I Finally Slept After Working With a Coach

What causes sleep deprivation?

There are two aspects of sleep deprivation: the disturbance that wakes you up in the first place and the mental muddle that prevents you from going back to sleep. Night time is a time of worry for many people. Those darkest hours are when your fears startle you awake and then torture you as you lie there, powerless to act.

Most people will be familiar with how worries and fears that seem so dire in the night evaporate in the daylight. But a fear that lodges in your mind in the darkness can keep you awake until the sun rises on what should be a new day.

It’s not just worries and fears that keep you awake at night. A mind whirring with a multitude of thoughts will also struggle to rest. Modern life is jammed with things that will fill your mind with competing thoughts, all vying for your attention: TV and other devices, the school run, the commute, your busy job, working late, spending too little time with the family, breaking promises, forgetting engagements. As you lie awake in the dark, all these thoughts, and the accompanying emotions of guilt, frustration, resentment, etc. flood into your mind and keep you awake as you hopelessly try to pin them down.

A business-like approach to sleep deprivation

The mental torment that wakes you up and keeps you awake at night boils down to three basic problems:

• Time management and the feeling that you can’t get everything done that you need to because there aren’t enough hours in the day.
• Lack of objectivity, which worsens as your mind becomes clouded with negative emotions
• The lack of tools to tackle the problem.

These are the same problems that will prevent a business from operating at its full capacity. So by applying the same sort of principles that help businesses to perform better, a coach can help you access the solutions to your sleep problem. A coach will look at the way you allocate your time and help to identify how you can use your time more efficiently.

The principle of the 24 golden coins, whereby each coin represents an hour of your daily time budget, can help you to make a clearer assessment of the way you spend your time and reframe the common misconception that you have no time to spare – effectively unlocking some resource.

The objectivity a coach brings to your time management extends to all other aspects of your life and will help you gain a logical perspective on the things that are worrying you. In a head full of fears, it’s hard to find the space to start putting matters in order. A coach will give you that headspace by providing you with the opportunity to unload your fears, and the smallest bit of release can be the spark that ignites a profound change in your mindset. Any improvement will set in motion a virtuous circle, whereby more sleep leads to more energy, making you more productive, emotionally stronger, leading to better sleep.

You could think of the voice in your head as a friend who just wants to check that you have a plan. You could even give that voice a name. Now when you wake up in the middle of the night, you can tell yourself, ‘That’s just Joe keeping me on my toes.’ Instead of being annoyed by Joe, value the role that he plays. All Joe really wants to know is that you’ve got a plan; so when you go to bed at night, make sure you have a plan for tackling any worries you might have. Then, when Joe wakes you in the night, you can tell him it’s okay; you have a plan and can put Joe’s mind at rest.

This is one of the techniques a coach can equip you with to help if you do wake in the night. These techniques aren’t just for crises situations, they will help in any situation where thoughts and fears occasionally wake you at night. Sleep is a vital part of the daily cycle, and as that virtuous circle begins to turn for you, you will feel the benefits throughout your daily 24 hours.