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Soon – within a week – we’ll be re-claiming morning light, and paying for it with evening light. We all appreciate the extra hour of sleep this little trick with our time-pieces brings us. We look forward to “Fall back” as much as we dread “Spring ahead.” This post is just a reminder that sleep pressure (the pressure that builds when we’ve been awake for some time) generally – eventually! — leads to a good night, as surely as sunrise follows sunset. Trying to keep your bedtime and wake time firm – regardless of how well or poorly you’ve slept – is one of the most important rules established for those with insomnia.

So if you’ve been suffering from insomnia, go ahead and take that extra hour if it naturally fills in with sleep. But then be aware of the usual pendulum like nature of sleep. Sleep will, like the seasons, like the moon, like the tide, both wax and wane. Yielding is the sweet spot: take the extra sleep if it comes, and if not, use the extra time awake to live your life. Like a traffic-round-a-bout, you may need to speed up or to slow down, depending on the other cars in the road… life is about being flexible enough and present enough to respond, in the moment, with what is needed (speed or deliberation).

Like wild geese, we make many trips in our lives: from birth to death, from health to illness, and from illness through healing and recovery. The integration of the three elements of our selves include the body’s bottom-line physicality; the mind’s undeniable presence within our body; and the evanescent spirit, embodied and expressed in waves of pure awareness, difficult to pin down but impossible for most of us to deny.

In your journey from stress or anxiety into insomnia and other disturbances of your wake/sleep cycle, you will have physical symptoms that sometimes command your attention; repetitive, ruminative, or unwelcome thoughts and conclusions that will dominate instead, depending on the day and the state of your physical body; and other times when your spirit, soul, or “self” will move forward and become the focus.

All of these elements play a part in healing. The majority of the time, we will be staying with the body and its behaviors; the next most frequent focus will be your thoughts, at the level of the conscious mind, occasionally dipping into the unconscious mind as it sometimes reveals itself, and lastly, into that state of pure being, where healing may be already present.

Like geese, we will look down from heights occasionally, and then other times we will be on the earth, feeling the water and ground beneath our feet. The ultimate goal is for you to re-learn something you once did effortlessly: sleep. I can help with this goal, and along the way I’ve picked up a number of other foci in my training — namely, helping you to deal with stress and the stress response, and with anxiety and other distressing states. In this blog, I’ll be sharing some of the ideas and observations about human sleep that I’ve collected over the years.

My training and credentials

I am a clinical psychologist, licensed in the state of New York, with advanced training in sleep and anxiety disorders. I earned my Masters and Doctoral degrees at the University of Connecticut, and continued with my training at Brown University’s Alpert School of Medicine (Rhode Island Hospital, Sleep and Anxiety Disorder Unit). I completed an internship and a post-doctoral NIMH fellowship at RIH and a number of other hospitals in Providence. After leaving Providence, I pivoted to teaching full time in upstate New York. Another pivot during COVID led to the use of telehealth, and while I’ll be continuing forward with telehealth, I hope to also offer in-person practice, most likely late summer or fall of 2021.

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Body, Mind, Spirit