61. What to Do if You’re Struggling with Sleep
This week, we’re talking about sleep, which may not seem like it’s related to work.
But let’s be honest - work stress can impact sleep in big ways. And sleep stress can impact work, too (and lots of other things).
No matter what your sleep life is like, I encourage you to listen to this podcast episode, because it will help you navigate not just sleep but anything that your brain stress about that you can’t directly control.
If you’re a high achiever (like me), you may be used to being able to power through things and get shit done. But you can’t hustle your way to a good night’s sleep.
And it’s important to know how to handle shit you can’t simply willpower your way through.
(Also, willpower isn’t the best fuel, so it’s good to learn other options for how to handle things.)
So tune in this week and learn some strategies you can use to set yourself up for a better night’s sleep, and also how to coach yourself when you just aren’t able to get the sleep you want.
And while I’m talking about sleep from the coaching angle today, there are tons of other resources out there when it comes to getting better sleep, and I’ll speak to those as well.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What has helped me fall asleep more easily during stressful times, both work and personal.
Why being anxious about your lack of sleep can make your sleep even worse.
How to extract the useful content from your worries.
What you can do to let the non-useful side of your angst go.
How to think about your sleep in a way that allows you to get the best result possible, even if you don’t get as much sleep as you want.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we are talking about sleep.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, Happy Wednesday. This week I want to talk to you about sleep. Which may not seem like it's related to work, but I think it is. Because one of the things I used to stress about, and I know that many of my clients stress about is not being able to fall asleep at night because of work anxiety or other big work feelings.
But before we get into that I want to share this metaphor with you. I shared it recently on social and I got some really great feedback about it. And I don't know if I've mentioned it on the podcast before, so I wanted to be sure to share it with you. And the metaphor is that in some ways, the brain is like a parrot, and it just wants to repeat shit that it's heard a lot.
And I think this is such a useful metaphor, because so much of what our brains say to us is mean and unhelpful and anxiety inducing, or rage inducing, or overwhelm inducing. All the things, right? And so many of us think that if our brain says it, it is true. But that's not the case. The brain is a habit learning machine. I mean, it's not a machine, but go with me with my metaphor here. It's a machine, it's a parrot.
Anyways, my point is it learns patterns, just like a parrot. And parrots learn to say things and they learn to say them in context. And it almost seems like they're communicating and understand language. But usually, it's just that they understand cues, they've learned cues. And your brain is like that too. It's learned cues. And it's learned if a certain thing happens to say a certain thing back.
Here's the thing, though, where do you think the stuff your brain says comes from? Since a lot of people think it's true, they're just like, it's just the truth. It's just like an observable truth, right? Wrong. The things that our brains say come from how we were socialized. They come from what adults said to us when we were children, what authority figures said to us. They come from what our peers said, they come from what we learned implicitly and explicitly from culture, from movies, from books.
And a lot of what we learned came from people whose opinions we wouldn't care about today. But their opinions have become embedded in our brains and now our brains are parroting those opinions back to us. So when your brain is parroting these things back to you, it's useful to think of it like a parrot.
Because if we think our brain is always telling the truth, then the things our brain says can feel really upsetting and really hurtful. And we can't necessarily get the brain to stop saying them, it's not very fun.
But if we think of the brain as a parrot and the parrot just says the same shit it always says over and over, it's still not the super most fun thing if our brain says, “You're an asshole, nobody likes you, blah, blah,” whatever thing your brain says. But it's a lot easier to tolerate. And it's easier to tolerate without becoming personally upset or without thinking our brain saying this means something bad about us.
So a lot of times it's hard for people to unhook from the parrot because they're believing the parrot. Versus when you stop believing the parrot, it's just noise. It's just like a prank phone call. It's still information, it's still sensory input but we don't relate to it in the same way.
So that's a metaphor that I think will be really helpful for you with whatever your parrot brain is saying to you. But it's also really helpful for this podcast, because a lot of people when they want to fall asleep and can't because they're stressing about work things, or they're stressing about life things or, their brain is just like, “Hey, remember this time in 1996 when you did this thing that was super embarrassing?” You know, that's not from personal experience anything. It can be hard for us to disengage from that voice and to go the fuck to sleep, which is usually what we would like to do. So that's a useful thing to know.
