What makes for a good night's sleep?

After years of denial about the importance of sleeping well and its link with anxiety, I have finally managed to alter my habits and experience this new feeling of having been in deep sleep with intricate dreams

I keep insisting to my partner that my body was not made for cold climates. He finds it amusing that I sleep with two pairs of socks. I tell him it's one degree outside. This doesn't suffice as an explanation. It is a joke.

I mean, I really do look and feel somewhat ridiculous with my two pairs of socks; the outer layer a pair knitted by Tibetan refugee women. The one day I dared to wear just one pair, I woke up in the middle of the night with my feet caught in spasms. I needed reinforcement.

I've always taken a long time to fall asleep. My brain takes time to unwind and it's often in the dark of night that my mind unleashes the anxieties it managed to repress through the day. If my feet are cold, then the process of finally falling asleep gets unnecessarily lengthened. I cannot focus on anything because of the consciousness I have of feeling not secure, not warm.

When it's cold, I need to be cocooned in my comforter. Part of it needs to be swaddled under my feet, the rest tucked around the edges of my body's form, so I look like a creature in a state of metamorphosis. Winter was always a struggle, more so back in Delhi, where most flats are built for the heat of summer. I'd often put a hot water bag in my bed, especially near where my feet would rest, to warm the cold surface and make it easier to acclimatise. The main obstacle was to fall asleep, it was usually smooth sailing after that.

In the last few months, the quality of my sleep has been dramatically enhanced. I've begun to suspect it's because I'm less anxious when I get into bed.

I began reading children's books in German, to improve my grasp over the language. I found that if I get into bed sooner, I am less anxious. I stopped spending time on my phone before bed (for years I would play a game of Scrabble or Candy Crush Saga at night in order to fall asleep).

Now I try, instead, to read in bed, or, before moving to the bedroom I do a round of crochet. This has helped me disentangle my thoughts, giving them room to wander and simply be. Where before I would use these final moments of conscious thinking to run over to-do lists for the future, thus reinforcing the anxiety that was keeping me awake, now I use the time to think of more comforting things. It has demanded a re-steering of my stream of consciousness. Recently, I read about how we program ourselves to fixate on negativity but don't train ourselves to follow a positive feeling, something that might possibly energise us. This resonated with me.

Because I was brought up to be humble, I never allowed myself to dwell inside a compliment. In fact, I internalised an inherent suspicion towards compliments. I led myself to believe that if someone was saying something nice to me it was because they wanted something from me, or they were secretly teasing me.

Because I have worked hard at holding my self more forgivingly, I am better equipped to simply even just accept a compliment, not disregard it, not invalidate it, but think of it as someone 'seeing' me in a certain way.
This small alteration in how I allow myself to slip into sleep seems to have transformed the nature of my sleep. Many other lifestyle changes have invariably contributed. For instance, I have dinner between 7 pm and 7.30 pm. I am usually in bed by 10.30 pm. I am up between 6.45 am and 7 am.

When I wake up I have this certainty of having been in deep sleep. This is a new feeling. My dreams are very intricately linked to whatever it was I was doing through the day. When, for instance, we were harvesting apples, I would see myself between the leaves, I could hear the plucking, I could envision the redness.

The last few days I've been seeing pages of art catalogues because I'd been scanning book covers as part of the library work I was temporarily doing. Sometimes, between these mundane things I have visions of things connected to the intellectual thoughts I'm wrestling with.

Last night I dreamed I encountered something like the burning bush, except it was an ancient rubber tree. It was not part of a plantation. It was a singular tree and it was oozing sap and it was glowing white. I imagine it must be connected to an essay I read two months ago by Kristina Lyons called 'Emergent Forms of Death Warning: Highly Toxic Experiments', that examines how extractive capitalist economies ruin indigenous knowledge systems. I'm not sure.

The point is that I'm finally beginning to understand the restorative, reparative powers of sleep, and how for years I had been in denial, not acknowledging the link between my anxiety and my inability to sleep. It made me question whether this should be our biggest red flag as far as mental health is concerned; being more keenly attuned to our sleep patterns, and transforming our lives with simply this goal in mind - how to sleep better?

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper

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