Mattress
I had a good sleep last night. It was because I didn’t sleep at noon yesterday. I couldn’t believe the mental clarity I had when I woke today. I was refreshed and wanted to get things done. Made my bed. Watched a few workout videos and went to the gym, it was all seamless.
I used to sleep downstairs before. I changed my bed yesterday, I have been sleeping in our living room which is upstairs. The bed is quite soft. It doesn’t hurt my back. My previous bed does, it is made of a pile of mattress: the Nepali style of making a trampoline-level bed. My current one has just one cushion, it isn’t very soft but it is comfortable. The problem with piling mattress to make bed more cushioned is — over time the cushions lose their orientations, rock-solid at one side and spongy on the other. They became almost ‘unsleepable’ bed.
My bed in Pokhara is also made of piling cushions. I have to constantly sun-bath my cushion to prevent them from losing orientations. But there is just so much you can do. Even for bed, bad habits die hard. They are still very uncomfortable to sleep in. I constantly roll from one side to another to find the sweet spot that passes me out. I usually wake up with a bad pain on my back.
Sleep is important to me. Although I constantly suffer from it, I know how grumpy and irritated I get due to poor sleep. Last semester I used to do so many things to make sure I sleep well. I used to massage myself at night. I used to take baths. I used to do Yoga and Stretching. But always had a difficult time sleeping. The one thing I had always neglected is: Sleep is internal.
Of course, you need to take care of your environment. It would be difficult to doze off if your bed is a rock and your roommate is a rock star at night. But you could take care of everything and yet not get a good sleep. You could follow all the ten-tips on YouTube and yet fidget the whole night. We are a complex being. Our body does react to certain patterns, but we are more than that. The best way to get a good sleep isn’t to force it, it is to let it happen. The more you think about falling asleep, the worse it gets. There are many things in human that you can’t force or do to get a certain benefit, and sleep happens to be one of them.
These days I don’t take a bath, nor I do all those activities to force myself to sleep. Those activities are meant to relax the mind and body. My intention in doing them was to get a good sleep, which made me more conscious of the fact that I have trouble sleeping and that’s why I do it. Yoga, where it was supposed to calm me down, became just another desperate activity of mine to get a good sleep. Do you see the catch? It all boils down to our mindset about relaxation, calmness, and sleep. Yoga is a relaxing activity. And if I had let myself do it just for enjoying the yoga instead of making it a pre-sleep therapy, then probably I would have relaxed and prepared myself for better sleep.
These days I don’t do much of these acts. I don’t look upon YouTube what I should be doing with sleep and all. I usually like to read a novel at night because I enjoy reading. And in no time, I find myself craving to shut myself. I turn off the lights, I take a few breaths, and I am slept.