One Size Does Not Fit All

As I become more comfortable with understanding the fear-pain-avoidance cycle, I find myself reflecting more about what the "TMS" diagnosis means. I love the feeling of recovering, but feel cautious about language that reminds me of 12-step programs. I find the TMS diagnosis empowering because it gives me a sense of control and optimism.nts

My mental attitude has changed dramatically since the day that I randomly picked up Sarno's book. I despaired at first, because he said there would be no answers in physical treatment. What would I have to do psychologically- I couldn't imagine.

The mental attitude is the most dramatic, and the decreased obsession about pain naturally follows. I am blessed to have a physical therapist who is astute and perceptive. She has gone on this journey with me, and our work is different now. In fact, she said- in keeping with Sarno--that I was addicted to rubbing my neck, as though I could fix it. I showed her Schubiner's page about the acupuncture points, and we made a plan that I intentionally shift to pressing those points instead of massaging my neck. And we are working on balance. Balance- what an important message. Instead of telling myself how clumsy and poor my balance is, I am to shift my thoughts to the affirmative. I can achieve balance.

All this from a PT--did I get lucky in finding her or what? The day I first made the appointment I was lying on the floor in agony. Now my aches are annoying twinges.

Will I "relapse?" I expect so, but not because of character defects. I would rather not think of it as relapse. Rather, I expect to have pain again in some way, but it will not disable me.

In a couple of months I will reach my mother's age when I last saw her before she died. There will be sort of an eclipse as I pass that age (60). Then I will get to have the years she didn't have, and I am looking forward to them.

My hope is that my family history of TMS stops with me, and that my daughters take in this experience so they don't have to suffer from their stress.

Pain was just becoming a ridiculous way to live, and it made no sense because I was not injured. At some point I will tackle my psychological symptoms so that I can live without fear of insomnia, and need for rx sleep medications. I wasn't even thinking about this when I started this "journey" but worry about sleep is also a ridiculous way to live.

 

This is Sarnos gift to us all...

''I find the TMS diagnosis empowering because it gives me a sense of control and optimism''

I made the exact same observsation early on and cried tears of joy. I AM FREE!

 

We are very fortunate.

 

Am waiting for my turn to say the same :-(

 

my advice Indimarshall take a break from the forum for a few weeks and really concentrate on doing fun things, speaking with old friends/family who you like and doing the 15 minute daily reflection. I've been at it for a year and its still not entirely gone but I have a liveable life and hope for the future, its truly priceless.

 

I am starting with Georgie this Friday and it is a 8 week programme..

what you said is true. some time pain can become our identity if we are on forums for long time..

 

good luck. I am doing her programme in fits and starts but really need to get talking to her directly.

 

Hi, Irish. I like your sharing of Dr. Sarno's thoughts about TMS giving us control and optimism.

My mother died at age 94 (she was healthy and her mind clear; she just tripped and broke her hip, then broke the other one and was too tired to go on.)
I am 85 and hope to be 100. I want to be the Duracell Battery of our family.

 

It's only a problem if you allow your TMS mind to make it one! Here's a great article I'll post once again. I now look forward to waking up and doing productive or un-productive things when the world is quiet.
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The myth of the eight-hour sleep
Comments (321)
By Stephanie Hegarty BBC World Service


We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
Roger Ekirch says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night
His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.
Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.
During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.

Between segments

Some people:

• Jog and take photographs
• Practise yoga
• Have dinner...

• Ten strange things people do at night

A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".
Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.
By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.
He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.

When segmented sleep was the norm

• "He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream." Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1840)
• "Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning." Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
• "And at the wakening of your first sleepe You shall have a hott drinke made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe Your sorrowes will have a slake." Early English ballad, Old Robin of Portingale
• The Tiv tribe in Nigeria employ the terms "first sleep" and "second sleep" to refer to specific periods of the night

Source: Roger Ekirch

• Roger Ekirch's website
• Find your personal sleep profile

In his new book, Evening's Empire, historian Craig Koslofsky puts forward an account of how this happened.
"Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good," he says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute - criminals, prostitutes and drunks.
"Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night."
That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation. Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night, during periods of persecution. If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to exploiting the hours of darkness.
This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by candlelight. With the advent of street lighting, however, socialising at night began to filter down through the classes.
In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed.
A small city like Leipzig in central Germany employed 100 men to tend to 700 lamps
London didn't join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe's major towns and cities were lit at night.
Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.
"People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th Century," says Roger Ekirch. "But the industrial revolution intensified that attitude by leaps and bounds."
Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep.
"If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.
"And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit."

Stages of sleep
Every 60-100 minutes we go through a cycle of four stages of sleep

• Stage 1 is a drowsy, relaxed state between being awake and sleeping - breathing slows, muscles relax, heart rate drops
• Stage 2 is slightly deeper sleep - you may feel awake and this means that, on many nights, you may be asleep and not know it
• Stage 3 and Stage 4, or Deep Sleep - it is very hard to wake up from Deep Sleep because this is when there is the lowest amount of activity in your body
• After Deep Sleep, we go back to Stage 2 for a few minutes, and then enter Dream Sleep - also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - which, as its name suggests, is when you dream

In a full sleep cycle, a person goes through all the stages of sleep from one to four, then back down through stages three and two, before entering dream sleep
Source: Gregg Jacobs

• Gregg Jacobs' site - CBT for Insomnia
• Find out more about the science behind sleep

Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body's natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light.
This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests.
The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear.
"For most of evolution we slept a certain way," says sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. "Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology."
The idea that we must sleep in a consolidated block could be damaging, he says, if it makes people who wake up at night anxious, as this anxiety can itself prohibit sleeps and is likely to seep into waking life too.
Russell Foster, a professor of circadian [body clock] neuroscience at Oxford, shares this point of view.
"Many people wake up at night and panic," he says. "I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern."
But the majority of doctors still fail to acknowledge that a consolidated eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

More from the Magazine

• Margaret Thatcher was famously said to get by on four hours sleep a night
• That put her in a group of just 1% of the population

• Can we really get by on four hours of sleep?
• Weird things people do in their sleep

"Over 30% of the medical problems that doctors are faced with stem directly or indirectly from sleep. But sleep has been ignored in medical training and there are very few centres where sleep is studied," he says.
Jacobs suggests that the waking period between sleeps, when people were forced into periods of rest and relaxation, could have played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally.
In many historic accounts, Ekirch found that people used the time to meditate on their dreams.
"Today we spend less time doing those things," says Dr Jacobs. "It's not a coincidence that, in modern life, the number of people who report anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse has gone up."
So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you.
Craig Koslofsky and Russell Foster appeared on The Forum from the BBC World Service. Listen to the programme here.

 

For last 3 yrs. on avg I slept only 5 hrs.. thanks to my neck, upper back , IBS and now lower back issues.. but sleep has never been an issue for me.I can cope up with it..

 

"Modern" sleeping habits are a construct of the Industrial Age, the advent of the assembly line. Everyone had to be at the plant at the same time, eat at the same time and sleep at the same time--otherwise they overslept or fell asleep at work and the assembly line stalled out. A lot of robots are used now, we mainly sit on our butts all day pushing paper or counting nothing heavier then beans. At least in the old days workers did something physical, like bolting a fender to a Model A, getting them physically tired to sleep well. But, we all still leave for work and home at the same time, creating the "traffic jam", where we sit some more.