The 3am Curse - A Personal Story from Wil, our COO
How I learned to go back to sleep at three am
I’ve always had a hard time letting go. For years, I’ve woken up at three am and not been able to go back to sleep, because my mind starts working over problems, worrying about things I can’t possibly change until the next morning. Sometimes the worries are from work and sometimes they’re personal. Either way, after about thirty minutes of struggling to get back to sleep, not being able to sleep becomes the problem.
A year ago I found a solution, built on years of research and practice: I learned some simple breathing exercises. Now, when my mind starts churning, I take control of my brain by taking control of my body, and I am back asleep within minutes. How did I learn this? I got lucky. I went to work for Silentmode, and started practicing breathing exercises because it was my job. At the beginning I was simply trying to learn our product, to understand the value we were providing and how breathing exercises worked.
As a life-long asthmatic, I have a lot of experience trying to control my breathing, and my body. I’ve spent hours trying to make my lungs relax, to get over an attack or stop one from happening. It’s hard, and it’s not always successful. This is one of the reasons I was curious about Breathonics, and the idea of breathing patterns set to music.
I worked at Silentmode for about three months, a lot of which involved worried mid-sleep wake ups, before I realized that the solution was right in front of me. I started doing breathing exercises in bed, right away. It helped, and I was able to get back to sleep faster.
At first I was doing whichever breathing pattern I remembered, just trying to calm my body as quickly as I could. After a few weeks though, I started to do the Breathonics breathing exercises focused on sleep. Now I can get back to sleep before I finish a set. These simple patterns have been transformational, allowing me to put mind over body over mind, calming the worries of the workday and letting me build the energy I need to wake up refreshed.
If my story sounds familiar, might be worth a shot.
