I Am Learning How to Stop and Restart

One of the outcomes of my health struggles last year was the understanding that I need to rest properly. A doctor said to me one of those things that you hear knowing it will permanently affect your actions going forward: ‘There’s nothing that can adequately replace over time what sleep is supposed to do for your body.’ I sleep well enough but one of my issues had always been getting back to sleep when I wake up in the night or too early in the morning. This issue was definitely worse than it should have been because of the complex I built around it; I would often say, ‘I can’t go back to sleep once I’ve woken up’ and would psych myself up when I woke up, sometimes to the point of getting up ridiculously early.

After last year, getting eight hours of sleep became such a rigid goal that I managed to create the new obstacle of sleep anxiety, which is where I had to draw a line. I realised I had a complex around stopping and restarting my sleep. I had given myself the idea that to wake up and have to fall asleep again meant I had ‘failed’ at sleeping somehow, as absurd as that sounds.

Realising how absurd that was but how true it rang emotionally, I realised the roots must go much deeper. It wasn’t just sleep I felt this way about. I could identify other similar examples in my life and, after examination, came to understand why my mind goes in that direction. A lot of introspective time later, I am growing better at being okay with stopping things and starting them again, knowing that it’s not a moral failing to do so and that sometimes it’s the wisest, the only thing to do.

I am a big advocate for ‘doing it scared’ i.e. not waiting until you feel fully capable of doing things to do them, but instead simply doing and rising to the occasion as necessary. The rewards reaped from this strategy have been many, but it has its difficulties. One such difficulty is that ‘doing it scared’ means that…you’re scared. You feel better eventually but there is an uncomfortable period where one has to push through a lot of self-doubt. That is the biggest reason why I struggle to stop and restart things - I know how hard it was to start and how hard it is to do currently, and worry that in stopping I’ll not have the strength to start again. This realisation felt like a blow until I realised that this feeling and the articulation of it were markers of progress. The step after ‘doing it scared’ is ‘you could do it then, so do it again’. Fear becomes smaller when faced, however incrementally. If I need to stop or I am stopped involuntarily in the pursuit of something I want or need, I can trust myself to restart or resume when I need to because I was capable of starting it in the first place.

If I return to the example of my sleep, one of the reasons my sleep became even more disjointed when I determined I would get eight hours a night is because of the pressure I was suddenly putting on myself. I would wake up and my first emotion of the day would be disappointment if I hadn’t met my target, causing me more of the stress I was trying to avoid by being adequately rested. All this meant that waking up in the night felt like a cataclysmic event and a night-ruiner, rather than simply unfortunate and fixed within ten minutes. I already slept with a sleep mask every night without fail to block the light and slept with my phone outside my room so I don’t awaken my brain if I wake up in the night. The biggest difference maker, however, has been affirming to myself that it’s okay to wake up and go back to sleep. Repeating to myself, ‘If you wake up, you can go back to sleep’ in affirmation has gradually helped immensely over time.

I have tried to take this new attitude of not being afraid to stop and restart things into many other areas of my life. When having disputes, my fiancée likes to take a moment to step away and gather her thoughts if things become too stressful whereas I want everything to be dealt with in the moment rather than dread its return. The merits to her approach, however, are clear - when we come back to talk after calming down, it’s much easier to actually hear each other when there’s less heat in the moment. I don’t need to be worried because the goal of our discussions is always to understand each other better and truly listen to what the other person is feeling.

When doing long runs in training for my half-marathon (anything over 10k), I would start the run feeling as though if I stopped, it would be over, and I’d never build up the momentum to match the pace I’d set and hit the time I’d wanted. There were a couple of runs in my training program where I would set out too fast, refuse to slow down because I was scared to stop, completely gas myself out and have to finish the run without finishing the distance I set out to do. I talked to the friend I was planning to run the half-marathon with (she is a much more experienced runner than I) and was told to run the distance I was meant to without worrying about stopping or time. I didn’t stop on another run for the rest of my training, simply because I felt like I could.

I have permission to stop and start again. If I am stopped for a reason outside my control, I am capable of restarting - after all, I was capable of starting in the first place. There are enough reasons to feel pressure without expecting everything to always go without a hitch. When I stop, I will find a way to resume.