I Need To Sleep

In  I Can Make You Sleep  Paul McKenna writes that you need to allow two months for your sleep pattern to become robust.  It's actually a little over two months now since I started Paul McKenna's  program. So how is it going? Has my sleep drastically improved? Did I follow the program to the letter? If you've read some of the other posts in this blog, you will know the answer to that last question was that at times I found it really challenging to do so. These times were mainly when our normal routine was thrown by events such as the late nights we had in the run-up to Christmas and then going on holiday for 2 weeks immediately afterwards. Getting ill on return was a challenge too! Choose When To Start the Program Carefully If you are thinking about starting Paul McKenna's sleep program, you will more probably have more rapid success if you choose a time when you are at home throughout and when there aren't holidays such as Christmas looming. But, if you ar

Image: David Castillo Dominici via freedigitalphotos  A few days after we got back from our break I became ill with a flu-type virus. This was definitely a test for Paul McKenna's sleep program. In the book, I Can Make You Sleep , McKenna doesn't write about what to do in case of illness, but I decided that the normal rule of getting up at the same time probably didn't apply. So when my head was pounding and I wasn't able to keep my eyes open I let them close and drifted off to sleep, no matter what time of day it was. I didn't get out of the house for several days and did very little exercise. I say very little exercise because as McKenna points out in  I Can Make You Sleep, we are exercising from the moment we wake up. In one of my favourite passages, someone at one of his workshops says she does no exercise and McKenna's response is to ask her if someone carried her to the workshop. This is one of the things I really like about McKenna's approa

After my last post we headed first to London where we stayed in the Hilton and I slept like a baby or a log -  or a like someone sleeping in the most comfortable bed in the world (because that was what it was.) I slept all night. Bliss, bliss, bliss. Can I go and live in the Hilton now? The Perfect Bed (Euston Hilton)  On the right is a photo of the bedroom we stayed in: it had 2 single beds for the kids and one enormous bed for the adults. Since we slept in equally huge beds in other hotels I can say it wasn't the size that made this bed so good. However, I can't say exactly what it was that did. It had just the right amount of softness for me, but it was more than just that. The quality of bed does make a difference, and you can't always tell by the price. The Hilton cost more than some of the places we stayed in, but less than others. The cheapest had one of those beds that bounce and shake every time the other person rolls over, but so did the most expensive.

I've been travelling around, visiting relatives and friends and so haven't been able to post here in a week. Several days I've found it tricky to find time to do the sleep exercises in McKenna's book, and we've slept in a tiny bed, a hotel bed and in a room where our kids also slept (on blow up mattresses on the floor.) We've been in the black countryside night and in a city centre with traffic roaring past all night.  How has my sleep fared with all that? It's been variable. Some nights I've slept well, others not so great. I do notice that late nights can mean more disrupted sleep for me. One day we had a large meal at lunchtime and in spite of not feeling hungry I ate again later on. That was a mistake: I was awake in the night with stomach pains. Paul McKenna does say that what you eat can make a difference to how you sleep, and I agree. Rich food is not for me, and I am usually fairly careful, but this time of year there's so much on offer

Merry Christmas everybody.  I won't be doing the usual post today, but will do as soon as I get the chance. Here's wishing us all a peaceful festive season and plenty of restful sleep.

Oops, yesterday I missed out on posting. I was busy with many other things, as most people are this time of year. Today hasn't been much different! Days 15 - 16 So how are things progressing? Last time I posted things didn't seem to be progressing much, but I have now realised that whenever I wake in the night and can't immediately get back to sleep it is because there is some insight I am not quite noticing. When I get it, then I get back to sleep. This has happened three times now. So I hope that (a) I start to notice the insights more quickly or (b) I can train my mind to save them for daytime. I guess the thing is that when we wake in the night our minds are in that borderland between sleep and wake where the barriers we erect during the day are down. So things we manage to block out at 4pm come right to the surface at 4 pm. This is the value of McKenna's theatre of the mind exercise where you ask the unconscious mind if it has something to show you so that it