First up in my new Mindful Parenting blog series is an old favourite of mine – coping with sleep deprivation!

This is a crucial skill for parents of babies and young children, depending on what sort of sleeper your child is. But this is also relevant for anyone who suffers from sleep disruption or insomnia at any point in our life.

Sleep deprivation is really hard – it’s been used as a torture method over history, and for good reason. Not getting enough hours of sleep and/or being woken repeatedly throughout the night has real impacts on us. It reduces memory function, concentration, reaction time and judgement, and it increases moodiness and bad temper and can lead to loss of motivation. We feel pretty crappy after many nights of getting a few hours less sleep than we normally need. Over time it can leave us feeling depressed or lacklustre, and upset and frustrated by our loss of sleep.

So whether you’re being woken by an unsettled child, the noisy neighbours or just by your own insomnia, how can mindfulness help?

1. Accept things as they are

In my experience, the most important thing to start with is to practice acceptance. Yes ironic isn’t it, to accept something that’s really crap and you don’t want happening?! But how many times have you been woken in the night and lain there worrying and fuming about how tired you’re going to be the next day? How you won’t function at work, you might get sick, you just won’t cope. You feel like crying (maybe you do cry). You feel frustrated but shouting at your wakeful child would only makes things worse. I know, I’ve been there!

But most of the pain and suffering about sleep loss is caused by these thoughts and emotions. So if we can just drop this story, we miraculously feel a lot better. If we can relax into the sleep disruption and accept that we will feel tired tomorrow, it makes the whole thing about 100 times easier to bear.

So – how to do this? Start by practicing mindfulness of your emotions and thoughts – this will then give you the space to choose how to react. When you’re lying there awake, just notice the stories in your head (I’m going to be exhausted, I just won’t function etc). And notice the feelings in your body (frustration, anger, sadness etc). Breathe into these feelings in the body: switch your mind’s attention to the body and away from the stories. Keep doing that for as long as possible. Then you can switch to mindful breathing if you like – just feeling the breath in and out. Meditating as you lie there.

2. It’s out of our control

A lot of the emotional turmoil from sleep deprivation can be due to feeling that it’s out of our control. And with children it largely is. There are definitely things we can do to help our child to learn to sleep better – there are many best-selling books with a “sleep solution” for you (which may or may not work!). But there are children who are just not good sleepers and it’s not always possible to change that. All we can do is create the conditions for our child to sleep better, and it’s up to him or her in the end.

Since we can’t really control our child’s sleep, the best thing to do is accept it as a part of being a parent of this particular child. In fact, I’ve found that if I switch my frustration about being woken in the night towards my feelings of love for my daughter and how lucky I am to have her then I can actually lie there in her room at 4am holding her hand and feeling quite joyful! (Bit tired the next day though!)

3. Get help if it gets too much

It’s important to note, though, that sleep loss can become a health problem for some of us. There are times when it’s gone on too long and you might start feeling constantly down and unmotivated about life. If these feelings continue for weeks and getting extra sleep doesn’t seem to lift them, you might be suffering from depression (post-natal or otherwise). If that’s you, please go and see your GP for help.