Illness and effects on following Paul McKenna's sleep program

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 approach: he gently encourages and helps  you to see where you are actually doing okay. Some articles I've read about sleep have the tone of a school teacher telling off a naughty child, and this has the effect of creating a sense of hopelessness.  After all, there's little more disheartening than feeling that you are doing everything wrong and that you really should know better. On the other hand, reading I Can Make You Sleep does leave you feeling that it won't take all that much to get your sleep right on track. This makes it far easier for it to seem possible that you can improve, and that makes it far easier to try.

When I lay in bed feeling ill, and couldn't find anything in the book about illness, I remembered the a passage towards the end of the book, in chapter and answer session. In this section someone asks if it is okay to nap during the day after being woken in the night with children. McKenna's reply is that if you can still sleep at night then yes it is okay. I took that to mean that napping when ill wasn't likely to have an adverse effect on the improvements I've made while on this sleep program. I decided that if it did, I would not allow myself to nap during the day.

In fact, I slept well at night, far better than I have when ill in the past. Even with a pounding headache I managed to sleep, and out of a week of being ill there were only two nights I slept badly because of earache and coughing.

In the past, feeling as ill as I did I would have been awake many times every night throughout the illness. So, it's looking likely that for me Paul McKenna's sleep program has passed the test.


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