One of the most incredible things about sleep is that you definitely know when it is not working for you, or when its had a significant change, either short term or long term.
This week, some cracks in my implementation of my ‘infrastructure’ have been exposed because of a change in sleep pattern, and it’s hurting!
You see, in our house we have two growing babies, two growing businesses, and large expectations. When things are growing so rapidly, we’re trying to take in all the opportunities of two beautiful growing humans and two growing non-business babies, and make sure we don’t stuff up either.
However, when we get busy, especially as our nurturing female side kicks in with survival mode, we tend to give to others and start to forget about nurturing ourselves. And when it’s the first thing to slip a little, I really find it can make very big cracks really quickly when something changes, and it challenges your resilience.
At the moment we’re in the midst of a teeth-athon (we’re talking about 10 new teeth in 2-3 weeks for a 19month old little girl), which means a bit of uncommon night waking. Thankfully it’s not a long period of time to re-settle, and a bottle of water quickly soothes things, it’s still (a) a change to everyones sleep patterns and the result is (b) feeling the consequence of broken sleep.
Thankfully, I now have the ability to pick myself up quickly to cope with the change. I can’t necessarily change the broken sleep [YET!] (although I continue to investigate options to hack this one!!), but I can change how I respond to it, and for me the answer is self care.
Sometimes I feel like these challenges are thrown at me to make me hit the reset button, check I’m working on my priorities that are really important to me, and then take action again, and endeavour to not learn the same message repeatedly.
The thing with self care is that we’re not taught self respect from a very young age. For example, from school, we’re taught to respect teachers because they’re teachers, books written by someone else because they’re written a book, and we’re taught that we can only include content in our assignments that someone else has said, therefore validating our own thinking only when it’s said by someone else.
For me, this lack of self respect means I give away things that are good for me in preface for giving others time instead, and I do it genuinely because I love them and I want to see everyone succeed.
One of my very first lessons of motherhood was that if I didn’t look after myself, nobody else would, and if I didn’t look after myself, I was ultimately (or very quickly!) useless to anyone else anyway. in the physical challenge and change situation pregnancy and life that follows, for many, you’re pushed physically in ways you haven’t been in years. And if you don’t keep on top of it, you can fall very quickly, both into bad habits, and into cycles of low energy… rendering you useless to yourself and everyone else.
Rx
