by Rosina Pzena, M.S.

I am writing this blog currently from home, where I have been stuck in my bed sick with the flu for the past few days. I spent a lot of time, at first, thinking about how unfair it was that I had to lay around all day (my body couldn’t handle much else) but couldn’t quite get rested, as I was regularly interrupted by coughs, breathing difficulties, or spiking fever disrupting my sleep. I also really wanted to sleep to avoid having to experience all the discomfort I was feeling. I was hoping when I slept, I would wake up magically feeling better.
However, over the course of my sickness I realized that the more I believed I should be sleeping, and how unfair, uncomfortable, and awful it was that I was so sick, the less I slept. In fact, these beliefs made me feel angry, and anger is not conducive to getting sleep as it produces physiological arousal. I was already sick, but my anger was interfering with my body’s natural attempts to help me get better. Using my training in REBT, I tried to help myself by accepting my sickness and living with the discomfort, rather than getting angry about it. While of course I would prefer not to be sick and uncomfortable, and to be able to rest properly when I am sick, that’s just not how my body is working at the moment.
Now that I started thinking that way, if I am not able to fall asleep, I don’t waste my time getting angry about it, but I use that time to watch Netflix or do something else mindless, like knit. I started falling asleep more readily once I let go of my demands about being sick and resting. I was finally able to get 8 solid hours of uninterrupted sleep last night and woke up feeling, while not completely better, much improved. This experience just was one example of a crucial point of REBT: the more rigidly we demand ourselves, others, or our environment to be a certain way, the less likely we can actually act to achieve what we want in the first place, because our unhealthy negative emotions interfere.
Rosina Pzena