SLEEP DEPRIVATION: One of the biggest complaints of parents the world over, throughout time must be sleep deprivation. If you have a baby, you may be up with the baby all night. If you have a toddler he may jump out of his big boy bed throughout the night. Older children may be up with stomach aches or nightmares. Parents with teenagers may stay up half the night wringing their hands, worrying about their kids who are out, or just plain worrying.

Loss of sleep and interrupted sleep has a profound impact on your mental clarity during the day. After a night of little or disrupted sleep you may feel mentally loose. It’s hard to focus, pay attention, or think rationally. Loss of sleep disrupts your ability to be in constant control and upsets your poise. After a night with little sleep you may be less inhibited. If you think about it – that’s why they use tactics of sleep deprivation on prisoners-of-war, to try to get them tell secrets they otherwise would never tell.

Right after my son was born, the Iraq war was just starting. I remember hearing a story on TV about how the Geneva Convention guidelines limit the military in using sleep deprivation with prisoners of war. I was surprised to learn that the world had created laws to protect even our worst enemies from sleep deprivation, yet there had been no global outcry to address the havoc wreaked by a newborn who may be up every hour throughout the night. I remember thinking that those prisoners of war were getting better sleep than I was.

While loss of sleep can be agonizing and disruptive, if you have to live with it you might as well look to find what you might gain from it. You might also want to head off serious disturbance, by trying to make up for lost hours at night by napping throughout the day. If you only get five hours of sleep at night, try napping in the daytime to make up some of that. Even in making up the lost sleep you will still be feeling dazed and confused around the clock.

Sleep deprivation can also lead to altered states of mind. The way you look at the world will change profoundly. Your direct perception becomes more fluid, more open to interpretation. With this loosening and letting go, you may find yourself startled by your familiar world.

The Parenting Path of Least Resistance
After a particularly bad night, you will find how to parent with the path of least resistance. This means you will learn by necessity about minimal parenting. This can be an introduction into “good enough parenting” for the high strung. You will likely give up your plans to tutor your child, or introduce them to the marvels of modern art.

Perhaps you will lie down on the couch half the day and let your kids try to amuse themselves. This sleep-deprived experiment will show you how low you can go. Sometimes with all our plans and projects, we forget how little it can take for kids to be entertained, and that sometimes they need down time too. We also figure out that by taking it easy our kids develop an essential life skill: how to amuse themselves.

If your child is spoon fed entertainment every day, they will become hooked on a constant stream of stimulation. All children come into the world with the capacity to amuse themselves. In fact, they need exposure to empty down time that is not prepared or planned. It gives them the opportunity to explore the greatest gift of childhood: Imagination. Children love to pretend. They need space to fill up with their own fantasies and to conduct their own experiments on the world.

Massive sleep deprivation, may take you to the point where you surrender your role as camp counselor for your child. So, if you’re too tired, don’t feel guilty. When you surrender your duties, you are giving your children the gift of having time and space to explore on their own. They will develop many necessary life skills, including self-reliance and their own imagination.

This is true even for babies. Think about it. Babies need more than anything to be close to their mamas. If you’re carting them around in the back seat of the car, or in the stroller from brain building activity to brain building activity, they may not get the closeness which is what they really want. If you lay down on a bed all day with your baby, or let them roll around on the floor while you collapse on a couch, they would love having mama so close.

By jamming the circuits of the familiar, sleep deprivation will open you to a new way of seeing the world. If you’re too tired to shape your own environment you will open to receive the world as it is.

If before you were constantly rushing around, keeping things clean and neat, now you will collapse in exhaustion. I remember one time sitting in a rocking chair with my son when he was a baby, too tired to move. With him in my arms I just sat there in a daze. I looked out the window at the wind blowing through the trees. For a long time I was mesmerized by the beauty of the wind on the trees. I would never have paid any attention to the natural beauty of my world if I had been bustling about with lots of energy.