And then I also want to talk about some other strategies you can use for when you can't sleep. So for people like me, and probably like you, high achievers who are used to being able to sort of like grind and hustle and willpower and white knuckle our way through everything and then we come to coaching and learn to do things a little differently. But even before we come to coaching, sleep tends to be an area where we struggle because you can't white knuckle your way to sleep. You can't hustle your way to sleep.
So this is an area I work on with so many people and I've worked on with myself. And I do think there's a lot of coaching that can be extremely useful. Sleep isn't something we can control as much as some of the other stuff that we work on here.
Okay, so there's two things I want to talk about. One thing is strategies we can actually use to help us empty our brains out and set ourselves up for more success with sleeping. And then it's also we want to talk about how we want to think about sleep, whether we're getting it or not.
And then I guess there's a third thing actually, to go out of order, I'll go over first, which is I'm talking about sleep from the coaching angle. But there's all kinds of stuff you can do about sleep from a lot of other angles. And I invite you to look into those.
I know I've read some books on sleep, I've talked to other people who've gone to sleep doctors, and there's all kinds of really great information about things like sleep hygiene and how to set yourself up successfully for sleep in that way. And I'm going to talk a little bit about some of those.
But I just want to be really clear here that that's not what I'm an expert in. And there are lots of people who are an expert in that. And if you need an expert, I invite you to go find one or get several opinions and really utilize that type of resource as well.
Okay, from the coaching point of view, let's talk about the strategies. So things that I've done, and I've had clients do that can be really successful are first of all, analyzing what am I thinking about when I'm unable to fall asleep at night?
Am I super stressed about work stuff? Oh, wait, is it actually personal stuff? Am I actually just stressed about how little sleep I think I'm going to get? This third one was actually me a lot. When my sleep wasn't going well, then I would become anxious about the sleep and that would make it actually go much worse.
So figuring out whatever it is ahead of time can be useful. I've had clients who couldn't sleep because they were worried they were going to forget something at work. And then they would like get in bed and their brain would like bring up all the things they needed to make sure not to forget. And thinking of all those in bed isn't super useful. And then perseverating on them all night isn't going to probably help us perform better either.
So something I have people do sometimes is kind of have like a close out ritual. This is kind of similar to what I talk about in the Sunday scaries, where we can kind of close out our workday, or close out our evening, or close out our work week as in the Sunday scaries, by thinking about all the things that need to not slip through the cracks, all the things we need to follow up on. We can do this in the form of a list, we can do this in the form of putting things on the calendar, so we make sure to do them next week.
A lot of productivity experts say not to just email yourself a reminder, but I'll be really honest, I love to just email myself a reminder of where I'm like, “Oh, remember to send this contract or remember to process this invoice.” And I do that, and it works for me. Whatever works for you.
But just kind of thinking through like, if we're worried and anxious before we're sleeping, are we capturing that worry and anxiety somewhere before we get in bed, so it's been containerized, it has a home that it lives in and it's not like, “I don't have a home. So your bedtime is my home now.”
Okay. And then with stuff like that some of things are going to be things we actually need to do or address. If you have a worried brain that likes to worry, like my brain, there's going to be a lot of stuff that probably you're not going to do anything about, it doesn't actually need to be addressed.
So I talk all the time on the podcast about is there any useful content in the worry? If there is useful content, we want to pull that useful content out so we can address it?
So an example of useful content is like, “Oh, I just realized I didn't email this person back and I'm afraid I'll forget.” The fear of forgetting is not useful content. But the idea that I want to email them back, that's the useful content. So how do I pull that information out of the worry, and then put it on a to do list, send myself an email reminder calendar when I'll do it.”
I was going to say go ahead and send the email, but unless you are in your working hours don't go ahead and send the email, okay? Let's just not work outside of our normal working hours.
Okay, and then what do we do with all the worry that's not useful content? So part of this work is about learning to notice that worry and then dismiss it. We notice the worry or the anxiety, we pull out the useful information. And then we let the worry go. Or we comfort ourselves about like, “Okay, if that thing I'm worried about comes to pass, I'm going to figure it out, I'm going to handle it.”
Or we say to ourselves, “Okay, I took the things that were actionable out of here, and I'm going to act on them. But inactionable worry is not useful. So I'm just going to unhook from it.” And this is where that parent metaphor can be really useful.
