Weighted Winnings and Meditation Misgivings

Some mixed successes thus far with some of my recent mental health goals. These goals, by the way, go back before New Year’s Day, so they aren’t resolutions, just management tools that I want to be better with. 

The first goal is sleep, and here I got an awesome win with a weighted blanket that I got for Christmas from my brother. I had heard a lot of positive things about weighted blankets and whatever, worse case I get an extra blanket in winter, who doesn’t like that?

So night one was a disappointment. However, as I later realized, it was only a disappointment because I had expected it to be a magic switch that would put me right to sleep. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t. What it was instead was a calming agent. Sleeping with a weighted blanket is like a gentle hug. And just as most of us don’t toss and turn in hugs, I realized I was tossing and turning less, which made me less anxious about when I would fall asleep and actually helped me fall asleep faster and stay asleep better. Winning!

Where I haven’t been as successful is in my meditation practice. I have a habit of setting expectations too high, and so my revised goal was to build a meditation practice. The idea was that I would slowly add time to my total daily meditation practice each day. Unfortunately, in recent days that time has been going down, not up. 

There are a lot of reasons for this. The biggest part of that though is that I have failed to properly plan for this time, thinking instead that I would just find a few minute gaps in my day here and there. That was a mistake. While those gaps do exist, you still need to plan. Yet as I said yesterday, this year can be the year of compassion for myself when I have a bad day or miss a goal. And this is their perfect chance to practice that. 

So, both my wins and mistakes get jumbled together in a bag full of lessons for me to apply as I continue learning the tools that best allow me to battle my mental illness. And I hope that by sharing this that you find ideas for tools that you can use in your battle as well. 

And, moreover, if you have tips of your own, I’d love to hear them, either in the comment section below or through the contact page. 

 

And as always, thanks for reading.

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