Tip for nightime pain and anxiety

Hey,

Just thought I'd share something I've been doing that seems to be working for me during those middle of the night flares of pain or anxiety. Recently, I've been having a lot of anxiety in the middle of the night because of some stresses going on in our life right now. I’d tried a lot of techniques, but none of them seemed to be calming me, so I thought maybe I needed to journal. The problem being that it’s been very cold here at night and the last thing I wanted to do was get out of my warm bed and go find pen and paper. Even if I’d had it right by the bed, I didn’t want to disturb my husband. So here’s what I did. I just “wrote” on the bed with my finger----and it worked!! I didn’t go right to sleep, but I definitely felt calmer and in less pain.


Don’t know if this will work for you, but it might be worth a shot.

 

What a great solution! I lot of people think that "journaling" means keeping a permanent record of their TMS writings, but nothing is further from the truth. In fact, Nicole Sachs herself uses a single digital text file that she completely erases before saving it as a blank document, which means it can't ever be retrieved. I use paper, which I throw away as soon as each page is full, and I scribble without any regard to readability, because I have no intention of re-reading anything I write.

The most important thing about so-called "journaling" is to actively engage your brain in addressing and acknowledging your concerns and irritations and fears. The ACT of physically putting these things down in words, no matter what happens to those words, is, in and of itself, the goal and the therapeutic process. I've read at least two recent articles emphasizing the therapeutic value of just writing shit down.

I'm totally cracking up, @lianot. And yet, and yet.... you know, we're talking about writing things down, and one of the key goals about writing things down is acknowledging and accepting that sometimes the littlest, silliest things are concerning us, bothering us, and/or being repressed by our poor fearful primitive brains. Our rational brains want to see these things as unimportant, but our primitive brains are simply not rational. From that point of view, I think your experience is totally explainable. Getting up in the middle of the night is not that much fun, but if you have to pee, part of you is convinced that "as soon as I relieve myself, I'll feel more relaxed and I'll be able to go back to sleep" but if the experience of a cold, hard misshapen seat in the middle of the night provokes irritation instead of relaxation - well, there you go.

Whatever it takes, people... whatever it takes. Good job, both of you!

 

PS I got to try out a new smart toilet that some friends installed, and OMG - it was lovely, and so warm and so very cleansing. Too much trouble for me to want to install (tapping into an electrical circuit probably through a tiled wall) but still...