Many adults don't sleep well, and don't feel rested when they wake up in the morning.

Do you wish you could (1) rely on sleeping well most nights? and (2) wish you'd wake up feeling rested and ready for the day ahead?

The quick tips in this video can help you improve your sleep habits.

REMEMBER: Not all sleep dysfunction is easily solved with a few tips. For example, if you have sleep apnea, the tips I share in this video won't help. If your sleep issues can't be solved easily, please see a doctor.

Watch this short video for a few tips on good sleep hygiene.

I've been a health and wellness coach* for two years, and have consistently found that most people don't know what this coaching is or why they might choose it for themselves.

So, what does a health and wellness coach do?

As your H&W coach, I will:
1. Trust and believe in your ability to grow and change.
2. Listen deeply, with compassion, and without judgment.
3. Encourage you to envision your best self - this is called a Vision and Values Statement.
4. Assist in your creating goals and action steps based on your vision statement. 
5. Help you explore and achieve behavior and habit changes you choose for yourself.
6. Offer a gentle accountability for your action steps.
7. Help you understand why habits are so hard to change, and what you can do to help yourself make those changes.
8. Explain my techniques and processes so that you will, in effect, learn to coach yourself.

For example, you may envision yourself as being healthy enough to travel. I'd help you dream a little: 
* what would be better about your life if you could travel?
* how would you change for the better with more travel?
* imagine yourself traveling to your favorite place - how will you feel? what will you do there?

Then, we'd create goals for change by asking certain questions:
* what's standing in the way of you traveling now?
* what needs to change in your life so you can start traveling?
* what habits might you have that keep you less healthy?

Our sessions together will be a process of choosing your most important goal and creating weekly or daily action steps - small, baby steps - toward reaching that goal.

All the while, we'll keep your ultimate vision - to be healthy enough to travel - in front of us as a guide and inspiration.


* Certificate from Georgetown University's School of Transformative Studies Health and Wellness Certification Program; national certification from NBC-HWC. 

So many of my clients tell me they're chronically tired because of work and life requirements, and because they don't sleep well. They struggle with insomnia, or at the very least, with difficulties getting to sleep and staying asleep.

This is about what's now called sleep hygiene, which encompasses all your habits and processes around sleeping. There's a lot of common wisdom about sleep hygiene, and the five tips below are adapted from a CDC document entitled TIPS FOR BETTER SLEEP. The pdf is HERE.

1. Their first tip is about CONSISTENCY. For good sleep hygiene, you want to be going to bed at the same time every night, and getting up at the same time every morning.

2. Make your bedroom QUIET, DARK, RELAXING, and a COMFORTABLE TEMPERATURE --- usually on the cool side is best for sleeping.

3. Take away all electronic devices. This seems to be the hardest step for many of us. But at the very least, stop your screen watching, scrolling, and reading at least an hour before you go to bed. Don't use your cell phone for your wake-up alarm. Put the phone and the laptop or iPad outside your bedroom. 
a. HERE'S A LINK to an article about silent alarms.
b. HERE'S A LINK to ideas for old-fashioned, no-screen, no-LED display alarm clocks.

4. For 2 to 3-hours before bedtime, do not eat a large meal, or drink alcohol or caffeine. 

5. Getting some physical activity during the day is a great help for your sleep that night.

In this short video about procrastination:
* You'll learn a bit about our brains and why they procrastinate
* You'll get a couple tips on how to manage procrastination.

Do you have ways to deal with procrastination? Please share them in the Comments.

More than 50 million Americans suffer with chronic pain, say Joanna Katzman, and Rollin MacGallagher at the start of their study, PAIN: THE SILENT PUBLIC HEALTH EPIDEMIC.

They also note that many patients receive ineffective care; that indigenous and POC populations are also burdened by the trauma (past and current) of racism in the healthcare profession. In my research to understand my chronic migraine disease, I've also read about and heard from many women who say they're patronized and dismissed, as in, the pain is all in your head kind of responses.

Given these facts, what can we who suffer from chronic pain do?

There are many resources online. Google "managing pain at home," or "diy remedies for pain," and you'll find a lot of suggestions.

For now, I'll share my own skills and tools for managing chronic migraine pain:

1. Fighting the pain, stressing out about it, or desperately wishing it would go away ONLY MAKE YOUR PAIN WORSE. As strange as it sounds, I've learned that the first step in managing pain well is to accept it's happening.

