I love my sleep and plenty of it am not really prone to insomnia. But occasionally, as this morning I woke early having been disturbed and could not get back to sleep no matter how hard I tried (maybe trying at all is the problem, I don’t know). Hubby starts work at 6am, and he has to travel an hour to get there so gets up at around 4.30 (the middle of the night in my world) but doesn’t usually cause me to wake up. If I am stressed or worried about something though then I will wake and not be able to get back to sleep. Last night I watched a programme on TV about self help and all of the different kinds of mechanisms for helping themselves that people use. This included cognitive behavioural therapy and neurolinguistic therapy amongst other things and advocated that when you are thinking of negative things that by changing around your thoughts to positive ones then your mood will lift (I am simplifying things here). With this fresh in my mind I thought I’d give that a go at 5am. Unfortunately my thoughts weren’t actually negative, just slightly jumbled and busy. Where is that meeting this morning? What will I cook for dinner tonight? How is  my niece and how are her parents coping? (she is undergoing some investigations for a potentially serious illness), will I have lost weight when I go to slimming world tonight since I have cut back on wine and tried to be really good. But none of these thoughts were serious on their own, not enough to prevent sleep. But in combination they were lethal.

A couple of hours lost sleep is not going to seriously affect my day, well not until about 8pm tonight when I’ll be wishing for my bed. Maybe I’ll have an early night say at about 10pm who knows? But what occurs to me now is that the mind is an amazing thing, and sleep when you can get it easily is not to be sniffed at.