I'm a bilingual yoga teacher who helps people who sit a lot gain mobility, move without pain and reduce their stress.
Why you wake up in the middle of the night
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Why do I wake up in the middle of the night then struggle to go back to sleep?
Should I stay in bed or should I get up and wait for sleepiness to come back?
This is one of the most asked questions on my Q&A podcast, so I thought it might be time to answer it here too. Most of the time, it's stress.(Is anything not caused by stress nowadays? 🥲) Something is bothering you, maybe not enough to keep you awake at night, but enough for your nervous system to be on alert. And enough for you to start thinking about it the second you wake up, whereas if you were a bit more zen, you would fall back to sleep without even noticing you woke up. But it could also be...
What should I do when it happens?If you wake up and can't fall back to sleep, don't look at the clock. You would start counting the hours until you have to get up and stress about falling back to sleep... which will prevent you from falling back to sleep. If you feel very awake (my tell-tale sign is if I can open my eyes fully) and have tried to get back to sleep for over 15 minutes, get up and go to another room. No bright lights, no screens. Do something relaxing like reading, listening to music, gentle stretching... and as soon as you start feeling tired again, go back to bed. Sleepiness comes in waves, so we want to prime the nervous system for sleep while we wait for that sweet wave. If that happens to you regularly...See which boxes you tick from the list of causes above. I'm sure you can get some quick wins like avoiding caffeine late in the day or ordering earplugs and a sleeping mask. And if you'd like to reduce your average stress level and build a night routine that will make you sleep like a baby, that's what I do :) Send me a short message explaining your situation as a reply to this email or on WhatsApp, and I'll tell you how I can help you. Om, peace 🧡 Clem |
Clémence Dieryck
I'm a bilingual yoga teacher who helps people who sit a lot gain mobility, move without pain and reduce their stress.
Do you consider yourself stressed? Most people I work with say no, or "not really". Yet their bodies tell a slightly different story 😬 We have a very specific image of stress: the heart racing, the palms sweating, the knot in our stomach. But that's acute stress, the kind we recognise easily. Chronic stress is far more subtle. It builds so gradually that you stop noticing it. You get used to it (like the story of the frog being slowly boiled alive) and it becomes your new normal. Your body,...
I want to talk about fatigue today. It's something we all experience, yet we don't fully understand it. Even from a scientific standpoint, there's still a lot of ongoing research and competing theories. Here's one that recently blew my mind. The widespread belief is that we become physically tired when we reach our muscular limits. The muscles run out of oxygen, or start to suffer damage from the build-up of waste products like lactic acid (if you have ever held a Warrior 2 for over one...
Sooo... How many yoga or gym routines have you tried? I've done it all. I committed to a new routine I saw on Instagram. And I managed... what, four days? Before I had to travel, had an early meeting, or let's be honest... just couldn't be arsed to get out of bed. And then I thought: "The problem is me. I lack discipline. If I were more motivated, I'd manage it." Nope. I don't think that anymore. The problem is that I was trying to shoehorn a random routine into my life. If you've ever been...