If our brain is going on and on and on about the things that we should be worried about, but we can't do anything about them, that can feel very anxiety inducing. But if we can tune back into this idea of the parrot is just doing the parrot thing where it lists worries and concerns, and I don't have to pay attention to that. What it's saying isn't necessarily true. I can just let that be like a radio station that's playing, a little parrot that's talking. That can help us stay in a calmer state, even while our brain is sort of having a meltdown.
Okay, so that's that piece. Let's also talk about the second piece, which is sometimes we don't get a full eight hours of sleep. I do not like it when I don't get a full eight hours of sleep. It is not my ideal at all. I'm like very intense about my sleep, I like 8 to 10 hours a night, 8 to 10.
But sometimes, even though I get in bed in the amount of time that I could get 8 to 10, my body lays there and lays there and lays there and doesn't fall asleep. And I get, I don't know, seven, sometimes I get six. And when that happens, what my brain immediately goes to is, “Oh no, this is terrible, everything is ruined, I'll never sleep again, I'm going to get sick.” And my brain has a complete, like catastrophe situation.
So that's okay, it's good to notice it. It's not a surprise that my brain does that because sleep is something that I've struggled with for as long as I can remember. But thinking about sleep that way doesn't feel good, and it doesn't produce any results I want.
So this is where even when we have a circumstance we don't prefer, like sleeping six hours instead of sleeping eight, it can be really useful to think about, “Okay, what way of thinking about this is going to help me get the best result I can?”
So, for instance, if I only get six and a half hours of sleep, and the next day I think, “I only got six and a half hours of sleep so today is going to be terrible.” And then I feel terrible, I'm probably going to make that day terrible by the actions I take and the actions I don't take from that terrible feeling.
And then it will seem like not getting the sleep ruined my day. But the reality is, I ruined my day with how I chose to think, chose to feel, and chose to act in response to that circumstance of how much sleep I got.
And I've really been learning the truth of this in the last few years because sometimes I don't get eight hours of sleep. And I'm like, “Okay, but maybe I can still have a great day.”
And the physical fatigue is not as bad as it used to be. And by not ruminating on the terribleness of it, I actually forget throughout the day and then my day is very much like any other day when I would get my 8 to 10 hours of sleep.
Now, I want to be clear that this is not about bright siding. And it's not about silver lining. And it's not about lying to yourself. It is simply about assessing which way of thinking about this is actually going to help me get the most of what I want.
So that might look like saying maybe I can still have a really productive day and feeling curious about how that could be. And then taking actions from that place of curiosity that help you have an amazing day.
It might also be about saying the best thing I can do for this day is take a nap for two hours and work for less time. And just be really kind to myself about that and not be a dick to myself and not tell myself that my inability to sleep is going to ruin my whole life.
So as always, it's not prescriptive. It's not about like, oh, this is the one thing you should be doing when you don't get as much sleep as you want or when you can't fall asleep at night. It's about you being able to figure out how to have an experience you like, no matter what the fuck is happening, including when your body is like, “I just don't sleep right now. I'm just not doing that.”
And I think for me, and for people like me, we are really smart and we're really capable. And we're really good at making things happen and achieving things. And we're really good at controlling things. And a lot of times in our lives that's led to results that seem really good from the outside. They often don't feel really good, it turns out. But they seem really good from the outside. And they're like the kind of things that society glorifies, and thinks is super successful.
And so we're like, cool, cool, cool. I'll just control everything all the time, that's how you have a good life. And then there's sleep, which we can't actually control. Like I said earlier, we can't white knuckle it, we can't hustle it. It just is something we have to relate to in a different way. And it really reveals to us our addiction to control.
But I think learning how to create experiences we want, even with this thing we can't control, which is sleep, helps us in so many other areas of our life too. Because there are so many things we can't control in so many different areas. And so many things where our desire to control them actually kind of makes us super miserable.
And being able to let things be what they are. Which doesn't mean condoning them, it simply means allowing reality to be what it is. And then choosing how do I have an experience that feels aligned to my values? How do I have an experience that feels yummy to me, or as yummy as possible? How do I have an experience that's in integrity with who I want to be? It's so valuable.
So to review, if you're struggling with sleep, you're not alone and there are things you can do. And it might take building some new skills. It might take using some strategies, whether they're the kind of strategies I talked about here on the call today or whether they're the kind of strategies you're going to learn more from sleep specialists that have studied sleep.
