Hello friends,
hope all is great as we reach the last article of this week. I can’t believe it that it’s Wednesday already.
So, here’s something that I should have wrote about a long, long time ago, but I don’t think I was ready for it.
Okay, let’s look at all the reasons why we go to sleep before I get to the meat and potatoes (as they say in England).
According to this article https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/what-happens-when-you-sleep, you need to sleep because you need to heal/recharge, the complete phases of sleeping include muscle repair, memory consolidation, the release of hormones regulating growth and appetite so that we can wake up less prepared to concentrate, make decisions, or engage fully in school and social activities.
I think that the article on the above link is pretty fascinating and I certainly didn’t know the opposite effects of sleeping more than nine hours, however, personally I can’t even remember when last I slept for over nine hours. I mean I’m lucky if I even make it to the eighth hour, maybe an odd Sunday or something.
I also found it fascinating how six hours of sleep can affect the weight in women and men and how ten hours of sleep can affect women and men.
Alright, now why did I choose this article to write about? Firstly, please, when you read what you’re about to read pray that not ever again in my life do I ever have to go through anything like this. Thank you in advance.
Now the amount you sleep can differentiate according to many factors as you see in the last section of the article on the link above. I can say that I recognise a lot now when I speak to women than I once ever could, I look at their expressions when they speak, I look at their energy levels when they speak, I look at what their eyes are telling me, and I just get to feel their vibe. One can only pick up certain things when one has been in the situation themself and knows the process like they know the back of their hand. I can say that’s why I chose the niche I chose and that’s because I can look into the politics of a person by just being around them for some time and acknowledge it without asking anything. I let people come to me. Actually, the humble experience of coming out of a relationship with domestic violence is that I got the gift of getting a wider, deeper view of people and more about why, what and where I stand in this world.
So, when someone tells me they’re sleeping a lot, I will stop and think about their politics even if I’m not stopping them in the middle of their conversation of course depending on what they want to reveal. This stems from when I left the relationship with domestic violence in the year two thousand and fourteen. My friend had to tell me over and over again, “Patel, you’ve come out of something traumatic. This was a traumatic event for you.” She kept repeating that sentence and I didn’t really know what it meant for me, my actions, my body, spirit, mind, emotions and how I was coming across in the external world. Nothing, I just saw them as a set of words and pushed them to the side because I knew I wasn’t in any good situation to go and just seek healing or therapy when I am getting flooded by distractions from the ex-partner, and letter after letter coming to the door from the UK government.
Last year I believe I wrote the articles on meditation and affirmations was when I probably mentioned that for the first time in my historical life I was arriving late to work, that I only wanted to spend my time in the world of sleep and never wake up. I really had no clue what my body required and after some more stalking from my then ex-partner the sweat on the area on my hands appeared, then at work, I realised I was having panic attacks from the bullying, and the palpitations of my heart, all this was first time, first hand and I had no clue what they were and what was going on. What was anxiety? That was for another day to figure out. Everything at this point caught up to my body, and just a day after I left my ex-partner I fell ill and felt like I couldn’t get up from the bed, almost ten days of this. It was actually maybe here when I fell ill is where the sleep patterns changed, just like from one day to the next. I was no longer bouncing straight out of bed, almost like Mel Robbins’ five-second rule but I had my three-second rule. It wasn’t working.
I also was late for almost everything during the year of two thousand and fourteen, I don’t know, you know rushing to the lawyer’s office or to get some kind of document sorted out before starting work, but I think the worst was when you have to go over the four years of the toxic relationship all over again in one year, and re-reading all the things to produce to the lawyer, I don’t know, this really didn’t help to just want to move on, and so sleep was a place I began to love whereas before I never really wanted to have a beautiful relationship with sleep. I always just got up even if my eyes opened at 3 am I just wouldn’t return back to sleep, I looked at it as the sign of just get up, shower, get dress and do something fun, not that I woke up many nights at 3 am.
What happened the more I slept and started living life by my terms after that year (it took a while)
The sleep that the body demanded, like seriously I have never felt the body feeling so like it didn’t want to wake up, I don’t recall ever feeling like that. My body felt slumped that it dragged my entire self into a deep sleep even when the alarm clock sounded for me to wake up. I wouldn’t say it was depression because that came in later on (lucky I am pretty good at not getting in a very downstate, I often draw a line on it, especially on this topic). I was the queen of drawing lines, but somewhere from these four years prior to this point most of the lines rubbed off and that really stood out. I no longer had the lines (rules) to get me back on track, and when I made them, I just kept breaking them. Nevermore disappointed in me I say. Needless to say, if ever I was late for work it was five maybe ten minutes max, but for me, that was still very late, because if anyone knows my work ethic, they knew me as the person who was at work twenty minutes early. Yay! I can tell you that this ethic returned before the year two thousand and fourteen even ended. I got my crap together, but that’s not to say that the weekends weren’t some really hardcore ones to deal with, because that’s when the distractions disappear and what you’re really going through shows up.
What did this “sleeping” phase do for me?
I found that the body didn’t only feel like it needed rest from the day to day work activities but what my friend said at this point started making more sense, you know that sentence, “Patel, you’ve come out of a traumatic event, this was a traumatic event for you.” All along I thought those were pity words, and I refuse to listen to them but the truth was it was real, it was the truth and I didn’t want to accept that truth until I saw what the sleep and the oversleeping was doing. I felt tired when I went to sleep and when I woke up. It’s not like I wasn’t out, god I was out! What was happening is that the body was processing the whole event, the mind, repairing and regulating and then by May, I was ready you know, ready to make some changes in my life. That’s when I started meditation and exercise, while back in March in that year I started the affirmations. The rest is history, and so after years of waking up at five-thirty in the morning, relocating and more crises have caused sleep disruptions and funny patterns but at least I can say that I am still as productive as hell and continue to have my seven, sometimes six hours of sleep and who knows when last I slept to the eighth hour. If I ever sleep to the ninth hour, ooo now that would need a special alarm clock! If there’s one thing I don’t ever want then that is depression, depression is a very difficult thing to deal with, I felt some doses of it especially in that year two thousand and fourteen. Whoever is dealing with depression and manages it successfully deserves kudos.
Hope this has helped you to not be so hard on yourself, there’s something the body is asking of you and it’s so easy to ignore it by asking more of yourself.
You sometimes just have to let it be, fall into it, to be able to get out of it, this is the gift to share – T. Dench Patel, 30 September 2020, 17:13
Oh! Here’s another resource, by the way, Ten things that happen to your body when you lose sleep.
In the quick nutshell it goes into the following:
1) You get sick
2) Your heart suffers
3) Your cancer risk increases
4) You can’t think
5) You forget stuff
6) Your libido diminishes
8) You gain weight
9) Your risk of diabetes increases
10) You’re accident-prone
11) Your skin suffers
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by purchasing my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
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