Today I’d like to share a success story with you. Not because I want to blow my own trumpet (although what’s wrong with that now and then?) but it can be hugely reassuring when you’re struggling to sleep to hear about others who’ve been in the same situation – and found a way out of it.
This success story concerns one of my recent clients. I’ll call him Peter. When Peter first approached me for support with his sleep, I was struck by what a competent individual he was. In his late 40’s, he was highly intelligent and articulate and held a top job in a finance company.
Peter was hesitant about seeking support. After all he hadn’t got where he was by relying on others. All his training and experience had led him to become a competent, independent thinker. He was used to working things out himself and not a little sceptical about “talking therapies”.
However things had got to the point where he had to do something. He’d never slept that well but after a gruelling phase of work dealing with a particularly difficult client, things came to a head. He was working long days, often into the evening and at night he found he just couldn’t get work out of his head.
His sleep, never great, became even more fragmented. He was waking up several times each night, often spending one or even two hours awake. He spent this time trying to find solutions to the impossible work situation and getting anxious about how he was going to cope.
Before he knew it, the alarm sounded and he was up and off to the city again for another long day. And so it went on until one day, he just ground to a halt.
As he recounted his story, I could see what a truly horrible experience this had been for him. He’d collapsed into tears at work (unheard of for him) and realised that he just wasn’t able to function anymore. All the skills he’d relied upon to do his job so well – his clarity of thought, his ability to sum up a situation in a few well-chosen words, his capacity to keep his temper when dealing with difficult clients – had left him.
He had no choice but to take time off from work to recover. A key aspect of that recovery was fixing his sleep.
In our first session together, Peter said he knew a lot about the theory of good sleep. He’d recently read the excellent Why We Sleep by Mathew Walker and was frustrated that he couldn’t put the advice into practice for himself.
This is familiar territory for me. I often think the same myself as I book a coaching session with my business mentor – but there are times when you just need that external vision and guidance to enable you to step outside your world for a moment and take a fresh look.
Once I’d reassured him that he was not alone in needing expert guidance from time to time, we got to work. I won’t go into the details of Peter’s treatment plan as these are always highly individual depending on each client’s situation. But I was as delighted as he was with his rapid progress. We had five sessions together over a period of 6 weeks. Each session we reviewed Peter’s sleep and decided upon personalised strategies to implement the following week. These included exercises and strategies to:
- ensure he went to bed feeling sleepy-tired instead of wired-tired
- get the right amount of high quality, refreshing sleep
- calm his racing mind to prevent thinking getting in the way of sleeping
- proactively deal with problems during the day so the decks were clear for relaxation and sleep
- manage night time awakenings so they caused minimum disruption and he could quickly return to sleep
- create micro-breaks during his working day to reduce stress and boost resilience
- bring renewed confidence in his natural ability to sleep well without medication.
By the end of week 5, Peter was completely confident that he could maintain his new healthy sleep regime. In his words, the work we’d done together had been a “game changer” and he now felt “ready to face the World again”.
One final point – when you’ve suffered months or years of poor sleep, you get used to feeling below par all the time. You can become a shadow of your former self. Without always realising it, your lack of sleep has affected every aspect of your life – your work, your relationships, your health.
Peter was once in that place. If you’ve had enough of putting up with the misery of poor sleep then please get in touch. I offer a free Sleep Analysis call in which together we explore what’s gone wrong with your sleep and identify key science-backed steps to start getting your sleep – and your life – back on track.
Just drop me an email frances@sleepwell.today and you too can start the journey to sleep success. It’s easier and quicker than you think
