One of the things I was looking forward to – hoping for – with this move, is to be able to sleep again.

The few times I came out here to visit, I slept better than I had in decades, not realizing how poor quality my sleep had become.

For all the weird things going on, including the odd things that keep me up at night, this hope of mine has been true.

The last few years, I’ve been getting perhaps 4 hours of sleep at night.  If I was lucky, I’d get a couple hours nap, later in the day.

One of the things that prevented sleep was noise.  Traffic noise.  People noise.  Drunk people noise.  Emergency vehicle sirens noise.  Animals.  The occasional crunching of vehicles hitting each other noise.  Having people living on either side of our walls noise.  Just… noise.  I wore earplugs to sleep for many years.

The other thing that prevented sleep was pain and stress.  The more stressed I was, the more pain I was in, and the stress levels have been high since 2013.  It wasn’t unusual for me to have to take painkillers, just to sleep.  Just over the counter stuff, but I was already taking painkillers daily because of my osteoarthritis and dislocating of metatarsals.  Then there was that mystery pain in my side no cause has been found for.  I used to never get headaches, but tension headaches had become frequent.  By the end of the day, anything I’d taken earlier had worn off and I would need to take more, many nights.  In the last weeks before the move, of course, I was taking them every day, just to push myself to keep going.

The biggest sleep killer, however, was busy brain.  Much of it, stress related.  I’m sure many reading this will understand.  No matter how exhausted, once your head hits the pillow, it starts.  A thousand thoughts, whirling through your mind, and before you know it, you’re wide awake, too wired for any possibility of sleep.

I used quite a few techniques to help alleviate the sleeplessness.  I picked up some sleep headphones and would listen to music.  This would sometimes be enough to drown out the busy brain.  Sometimes I would listen to instrumental music, sometimes to binaural recordings to induce brainwave patterns to assist sleep.

Some nights, however, the busy brain was just too much, and I needed voice to drown it out.  For a while, I tried listening to audio Bible, only to find it led to me start falling asleep in church, during the homilies and sermons.  Plus, if I want to listen to an audio book of any kind, I want to actually pay attention to what’s being read, not fall asleep and miss it.

One thing I tried that worked well was to record myself reading positive affirmations.  Unfortunately, my first attempts, using my phone, didn’t last.  For some reason, after a while, the files became corrupted and the recording would begin to sound weird.  Eventually, I borrowed my daughter’s microphone and used my desktop.  That worked, and there was no file corruption problem.

Sometimes, however, nothing would work, and I would resort to over the counter sleeping pills.  Which also didn’t always work, but it was a last ditch attempt.

Since the move, for all the hassle and stress with the state of the house, the hot water tank dying, the ongoing troubles with the movers, and so on, my sleep has improved substantially.

No more earplugs.  Noises such as the furnace turning on or the wind outside are about it, and those are rather soothing.

Not once have I had to sleep with headphones on to drown out my busy brain.  I’ve still had some nights where my thoughts just ran in circles, but I fall asleep anyways.

Most amazing of all is, I hardly ever take pain killers anymore.

It’s not that I don’t have pain anymore.  I certainly do.  But it’s so much less than it was before.  Once in a while, I’ll be hurting a bit more and will need to take some during the day, but I don’t think I’ve had to take any before bed since the move.

I can actually sleep again.

What an amazing thing.

The Re-farmer