No sites for LENS this week, following the biweekly schedule we're adhering to. My wedding, however, creeps every closer. The remaining supplies for favors just finished arriving yesterday, so I've been working diligently in some of my spare time to finish them. I need to hurry up with that and then get working more diligently on the flowers for the wedding. I don't want to make them too soon, since we'll have to transport them anyway, but they're also going to take lots of time and I don't have designs set in stone, so I do have to start soon.
The sleep study is this week. I'm extra tired this morning so I'm not too crabby about it, but it's going to be an endeavor. The sleep study involves wearing a headcap of electrodes, along with various other wires to track heartrate and breathing. You then get to try to sleep with all that in a room that's more or less a clean but very uncomfortable motel room. This would all be annoying, but fine, if it weren't for the fact that I have to drive to Lansing the very next morning, bright and early. I don't usually partake of heavily caffeinated beverages, but I'll take the awfulness of caffeine crashes over falling asleep at the wheel and killing myself and maybe other people too.
The paperwork says to have someone drive you to and from the lab. I don't think whoever wrote it would be very happy with me. The meeting in Lansing is fairly important, though, so unless I absolutely cannot drive, I need to be there.
Related to sleep, I was recently introduced to a concept I found interesting: mindscapes. My oldest friend told me about one of his personal constructions. He envisions a hammock-sleeping bag, strung up between two big branches in a vast rainforest during a torrential downpour. The hammock-sleeping bag is waterproof and has a top, so he is quite dry, and everything he needs is in a knapsack hung on a nearby branch. When life is being overwhelming, or sometimes just when he wants to sleep, he envisions that place and relaxes.
When I related this idea to Chris, my fiancee, he told me he has his own mindscape, which I didn't know until then. So now I'm trying to construct one of my own. I'm starting with the feeling of having my back to the corner of two walls. I've always kind of found that comforting, I guess, since no one can sneak up on you from two directions that way, short of walking through walls. It significantly lowers the field of vision you have to pay attention to.
To that I'm poking around with the idea of it being well-lit and the walls being painted white. I'm not really sure how well that'll aid me in sleeping, since imagining light doesn't really seem helpful to going to sleep. But perhaps this particular mindscape won't work for that, and will be more suited to calming down while awake.
Since chatting with my LENS-doctor regarding stress levels, I've been thinking about ways to handle stress better. I've cut out a lot of sources of stress, or at least reduced them, but there's only so much to be done when daily life itself is often a large source of stress. Never mind wedding planning and health changes. The solution, then, is to become more capable of handling stress, and gracefully. At present I can tolerate a large amount of stress, given all the practice I've had, but I definitely can't do it gracefully.
The sleep study is this week. I'm extra tired this morning so I'm not too crabby about it, but it's going to be an endeavor. The sleep study involves wearing a headcap of electrodes, along with various other wires to track heartrate and breathing. You then get to try to sleep with all that in a room that's more or less a clean but very uncomfortable motel room. This would all be annoying, but fine, if it weren't for the fact that I have to drive to Lansing the very next morning, bright and early. I don't usually partake of heavily caffeinated beverages, but I'll take the awfulness of caffeine crashes over falling asleep at the wheel and killing myself and maybe other people too.
The paperwork says to have someone drive you to and from the lab. I don't think whoever wrote it would be very happy with me. The meeting in Lansing is fairly important, though, so unless I absolutely cannot drive, I need to be there.
Related to sleep, I was recently introduced to a concept I found interesting: mindscapes. My oldest friend told me about one of his personal constructions. He envisions a hammock-sleeping bag, strung up between two big branches in a vast rainforest during a torrential downpour. The hammock-sleeping bag is waterproof and has a top, so he is quite dry, and everything he needs is in a knapsack hung on a nearby branch. When life is being overwhelming, or sometimes just when he wants to sleep, he envisions that place and relaxes.
When I related this idea to Chris, my fiancee, he told me he has his own mindscape, which I didn't know until then. So now I'm trying to construct one of my own. I'm starting with the feeling of having my back to the corner of two walls. I've always kind of found that comforting, I guess, since no one can sneak up on you from two directions that way, short of walking through walls. It significantly lowers the field of vision you have to pay attention to.
To that I'm poking around with the idea of it being well-lit and the walls being painted white. I'm not really sure how well that'll aid me in sleeping, since imagining light doesn't really seem helpful to going to sleep. But perhaps this particular mindscape won't work for that, and will be more suited to calming down while awake.
Since chatting with my LENS-doctor regarding stress levels, I've been thinking about ways to handle stress better. I've cut out a lot of sources of stress, or at least reduced them, but there's only so much to be done when daily life itself is often a large source of stress. Never mind wedding planning and health changes. The solution, then, is to become more capable of handling stress, and gracefully. At present I can tolerate a large amount of stress, given all the practice I've had, but I definitely can't do it gracefully.
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