Sleep deprivation will also break up rigid ways of seeing the world. In the mental fog of extreme fatigue you may suddenly realize that you no longer believe what you were told about your abilities. Maybe someone told you that you needed to play it safe. In your mental fog, you begin to think you can become what you’ve really wanted to be. You may challenge the labels people have put on you.
Sleep deprivation leads to creativity. Because your executive brain functions are lying low, you have to make your way through the world without imposing clear expectations on it. This leaves you more open to the world impinging on you and having to create a new way of seeing it.

The Power of Nonsense
When you are too tired the world stops making sense. And very often you start making nonsense. The giddy nonsense you find yourself thinking and feeling may be deeply meaningful. The altered state of consciousness that sleep deprivation brings on makes you more open to your unconscious thoughts and feelings. Consider it free therapy. When you are well rested and rational, you are in complete control to move forward on your own agenda.

In the throes of fatigue, the unwanted voices of your unconscious can storm their way into your awareness. Forgotten memories, discarded feelings emerge to stake their claim now that the parole office of your rational mind is off duty. These voices will be troubling because that’s why you banished them away in the first place. Although disturbing, these voices can play a powerful role in connecting you to who you really are.

Perhaps you find yourself thinking that a person in your life who has been perfectly nice to you is really just a wicked witch. Pay attention to this nonsense. There is probably a method to your madness. The whole enterprise of psychoanalysis is based on getting the client to free associate and let their mind run loose. The premise is that you’ll run into some truths you’ve wanted to hide behind a polite and pleasing social façade.

Of course there is a wicked witch in your life. When you let your guard down, you may figure out who it is and set your life right by seeing these truths. You can save yourself upwards of a few hundred dollars an hour in the cost of psychoanalysis by paying attention to the crazy stuff you find yourself thinking.

Even the silly songs that run themselves through your mind may have important messages for you. One time after a night of being waken to feed my daughter and having her cries wake her brother who then refused to go back to sleep, I kept having the song, “You have to believe in magic” loop endlessly through my mind. For a while I just figured it was the predictable nonsense that results when you get almost no sleep and spend your night between feeding a baby and getting a 2 year old to stay in his big boy bed.

But in a moment of daring to embrace my own absurdity, I opened up into an experience of seeing the whole world as enchanted and knowing that I had to live my life waiting for magic to meet me around every corner. This silly song that I couldn’t escape accomplished what years of psychotherapy never had. Finally, instead of staying in control by preparing for every eventuality and analyzing the risks, the costs and benefits of every choice, I was opened to a new way of skipping through the world waiting for its magic to unfold. By paying attention to your own silliness, your songs, your ratings and ravings, you may stumble on a powerful method for transforming your life.

Let the Mood Swings Roll
But what about the terrible mood swings that follow sleep loss? Even that can lead you to an altered perception of your familiar world. People who lose sleep find themselves irritated at the drop of a hat. You can use your increased sensitivity to irritation as a kick in the butt to set your foot down.

The irritation you feel from sleep deprivation might be like amping up your sensitivity to your life that you have overrun with your rational mind. Sleep deprivation can change your perception and make you more sensitive to current dynamics in your relationships. This may cast a light on changes you should have made long ago. Maybe you can’t take the antics of a friend who still calls and forgets that you have a life too. Your frustration may be a signal its time to let go of old friends or old ways of life.

Instead of chalking your mood swings up to lack of sleep, try understanding them as messages to you that were filtered out by your rational mind when you were in full possession of your wits. What would you do differently? How would you change your life? Give serious consideration to your irritations, angers, and flights of fancy.

If however, your mood spirals into a constant state of depression, it is urgent that you seek medical treatment and psychological help as soon as possible.

For more tips and tools about parenting visit http://www.visionarysoul.com.

To listen to Dr. Honos-Webb's internet radio interview with IP Editor in Chief, Sandie Sedgbeer, click here...

SPECIAL NOTE: As an expert in ADHD, Lara has created a number of FREE video tips and tools and uploaded them to YouTube. To access these, please click on the links below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyD41IhOqsY
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLF-3mL0UB4
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© Lara Honos-Webb, PhD, 2008

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