HomeAging With MonicaSleep JournalSunday September 17th beauty sleep journal

Sunday September 17th beauty sleep journal

I wish I could report that I slept beautifully last night; but it was not the best night. However, I think I am well on my way to earning my first belt in the art of sleeping on your back.

I woke up way too many times during the night last night, but each time I woke up, I realized I was still lying on my back. A couple of times I felt the need to change positions; but each time that I woke up from those positions I felt the need to lie on my back. That is the reason I think I am soon to conquer this sleeping on your back thing. I think my mind and body are beginning to transition to where they both think that I am supposed to be sleeping on my back. I do think, however, that I am going to have to buy a pillow that will make it more comfortable. Because I think my back sleeping technique is not good for my spine and neck. I can feel some slight strain in my back and neck right now. So I guess that sleep wrinkle pillows aren’t just for protecting your face from sleep wrinkles and acne. The ones designed to facilitate back sleeping also will, hopefully, help you with sleeping on your back in a way that doesn’t leave you with back and neck strain.

I am thinking the JuveRest pillow might be the one I need to buy because it looks the most sturdy to me and the most like it was designed based on actual consideration of the needs of the back sleeper. But judging something by the way it looks is never a good idea is it? I know a thing or two about buyer’s remorse, but I will spare you the details of my personal life.

I woke up earlier than I wanted to wake up this morning, and my day did not get off to a great start. You know you’re going to have a great day when you wake up feeling so well rested that you stretch like a cat. That did not happen for me this morning. I probably will try to go back to sleep for a couple of hours. I’m still yawning so clearly I should still be sleeping. But some of the issues that caused me to develop sleeping problems still exist in my life, and I am awake now having not gotten 8 hours of sleep, thanks to those issues.

Sleeping on your back will not yield the expected results if you’re waking up in a hostile environment

This is what I am thinking to myself right now. All the sleeping on your back in the world won’t work for repairing damage and restoring your glow if your youthful spirit and joy for life isn’t being repaired and restored as well. Or more to the point, if you have stuff going on in your life that makes you feel ugly inside, people around you who make you hate yourself and hate your life, that is always going to undermine your efforts. Because even if you are able to sleep on your back for 8 hours, the stuff going on inside your head that makes you toss and turn and wake up a million times feeling depressed and hopeless and whatever else you feel, that stuff will still cause you to wrinkle and wither away.

So more important than training yourself to become a pro at sleeping on your back is getting your head in order, healing your heart, soothing your soul.

I took pictures yesterday. I take pictures often because I am trying to reinvent myself and in the process I am pursuing my passions, or I am trying to pursue my passions at any rate. It is sort of an ambition that puts me out there. So I take pictures to promote myself and my work. When I am taking pictures, I become aware of a lot of the psychological issues that plague me. I have fun taking pictures, but there are always these voices in my head that I’ve come to realize are all the voices that have ever spoken at me throughout the course of my life. I’ve come to realize that I don’t feel like I deserve to be happy. I don’t feel like I’m a good person. I don’t feel like there’s anything about me to like. This is when those voices start talking. When they’re quiet and I don’t remember, I usually know the exact opposite of all those things. So there’s always a battle going on inside me between what I know and what I feel. Deep down I know that I’m a good person, that I deserve to be happy and that I am very likable; but because of my life experiences, I don’t necessarily always, or even often, feel like I am good person who deserves to be happy and who is likable. And this battle seems to play out quite a bit when I’m sleeping.

So for me, I’m not just fighting the ravages of time, or the damages from not sleeping on my back for all these years. I’m fighting sadness. I’m fighting stress caused by the things that result from living with depression for so many years. I’m fighting a lot of negativity that comes at me from many directions in the physical space I occupy as well as from spaces outside , and even virtual spaces.

So even if I conquer this sleeping on your back thing, I will have to conquer a lot of other things in order to start sleeping soundly every night.

You can sleep on your back for eight hours every night and still not wake up in the morning looking or feeling refreshed. Because you tossed and turned constantly throughout those eight hours. Your mind was unsettled throughout those eight hours. That’s what it is for me. I toss and turn all night. My mind is unsettled. I have crazy dreams that always have something to do with what a mess I am, how I am always messing up my life, blowing my chances, failing, not measuring up, not belonging, being hated by everybody, being kicked out of home, being walked out on, crashing, dying, suffering, being alone and lonely. The list goes on. Many of these things are things that tortured me in sleep and wake for many years. Over the last few years, I’ve managed to learn how keep them out of my mind when I am awake; but I haven’t managed to get them to stop torturing me when I’m asleep.

Last night I had a dream that I was given the opportunity of a lifetime, but I couldn’t find the right pair of shoes to wear to the meeting. My conscious self had to go into the dream to make me put on some shoes before it was too late. But even then there were all kinds of things that just kept on happening that were designed to make sure that I would lose the opportunity. I kind of feel like that’s what’s going on in my life in reality. Things are happening that are threatening to undermine everything I’ve been trying to do. And I feel like, this is my last chance, my last opportunity to be all that I can be. But I am struggling to fight what I feel with what I know. I have never been able to change what I feel so that it matches what I know. In fact, the opposite is what usually happens. What I feel usually makes me doubt what I know.

I hope you are not struggling quite so much in your own life. I hope what you feel and what you know about who you are and what you deserve are aligned and positively charged. This way, when you go to sleep at night, having conquered your efforts at sleeping on your back, you will wake up glowing every morning. Remember, having a glow doesn’t require you to look like you’re twenty. It just requires you to be at “your” best mentally, emotionally and physically. I wish you all the best in your back sleeping endeavors and life in general.

M

Monica
Monicahttps://adelamonica.com
Singer songwriter Adelamonica AKA Avenue Sixty editor in chief. Writing as Monica for The Monica Archives. Writing has always been one of my passions. In fact, when I was a teenager, I used to tell people they should remember my name, because I was going to become a famous author. I used to live to write and write to live--not in the sense of writing for income but writing to combat depression and to feel a sense of purpose. I've written novels, poems, articles and essays that I tried unsuccessfully to get published over many years starting in my teens. When I discovered blogging several ages ago, I turned to that avenue as a means of doing what I love without having to worry about publishers and their rejection letters. Modeling is also something I have always enjoyed and something I wanted very badly to do as a teenager. So badly that I used to lie and tell people I was a model. I would carry around a large portfolio style photo album and claim it was my modeling portfolio. But, as with my writing, the people with the power to make my modeling dreams come true saw nothing in me that made them stop me in the streets of New York to offer me a modeling contract with their agency. So when I discovered the ability to photograph my own self (before cell phones and selfies) I took up a hobby of pretend modeling at home and that hobby has remained with me throughout my life as a form of self expression and self therapy. I ask that you kindly excuse my lack of worldliness and any instances where I demonstrate lack of tact or lack of knowledge and even lack of basic intelligence in my writing and posing. I'm just here trying to have a little fun doing the things that make me happy. I'm just an average human for whom writing and posing and singing and dancing and the other things I do are ways I express myself and keep myself going on this ever challenging journey of life. I hope you will find something even remotely useful or interesting in the things I share.

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