How to practice opening up your attention when you have baby or toddler sleep problems
Why our mind narrows its attention when faced with ongoing stress
Homo sapiens has a magnificent, problem-solving brain, which likes to figure things out. The capacity to solve problems has been our evolutionary edge.
It means that when we are faced with a crisis, we have a strange and extraordinary gift for being able to find our way through, protecting ourselves and our fellow human beings. It’s amazing how our mind naturally wants to zoom in, laser-like, on the crisis at hand. Our brain is highly attuned to threats or danger, and even more so after we've had a baby. There is more about this here.
We can think of our attention as a spotlight on a stage. The spotlight beam becomes narrower and more intensely focussed down on the problem, as we attempt to solve it.
Maybe, if you're reading here, the problem is sleep, or lack thereof. We tend to think about it all the time and naturally try to set up plans which will help us get more of it. Sleep training approaches really buy into this quirk of the human mind, helping us focus more and more closely on sleep, so that it dominates the ways in which we live our days with our babies. Then our body is more likely to experience the unpleasant or distressing physical sensations which come with both sleep deprivation and chronic worry.
The tendency to focus so much on sleep when we don’t have enough of it takes us down a rabbit hole of sleep distress and sleep battles with our babies, which worsens sleep.
This is not to deny the awfulness of sleep deprivation, and it's dull misery. Hopefully you will soon be changing your baby or toddler’s disrupted sleep patterns by working through The Possums Sleep Program.
How to expand your attention to include other things in the present moment as well as your tiredness
The challenge when you're sleep deprived is to both notice and accept your feelings of tiredness, which often come with exhausted, unhelpful thoughts - and to expand the spotlight so that it includes the other things that you can notice in the present moment.
Are you noticing the physical discomfort of sleep deprivation, the emotional distress of worrying about your and your little one's health and wellbeing? Are you noticing that there's a lot of repetitive negative thinking happening in your mind? This rather unpleasant mix of experiences is very normal when we're coping with baby or toddler sleep problems!
Can you make room for all of this, knowing you can’t really switch it off? Can you also bring your attention to other things in the present moment, in all its mundaneness? Our sensory awareness anchors us in the present moment, even when we are feeling awful. This present moment is all we ever have from which to make a life, really - and is also where our baby or toddler dwells.
While you're doing this, you could also try to remember what matters the most to you in life, and take steps each day to act in a way that aligns with your values. This might mean planning each day ahead of time so that you are connecting with old friends or making new ones, or walking outside as much as you can with your little one, or organising some regular child-free time.
It takes courage to continue to practice noticing the little things, the sounds of the day, the noises on the street outside your window, the birdcalls if you have trees nearby. What can you see in the room that you are in, what can you see outside the window? What is your baby up to? Can you notice the soft touch of his skin? The scent of her scalp, the cup of coffee in your hands? The taste of that piece of chocolate, the kindness of your partner’s touch, your friend’s encouraging words?
This is called anchoring yourself in the present moment, using your senses. This is the best way of opening up or expanding your attention.
Expanding your attention, over and over, not trying to fight all the stress and distress but deliberately paying attention to the other things that around you as well: this is how a woman or a parent gets through, minute by minute by minute.
Acknowledgements
I'm grateful to perinatal psychologist Narelle Dickenson and her psychology students at Lotus Health and Psychology, Brisbane, for creating the video above.
Recommended resources
The stageshow metaphor. Dr Russ Harris
Recommended resources, acknowledgements, and selected references for the articles in the Caring for you section of The Possums Sleep Program are found here, including selected research evaluations of both Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Compassion-focused Therapy in the perinatal period.
