Mindfulness, living in the now with insomnia

Mindfulness, living in the now with insomnia

There has been a lot said about mindfulness and if you have studied anything to do with the mind and meditation no doubt you have heard about it. It is indeed the buzz word in meditation for the western world because it is quite simply so easy, accessible, free from religious overtones and a very pleasant way of balancing the mind and feeling like a slightly deeper person than perhaps you really are. I am sure in certain circles that I do not live in it is “the thing” to do, or was and is probably so last season the very mention of it is ridiculous. But I do not care about that.  

Luckily, I have never had any real fashion sense and being part of a “scene” has never been my “scene”. Therefore, when I stumble across these things they tend to be past their sell by date and the one thing nobody is doing. That said mindfulness appears to be here to stay for now.  

The thing is I do not want to harp on and repeat what you may or may not have read about mindfulness or to preach to the perverted. Mindfulness, to me, has been a very pleasant surprise. I have studied and practiced forms of meditation for years; even before I knew what I was really doing I would sit and stare into space clearing my mind. Because of this I have always had a fascination with the subject and so have studied many techniques, one or two of which I will probably go into in more detail in the next chapter I say probably as I haven’t written that chapter yet.  

Mindfulness has given me balance and clarity. It has also brought me calmness in un-calm situations. I would suggest that as someone who lives with insomnia if you take one thing away from this book take these principles and it will not only aid your sleep but also your ability to live with insomnia when it occurs. 

The internal narrative 

So why is mindfulness or a lack of it so important?  

Well since the moment we are born we hear noises and sounds that later we understand as words. These words for the understanding that we have about the world. They are the labels for which we start to attach to the people and things around us. Our parents start this very early on. They chose a label for us for which we will be known by others for the rest of our days and by which we soon become aware is our label. For instance, my label is Sam. I am known to others and myself as Sam, sometimes I go by other names but let’s not dig down that particular present today.  

We learn the labels that are given to others such as mom, dad, big brother who wants to flush my head down the toilet and so on. We do this through repetition on their part to us and visual gestures that back this up. And this is all fine this is how we become to formulate and understand the world.  

Over the formative years that follow we move away from being a being living on a purely subconscious level to one that interacts and understands the worlds on a conscious level with names words and formation that enable us to interpret the world in our own unique way.  

These formative years in early childhood through to early adulthood are so important to our understanding and interpretation of the world and our feeling and perception of our place in it. Over this period of growing we end up developing our own internal dialogue that we have learnt to use to decipher and understand the world. This internal dialogue works on many levels.  

This is to say we all have a least one internal voice that talks to us throughout the day helping us to understand and make sense of what we are seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting and so on. You may say to yourself “no I don’t I don’t have an internal voice I am not mad” and no you’re not mad, at least not by that statement alone is madness defined, but if you did say that to yourself then well I hate to be the one that breaks this to you but that was your internal voice saying that to you.  

This internal voice, or I should say internal voices (yes there are more than one that we all have but let’s not apply to the doctor for psychotropic just yet), these voices are said to be talking to us over 50,000 words a single day. The majority of this internal self-talk is automatic and barely on a conscious level. My theory here is that we need all this talk to a degree for a subconscious to analyse and interpret the world and the what we are interacting with around us. I am a big believer that this is where our intuition, sixth sense and ability to read a situation or person on an often none verbal level but on a gut feeling level comes in, our subconscious is taking all the millions of bits information that we absorb every second, comparing it to a life time’s worth of data the brain has stored so far, analysing all the possible outcomes and meanings and then providing us with the most probable answer. All at a subconscious level.  

This internal dialogue can be great. It can be used for great things. Creative thinking and problem solving and as we will discuss later in this article series, we can really use it to redefine our life and take control of our life and future.  

If as an insomniac you think to yourself that you do not have this internal narrative going on then I would ask you to think about that next time you are lying there in the darkness and comfort of your room unable to sleep because your mind simply won’t switch off. You will then start to hear and realise that voice that is going over and over the same thing 100 times, playing out the situation of the day or days gone past that you feel have wronged you or the worry about tomorrow and what it will bring. That voice that keeps going over those points is your internal voice, your internal dialogue.  

The problem with this internal dialogue is when it becomes a narrative of negative self-talk. We will look at this in the next article

 

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