And then also, of course, how are you thinking about your sleep? And what result is that creating for you? And I think that's a great place to start. Because that allows us generally to get to a calmer, more even keeled place from which we can then implement the strategies that these experts talk about, and test and learn and see what works for us and keep going until we get something that is effective. Versus if we're feeling super frustrated about it, I think it's much more likely that we'll just burn ourselves out, give up and hang out in the pit of despair and assume we're never going to sleep well again.
All right y’all, that's what I have for you this week. I wish you many happy functional sleeps. And if you don't get those, at least you got some tools to work with what you do get. Talk to you next week.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, Happy Wednesday. This week I want to talk to you about sleep. Which may not seem like it's related to work, but I think it is. Because one of the things I used to stress about, and I know that many of my clients stress about is not being able to fall asleep at night because of work anxiety or other big work feelings.
But before we get into that I want to share this metaphor with you. I shared it recently on social and I got some really great feedback about it. And I don't know if I've mentioned it on the podcast before, so I wanted to be sure to share it with you. And the metaphor is that in some ways, the brain is like a parrot, and it just wants to repeat shit that it's heard a lot.
And I think this is such a useful metaphor, because so much of what our brains say to us is mean and unhelpful and anxiety inducing, or rage inducing, or overwhelm inducing. All the things, right? And so many of us think that if our brain says it, it is true. But that's not the case. The brain is a habit learning machine. I mean, it's not a machine, but go with me with my metaphor here. It's a machine, it's a parrot.
Anyways, my point is it learns patterns, just like a parrot. And parrots learn to say things and they learn to say them in context. And it almost seems like they're communicating and understand language. But usually, it's just that they understand cues, they've learned cues. And your brain is like that too. It's learned cues. And it's learned if a certain thing happens to say a certain thing back.
Here's the thing, though, where do you think the stuff your brain says comes from? Since a lot of people think it's true, they're just like, it's just the truth. It's just like an observable truth, right? Wrong. The things that our brains say come from how we were socialized. They come from what adults said to us when we were children, what authority figures said to us. They come from what our peers said, they come from what we learned implicitly and explicitly from culture, from movies, from books.
And a lot of what we learned came from people whose opinions we wouldn't care about today. But their opinions have become embedded in our brains and now our brains are parroting those opinions back to us. So when your brain is parroting these things back to you, it's useful to think of it like a parrot.
Because if we think our brain is always telling the truth, then the things our brain says can feel really upsetting and really hurtful. And we can't necessarily get the brain to stop saying them, it's not very fun.
But if we think of the brain as a parrot and the parrot just says the same shit it always says over and over, it's still not the super most fun thing if our brain says, “You're an asshole, nobody likes you, blah, blah,” whatever thing your brain says. But it's a lot easier to tolerate. And it's easier to tolerate without becoming personally upset or without thinking our brain saying this means something bad about us.
So a lot of times it's hard for people to unhook from the parrot because they're believing the parrot. Versus when you stop believing the parrot, it's just noise. It's just like a prank phone call. It's still information, it's still sensory input but we don't relate to it in the same way.
So that's a metaphor that I think will be really helpful for you with whatever your parrot brain is saying to you. But it's also really helpful for this podcast, because a lot of people when they want to fall asleep and can't because they're stressing about work things, or they're stressing about life things or, their brain is just like, “Hey, remember this time in 1996 when you did this thing that was super embarrassing?” You know, that's not from personal experience anything. It can be hard for us to disengage from that voice and to go the fuck to sleep, which is usually what we would like to do. So that's a useful thing to know.
And then I also want to talk about some other strategies you can use for when you can't sleep. So for people like me, and probably like you, high achievers who are used to being able to sort of like grind and hustle and willpower and white knuckle our way through everything and then we come to coaching and learn to do things a little differently. But even before we come to coaching, sleep tends to be an area where we struggle because you can't white knuckle your way to sleep. You can't hustle your way to sleep.
So this is an area I work on with so many people and I've worked on with myself. And I do think there's a lot of coaching that can be extremely useful. Sleep isn't something we can control as much as some of the other stuff that we work on here.
Okay, so there's two things I want to talk about. One thing is strategies we can actually use to help us empty our brains out and set ourselves up for more success with sleeping. And then it's also we want to talk about how we want to think about sleep, whether we're getting it or not.