2. That doesn't mean to give up. It means stop fighting, denying, or worrying and turn to positive strategies that give you comfort.

3. Experiment with heat and cold therapy: use a heating pad or microwaveable pillow; always have ice compresses in the freezer for when you need them; a simple washcloth soaked in warm or cool water can help.

4. Indulge yourself in whatever comforts you: when a bad migraine strikes, I make a cup of tea, put on loose and comfortable clothing, snuggle under my weighted blankie (fall and winter) or soft blankie (spring and summer), wear an eye mask, and listen to Golden Girls on Hulu.

5. You will struggle with people who don't understand the toll chronic pain takes, who will find some way to give you a hard time about it. This is especially true of those of us who have invisible pain. I've learned to ignore them, although sometimes I do snap out a pointed reply. "You look fine," someone will say to me in an accusatory tone when I have to leave a gathering or party because of a migraine. "Thank you!" I say with a big smile as I turn my back on them.

6. Most pain advice I read and hear includes staying hydrated, and that's true for me and my migraines.

I could go on and on about managing pain, but will conclude for this post and plan to write more about it in the future.

For example, a regular meditation practice is essential for me, as is daily stretching. I'll write about these strategies in later posts.

In the meanwhile, please be kind to yourself. It's hard to keep cancelling plans, being afraid to make plans, feeling like we're letting people down.

You're not letting people down - you're taking care of yourself.

Sometimes our fear of what may happen can be overwhelming
 
I’ve been feeling a lot of dread since the November elections. Many of us have - as I’ve written before in this newsletter, you don’t have to be highly sensitive like me to understand at a gut level that things are terribly awry.

So we all feel dread, it’s just that highly sensitive people (HSPs) feel it more and process it at greater depth. Therefore, dread affects us more. As an HSP, simply understanding that fact helps me get perspective on my feelings of dread.

Getting perspective means naming our emotions, and not denying, avoiding, or ignoring them. It’s best to admit we’re in dread. Give it the name! Naming it takes away some of its power.

After naming it, we accept that we’re feeling dread.

This may seem elementary, but many of us are pretty good at denying or avoiding our feelings. In a society that elevates thinking and intellect above all else, emotions and feelings are disrespected and criticized. This is so not helpful.

There’s no shame in having a strong, even overwhelming, feeling of dread.
Name the dread, accept that you’re feeling it, and examine it. Reflect, journal, draw, paint, walk in the park … whatever helps your honest, compassionate examination of your feeling.

Where in your body do you feel dread? What other feelings go along with it? Does it remind you of another time in your life when you felt similarly?

When you’re ready, there are ways to manage dread.
 
Tools for managing dread:*

1. Some of your dread will be related to stories you’ve constructed in your mind. Some will be related to what is actually here and happening. Separating what your mind has conjured from what is fact can help mitigate the dread.
2. Recognize that some of what’s here and happening is out of your control. This is another place to practice acceptance. Can you accept that things are not yours to control, then step away from them?
3. Here and happening dread causes us suffering. Stories we tell ourselves, worried imaginings about future possibilities also cause us suffering. Why add to your very real here and happening suffering with suffering from what’s in your imagination? In other words: your dread is real; your worried projections and stories are not real. Take that extra layer of suffering away!

* adapted from THIS ARTICLE in UC Berkley’s Greater Good Science Magazine
 
Managing dread during this terrible time of upheaval in America will help free us.

Free us for creative and energetic response to the trump regime and its hateful, anti-democracy words and actions.

Free us to accept reality and understand what our role is in fighting for America.

Free us to share our genuine feelings about the here and happening, rather than wasting time arguing or fearing what may or may not come to pass, over which we have no control.

We have power only over our own reactions to events that are far beyond our sphere of control. Handling our feelings of dread well and with self-compassion can make a big difference in how we show up for the fight.

Cyclic sighing is a practice recommended for managing anxiety and aiding relaxation.

It's easy to learn and effective, especially if you make a habit of it -- learn to do it at first by remembering, but as your brain picks up on the mechanics and the benefits, it will become a tool you use whenever anxiety spikes or you realize you're tense and need to relax.

I learned about it from the Happiness Break Podcast on the Greater Good Magazine (UC  Berkley). HERE IS THE LINK.

Have a well day!