleeping.

It’s your anxiety about not sleeping that is causing most of the problems. It’s not the cup of coffee that you had, or the movie you watched on your iPad. It’s worrying that these are going to affect your sleep. As soon as you start fretting about being awake, you virtually guarantee that you’ll find it hard to get back to sleep.

You also need to stop worrying about waking up during the night. It’s perfectly normal to wake during the night, especially as you get older. In the olden days (prior to the industrial revolution) it was normal for people to have two sleeps every night. They would go to bed early and then wake up in the early hours of the morning and spend a couple of hours talking, playing games, even visiting friends, before heading back to bed for a few more hours of sleep. The invention of electric lights in the late 19th Century made it possible for people to stay up later and it became the norm for people to expect to sleep in one continuous stretch.

It was around this time that someone invented the term ‘insomnia’. This caused an explosion of potions and pills to help people get to sleep and stay asleep. It was inferred that there was something wrong if you woke up in the middle of the night, when previously this hadn’t been regarded as a problem.

In his book “Why can’t we sleep” Darian Leader says that sleep has become a commodity that’s worth billions of dollars. Not only do we have a myriad of medications, there’s the mattress industry, smart watches to track your sleep cycles, and a host of books on sleep science. It’s a big business that relies on people being anxious about their sleep.

So, where does this leave you if you are having trouble sleeping because you are worrying about your business going down the spout, or other genuine possibilities?

I’m not sure of the answer to this, but I try to distract myself by listening to funny podcasts (try Elis James and John Robins or No such thing as a fish) or by listening to music. It doesn’t block the swirling thoughts entirely, but it reduces my level of anxiety a few notches, and eventually I drop off again. I try really hard to convince myself that even though I’m not sleeping, that’s ok. Having children has taught me you can function reasonably well on a surprisingly small amount of sleep.

If this fails, I try to imagine what I’d do with a million dollars or other favourite scenarios. You may have your own version of this. It might be designing the house of your dreams, writing a book, or inventing something brilliant. Do whatever works, but don’t focus on what the time is or how long you’ve been awake.

Everyone is understandably stressed and anxious about what the next few months will bring, so rather than stress too much about things you can’t control, be kind to yourself and get some rest when you can.

Best wishes from me to you

xxx

Self care

Attitudes to money

by Margaret10 Comments on Attitudes to money
Attitudes to money

My father died shortly before my fourth birthday, leaving my mother with three young children, a half-finished house, and no income.

He was 33, a newly qualified architect just starting out in his own business when he died. He designed our home, which was very modern for its time. It was open plan, with a huge kitchen/dining room and a laundry overlooking the front yard. This was very unusual as most kitchens and laundries were at the back of the house in those days. My mother had insisted that she wanted to have a view of the street when she was in the kitchen or doing the laundry. She disliked housework and menial chores (it runs in the family) and didn’t want to be stuck away somewhere at the back of the house slaving over a hot stove in the kitchen or doing the endless laundry that comes with a growing family.

Our family home designed by my Dad, Les Moon.

We had beautiful polished floorboards in the lounge room and a fireplace. This was odd given that we lived in Perth where the winters aren’t really that cold, but we all loved that fireplace and I have happy memories of sitting on my grandmother’s lap eating hot buttered toast in front of a roaring fire. We’d crouch in front of the fire with long forks trying to get our thick white bread nice and brown without burning the edges, but we secretly loved the burnt bits. They added excitement and texture, elevating the toast to something magical.

We moved into the house before it was really finished, so when my dad became ill, we had many working bees at our house. Friends and people from our church would come around on weekends to build cupboards, paint walls and hang doors. They even made us a cubby in the backyard from leftover building materials. They fashioned a little front doorstep, and we pushed our feet into the wet cement and put our initials underneath in a neat row–BJM, in that order, oldest to youngest. As I grew older, I would marvel at how my feet had mysteriously grown large enough to fit into the impressions made by my two big sisters. 

