Yesterday, I was watching YouTube as I unpacked from my week of observations in Cuernavaca. It was about 5am, little earlier than I’m usually out of bed, but I had had a week of very early mornings. I love my Saturday morning alone time, usually pottering around the house, getting odd jobs done, washing dishes, organising my desk etc. It’s a welcome experience to be up in the stillness of a big city, before the rest of the population wakes up.

The YouTube video was from a channel I had never seen before. I am normally a creature of habit, watching the same familiar faces and often, rewatching the same videos. YouTube is my comfort platform that has accompanied me through life since I was about 15 years old.

This time, a woman with bright pink hair called Florence Given grabs my attention. More than the pink hair, the title of the video gets me. “Your body thinks your dream life is dangerous”.

Let me explain why.

About a week ago at work I was talking to two colleagues. I asked them to tell me their secrets to always having energy while I, someone who sleeps 7-8 hours a night, am exhausted literally all the time. We discussed all sorts of options – taking supplements (I take them), diet (working on it), do I sleep enough (bloody loads)?

When I sleep, do I actually rest?

Ah.

Good question.

I hadn’t given it much consideration, but I do often wake up and can struggle to sleep through the night. Anxiety has me up more than I’d like and PTSD has given me on and off nightmares for the last 11 years. I also have a hernia in my spine, which makes finding a comfortable sleeping position pretty much impossible.

I’ve been working on lots of lifestyle changes recently for various health reasons and though I’ve never been much of a tech-y person, I decided it was time to invest in one of those health watches. I wanted to measure my sleep patterns to see what the problem was, plus I can start tracking my fitness, which is definitely improving.

Well, my colleague’s suspicions were right. Not only do I have “fitful” and “restless” sleep, I don’t sleep enough, hardly get any REM and overall, my sleep is “non-restorative”.

And that’s not all.

I didn’t know these gadgets can measure your stress levels. As you can probably guess from the title of this post, mine are off the chart. I’ve used almost all of my body’s energy before midday on stress and then I am “running on fumes” for the rest of the day.

Delightful. Absolutely fucking wonderful.

Circling back to the video. Florence talks about how we need safety in order to expand. She mentions that if we try to progress too quickly in our lives (she called it “quantum leaping”) without doing the nervous system work, we’ll experience “expansion backlash” and that it will be too much to handle all at once.

Now I am a person who tends to quantum leap. I am a yes girl and I don’t back down from a challenge. Though lately I am thinking that maybe I should. I have been frustrated more than once in my life that my health has held me back from going at the pace I want to go at. The pace that “other people” go at.

When I was very ill back in university, I always thought that one day, when I got better, I’d be able to get back to “normal”. I let myself slow down for a time but then, I don’t remember when, I must have decided it was time for me to be “normal” again. This means that for the last few years, I have been pushing and pushing myself to just do things like everyone else does.

But I can’t and it’s time to accept that. I don’t know if I ever will.

In the last four years I have been diagnosed with two incurable chronic health conditions, two neurodevelopmental conditions and a possible hernia in my spine. During this time, I have moved to another continent where I spend most of my time speaking another language, became a primary school teacher in a bilingual school and then on top of all that, I decided to enter an intensive teacher training course.

Even just writing that made me pause. That is nuts. It’s bananas to think I can take all that on and be alright. But, as you can imagine, I haven’t had much time to reflect on what is going on around me.

Clearly, I am not OK. I expect too much from myself and of course my body doesn’t feel safe. It is on overdrive, mentally and physically, 24/7. My body has started to aggressively say NO so that I actually pay attention to it.

So that’s what I am going to do.

I have deferred my entry into the 2nd year of the course. I have gone back to therapy and have begun to make swimming a habit. I want to start meditating and regular yoga, and I am trying to find a time to incorporate them into my daily routine. I have also started to pull back on work (I am absolutely a workaholic) and replace that time with things like embroidery and crotchet.

View this post on Instagram

I am no where near the finish line, if there even is one, but I do feel like I am at the beginning of this journey. I’ve started building up more of a journalling habit and I’d love to get back to writing on here too. I find writing out what I am going through helps me to process things. Plus, I love the comments and conversations these posts can ignite.

Thanks for reading. This is your friendly reminder that you are a human, not a machine and that the capitalist nightmare that we’re living in can’t take that away from you. You don’t have to be productive to be worth something. You can just be.

***

Resources

Sleep hygiene tips: https://www.nhs.uk/every-mind-matters/mental-wellbeing-tips/how-to-fall-asleep-faster-and-sleep-better

Mental Health: https://www.mind.org.uk/

Book on the importance of rest: The Brain at Rest – Why Doing Nothing Can Change Your Life by Dr. Joseph Jebelli