The Wrist And Hand Under My Head When I Sleep
Here is the latest installment in my possibly unhealthy obsession with the quality of my sleep.
The wrist and hand that rest under my head when I am asleep want to do things I would prefer them not to do.
And I am having trouble breaking them of their habit.
If I sleep on my left side, the hand under my head tends to ball into a gentle fist and the wrist flexes slightly.
What I teach in yoga classes and my CoreWalking Program is nothing more than behavior modification— have a habit, change that habit.
The problem is that breaking decades-long habits (that very often we are not even aware of) isn’t always easy.
Add that some of these habits occur while we are asleep and things can get very complicated.
I wonder at times if I am freakishly preoccupied with sleeping.
The first thing I do each morning upon waking is to check my Fitbit sleep graph.
Sleeping well and aging gracefully are intimately linked in my mind which is how I justify the efforts I put into improving my sleep.
And my sleep has improved by about an hour a night over the last few months.
Back to my wrist and hand.
I fall asleep on my right side and switch sides a number of times through the night.
I sleep with one hand under my head in between two pillows and my other hand in between my thighs which also have a pillow between them.
All is well and good on my right side but like I said when I turn over onto my left my hand makes a fist and my wrist flexes.
This feels awful an hour or so later when I roll back to the right.
And no amount of effort seems to rectify the situation.
I start out with my hand and wrist flat and straight and before long it has curled into a ball.
What seems most strange to me is that I would expect this of my right side wrist and hand which is where I have some shoulder stuff.
So if the right side hand and wrist were affected I could attribute it to the neck and shoulder issues.
But it only happens on the left side and it is maddening.
And while I know that I might focus on this stuff a bit too much, I don’t like that it happens and that I can’t seem to break the patterns.