Family photo
Family snap circa 1959 – Jennifer, Les, Beverley, Nola, Margaret (L to R)

When my father died, my mum survived by cleaning the local hairdressers, taking in ironing and doing whatever she could to make ends meet. Sadly, her father (our grandfather) also died in the same year, so it was a difficult time both emotionally and financially, but we got used to wearing hand-me-down clothes and eating meals that had been stretched out with cheap fillers like pasta, oats, and bread.

One of my favourite desserts was made from Weetbix layered with apples and sultanas and served with hot custard. Years later, my mother told me she used to make this when there wasn’t really enough of the main course to go around.

I’ve got no doubt that these experiences have shaped my attitudes towards money and I often struggle to understand how young families can afford to take their young children to the local café where breakfast costs $40 or $50 dollars for a family, and that’s without any smashed avocado!

This isn’t a criticism of young families. I can fully appreciate that times have changed in so many ways, but I find it hard to comprehend that people seem to spend fairly large amounts of money on things that I consider luxuries. I still feel guilty buying take-away coffee even though I can well afford to these days, but I’m also very aware of where these feelings come from and I know they are hard to shake.

Once when my children were toddlers, my mother sent me a five-dollar note inside my birthday card with instructions to buy myself a cup of coffee at the shops as a treat. She knew me too well. There was no money to spare and it would have been unthinkable to spend money on coffee when I needed the cash to put petrol in the car so that I could get to playgroup.

Now I’m heading towards retirement and I’m finding it hard to accept the idea that one day soon my income will drop and I’ll have less coming into my bank account. Over my career I’ve transitioned from a well-paid job with the national broadcaster, moving to part-time work with TAFE and back to full-time work when the kids were bigger, but I’m still thrilled when I get paid every fortnight.

I’m hoping that when I eventually call it quits, I’ll have learnt to be generous with myself (and with others) and not get caught up in the fear of not having enough. I know that I have enough, as well as a generous and supportive husband, so these fears are totally unfounded, but it helps me to understand that my fears are rooted in experience.

It also helps to remind myself that being relatively poor wasn’t even a bad experience. We never missing out on anything. We had clean clothes, a nice house, a loving mother and plenty to eat. We were satisfied with our lot, so I hope that as I move towards the next phase of my life, I’ll be happy knowing that there’s enough of everything, including money for coffee.

Books and reading

Good writing

by Margaret6 Comments on Good writing
Good writing

I’ve been a member of the same book group for over twenty years. We’re a small group of women who enjoy reading and we have quite different tastes, which is a good thing.

I often tell people that although we like different books, we all appreciate good writing. But recently someone asked me what I mean when I say that something is ‘well written’. Isn’t this purely subjective? A matter of opinion?

Yes, and no.

A book can be beautifully written, but boring. Some books are too slow or the characters are really unlikeable. (See my previous post for my thoughts on unlikeable characters).

Here are a few things that I think contribute to good writing.

I appreciate well-crafted sentences. I don’t like having to read a sentence more than once to figure out what it means. If I do read a sentence twice, it’s usually because I’ve enjoyed it so much that I want to read it again.

I enjoy writing that is honest but graceful. I like lyrical writing, but I dislike long descriptive passages and tend to skip over them if they are too long. I like stories to move along at a fairly brisk pace.

I like the characters to be complex and multi-dimensional. It’s great when characters have a range of emotions, or mixed feelings. I like to understand their motivations, their fears, and their secret desires.

A couple of years ago, my book group read an excellent book by Stephanie Bishop, a West Australian author called The Other Side of the World. Set in England, Australia and India in the early 1960s, the New York times Book Review described it as an exquisite meditation on motherhood, marriage, and the meaning of home. For me, this is the sort of book that encapsulates what I like best. Powerful themes, strong characters and lots of thought-provoking questions we couldn’t really answer in our book group, but we enjoyed discussing.

And yes, we thought it was well written, whatever that means.