And then I guess there's a third thing actually, to go out of order, I'll go over first, which is I'm talking about sleep from the coaching angle. But there's all kinds of stuff you can do about sleep from a lot of other angles. And I invite you to look into those.
I know I've read some books on sleep, I've talked to other people who've gone to sleep doctors, and there's all kinds of really great information about things like sleep hygiene and how to set yourself up successfully for sleep in that way. And I'm going to talk a little bit about some of those.
But I just want to be really clear here that that's not what I'm an expert in. And there are lots of people who are an expert in that. And if you need an expert, I invite you to go find one or get several opinions and really utilize that type of resource as well.
Okay, from the coaching point of view, let's talk about the strategies. So things that I've done, and I've had clients do that can be really successful are first of all, analyzing what am I thinking about when I'm unable to fall asleep at night?
Am I super stressed about work stuff? Oh, wait, is it actually personal stuff? Am I actually just stressed about how little sleep I think I'm going to get? This third one was actually me a lot. When my sleep wasn't going well, then I would become anxious about the sleep and that would make it actually go much worse.
So figuring out whatever it is ahead of time can be useful. I've had clients who couldn't sleep because they were worried they were going to forget something at work. And then they would like get in bed and their brain would like bring up all the things they needed to make sure not to forget. And thinking of all those in bed isn't super useful. And then perseverating on them all night isn't going to probably help us perform better either.
So something I have people do sometimes is kind of have like a close out ritual. This is kind of similar to what I talk about in the Sunday scaries, where we can kind of close out our workday, or close out our evening, or close out our work week as in the Sunday scaries, by thinking about all the things that need to not slip through the cracks, all the things we need to follow up on. We can do this in the form of a list, we can do this in the form of putting things on the calendar, so we make sure to do them next week.
A lot of productivity experts say not to just email yourself a reminder, but I'll be really honest, I love to just email myself a reminder of where I'm like, “Oh, remember to send this contract or remember to process this invoice.” And I do that, and it works for me. Whatever works for you.
But just kind of thinking through like, if we're worried and anxious before we're sleeping, are we capturing that worry and anxiety somewhere before we get in bed, so it's been containerized, it has a home that it lives in and it's not like, “I don't have a home. So your bedtime is my home now.”
Okay. And then with stuff like that some of things are going to be things we actually need to do or address. If you have a worried brain that likes to worry, like my brain, there's going to be a lot of stuff that probably you're not going to do anything about, it doesn't actually need to be addressed.
So I talk all the time on the podcast about is there any useful content in the worry? If there is useful content, we want to pull that useful content out so we can address it?
So an example of useful content is like, “Oh, I just realized I didn't email this person back and I'm afraid I'll forget.” The fear of forgetting is not useful content. But the idea that I want to email them back, that's the useful content. So how do I pull that information out of the worry, and then put it on a to do list, send myself an email reminder calendar when I'll do it.”
I was going to say go ahead and send the email, but unless you are in your working hours don't go ahead and send the email, okay? Let's just not work outside of our normal working hours.
Okay, and then what do we do with all the worry that's not useful content? So part of this work is about learning to notice that worry and then dismiss it. We notice the worry or the anxiety, we pull out the useful information. And then we let the worry go. Or we comfort ourselves about like, “Okay, if that thing I'm worried about comes to pass, I'm going to figure it out, I'm going to handle it.”
Or we say to ourselves, “Okay, I took the things that were actionable out of here, and I'm going to act on them. But inactionable worry is not useful. So I'm just going to unhook from it.” And this is where that parent metaphor can be really useful.
If our brain is going on and on and on about the things that we should be worried about, but we can't do anything about them, that can feel very anxiety inducing. But if we can tune back into this idea of the parrot is just doing the parrot thing where it lists worries and concerns, and I don't have to pay attention to that. What it's saying isn't necessarily true. I can just let that be like a radio station that's playing, a little parrot that's talking. That can help us stay in a calmer state, even while our brain is sort of having a meltdown.
Okay, so that's that piece. Let's also talk about the second piece, which is sometimes we don't get a full eight hours of sleep. I do not like it when I don't get a full eight hours of sleep. It is not my ideal at all. I'm like very intense about my sleep, I like 8 to 10 hours a night, 8 to 10.
