Restless sleep with a ticking clock in the room…
I’m not very fond of ticking clocks. I’m sure they give hard time to a lot of people who are troubled sleepers anyway. I have ticking clocks now in almost all of our rooms in our house – except our master bedroom.
But if I sleep in my parents’ house during holidays or in a hotel room on vacation these tricky little bastards don’t bother me anymore.
As a child, honestly, I did not care about ticking clocks, I just slept. Period. No sound bothered me. My nights were peaceful, nothing could cause me restless sleep.
After that, as a teen I was occupied with vicious thoughts at sleepless nights about how I would destroy the damn device hanging from the wall /in my parents’ house it was not me who was in charge of home decor or clock purchases :-)/.
As a young adult, when I was the creator of my own living space, I avoided ticking clock as much as possible. I didn’t want to have restless sleep!
I soooo much loathed these products that I once bought a wall clock that was designed with that nasty stuff inside “crawling” and not ticking.
A so-called “quiet clock” – I was so convinced I need it! I believed it was the perfect product, invented and designed especially for me and my kind. The price of this product at that time was 4 times higher compared to ticking clock prices. And I paid for it gladly :-).
Ticking sound: a friend, not an enemy
Later on, I was introduced to a type of relaxation technique at yoga class where we would consciously listen to the surrounding noises and make them – and the silence that anticipated and followed them – the center of our attention.
If you hear noises around you when you would like to sleep peacefully, you basically have two choices: reject and resist it and become annoyed or try to solve the problem.
You can deal with some of the annoying noises, i.e. your snoring partner, but lots and lots of them are totally out of your control (the neighbors’ dog’s barking, sudden noise of garbage trucks at dawn, ever-rushing ambulance cars in the middle of the night…)
Restless sleep comes along…
As I experienced being annoyed by any sound just multiplies agony and the time spent on falling asleep – in vain. The more you resist, the harder it gets.
However, you can choose the opposite reaction: surrender. You can accept that many of these surrounding sounds are out of you control and just let them be.
You can actually embrace the silence between these troubling sounds. The key of being able to relax or even meditate in busy or noisy environment is awareness.
Surrender and acknowledgement
You surely can simply ignore noise around you without refusing it. You can acknowledge it instead, focus on your breathing and whenever your concentration gets diverted, return to inhaling and exhaling.
Breathe in and out slowly and deeply, always returning to your favorite sleep affirmation or bedtime mantra. Or just counting ‘1’ and ‘2’ if you like when inhaling and exhaling. (Prayers also work well if you are religious.)
Practising this relaxation consciously was life-changing to me: up till that moment I was annoyed by every little noise e.g., my partner turning in bed, the sound of wind, rain, rustling trees in the yard etc.
Nowadays I can make these sounds work in my favour: I listen to them and use them! Use them in my relaxation for my better, more peaceful sleep.
Of course, if a baby cries in the other room I would not be able to be silent, calm and sleep peacefully, but smaller sounds like cars driving by,, fighting airplanes at night, boiler noises etc. are no problem for me anymore.
If I am aware and recognise a sound that bothers me (or just grabs my attention during meditation), I immediately ask myself: why does this bother me? Can I use it for my relaxation? Or simply look for the silence in-between.
So, besides purchasing silent clocks 🙂 to avoid tossing and turning at night there is at least one powerful possibility you can try anytime to enable yourself to relax and sleep despite any noise.
Watch out! – sounds and memories
- There could be a practical reason I can think of to be really bothered by specific sounds like clock ticking: bad memories, e.g., from childhood. If your clock ticking reminds you (what’s more, brings you back) to your grandma’s house where everything was boring or to a situation that was unpleasant or frightening for you, it can stay with you for a long time.
- Negative experience associated with a sound, e.g. a clock endlessly and stubbornly ticking makes your aversion totally understandable. In this case I would encourage you to think about it, go deep and try to free yourself from bad memories: consciously create new, positive associations with the ticking sound. Opening up to a mental practitioner or memory suppression might be your solution. (If you suffer from PTSD
- Intentionally practising shutting down your painful memories as soon as they start to kick in. You need several month of training to do this, preferably under the supervision of a mental health care professional. What you do is simply train your brain not to remember (weakening neural connections in your brain that no longer serve your needs and are bad for you). Replacing bad memories with new, good ones also works well with NLP (I’m not an expert on this but there are many self-help books available on NLP.)