But sometimes, even though I get in bed in the amount of time that I could get 8 to 10, my body lays there and lays there and lays there and doesn't fall asleep. And I get, I don't know, seven, sometimes I get six. And when that happens, what my brain immediately goes to is, “Oh no, this is terrible, everything is ruined, I'll never sleep again, I'm going to get sick.” And my brain has a complete, like catastrophe situation.
So that's okay, it's good to notice it. It's not a surprise that my brain does that because sleep is something that I've struggled with for as long as I can remember. But thinking about sleep that way doesn't feel good, and it doesn't produce any results I want.
So this is where even when we have a circumstance we don't prefer, like sleeping six hours instead of sleeping eight, it can be really useful to think about, “Okay, what way of thinking about this is going to help me get the best result I can?”
So, for instance, if I only get six and a half hours of sleep, and the next day I think, “I only got six and a half hours of sleep so today is going to be terrible.” And then I feel terrible, I'm probably going to make that day terrible by the actions I take and the actions I don't take from that terrible feeling.
And then it will seem like not getting the sleep ruined my day. But the reality is, I ruined my day with how I chose to think, chose to feel, and chose to act in response to that circumstance of how much sleep I got.
And I've really been learning the truth of this in the last few years because sometimes I don't get eight hours of sleep. And I'm like, “Okay, but maybe I can still have a great day.”
And the physical fatigue is not as bad as it used to be. And by not ruminating on the terribleness of it, I actually forget throughout the day and then my day is very much like any other day when I would get my 8 to 10 hours of sleep.
Now, I want to be clear that this is not about bright siding. And it's not about silver lining. And it's not about lying to yourself. It is simply about assessing which way of thinking about this is actually going to help me get the most of what I want.
So that might look like saying maybe I can still have a really productive day and feeling curious about how that could be. And then taking actions from that place of curiosity that help you have an amazing day.
It might also be about saying the best thing I can do for this day is take a nap for two hours and work for less time. And just be really kind to myself about that and not be a dick to myself and not tell myself that my inability to sleep is going to ruin my whole life.
So as always, it's not prescriptive. It's not about like, oh, this is the one thing you should be doing when you don't get as much sleep as you want or when you can't fall asleep at night. It's about you being able to figure out how to have an experience you like, no matter what the fuck is happening, including when your body is like, “I just don't sleep right now. I'm just not doing that.”
And I think for me, and for people like me, we are really smart and we're really capable. And we're really good at making things happen and achieving things. And we're really good at controlling things. And a lot of times in our lives that's led to results that seem really good from the outside. They often don't feel really good, it turns out. But they seem really good from the outside. And they're like the kind of things that society glorifies, and thinks is super successful.
And so we're like, cool, cool, cool. I'll just control everything all the time, that's how you have a good life. And then there's sleep, which we can't actually control. Like I said earlier, we can't white knuckle it, we can't hustle it. It just is something we have to relate to in a different way. And it really reveals to us our addiction to control.
But I think learning how to create experiences we want, even with this thing we can't control, which is sleep, helps us in so many other areas of our life too. Because there are so many things we can't control in so many different areas. And so many things where our desire to control them actually kind of makes us super miserable.
And being able to let things be what they are. Which doesn't mean condoning them, it simply means allowing reality to be what it is. And then choosing how do I have an experience that feels aligned to my values? How do I have an experience that feels yummy to me, or as yummy as possible? How do I have an experience that's in integrity with who I want to be? It's so valuable.
So to review, if you're struggling with sleep, you're not alone and there are things you can do. And it might take building some new skills. It might take using some strategies, whether they're the kind of strategies I talked about here on the call today or whether they're the kind of strategies you're going to learn more from sleep specialists that have studied sleep.
And then also, of course, how are you thinking about your sleep? And what result is that creating for you? And I think that's a great place to start. Because that allows us generally to get to a calmer, more even keeled place from which we can then implement the strategies that these experts talk about, and test and learn and see what works for us and keep going until we get something that is effective. Versus if we're feeling super frustrated about it, I think it's much more likely that we'll just burn ourselves out, give up and hang out in the pit of despair and assume we're never going to sleep well again.
All right y’all, that's what I have for you this week. I wish you many happy functional sleeps. And if you don't get those, at least you got some tools to work with what you do get. Talk to you next week.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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