# Chapter 204

When you face the difficult and/or unknown. This comes to each of us eventually. There are nights when you don’t sleep well because of this. You can’t turn your brain off and you can’t get the rest that you really need. Instead you lay there with your thoughts in a tornado that you can’t stop and sooner or later you give up and get up. Laying there hour after hour is pointless, unless you are recovering from jet lag, and then there are actually real benefits from laying there hour after hour even if you can’t sleep.

But with the standard tornado brain working against you, getting up after an hour of trying to go back sleep is the only reasonable thing to do. Take a long shower, enjoy a good grooming, get dressed and even if all you can do (because its the middle of the night) is sit downstairs or in your living room and read, that is progress of the only sort you will get tonight. So take it. Make use of it. Think - in the sense that you take control of the tornado and give it some direction and work toward some solutions. None of this will restore your lost sleep but perhaps it will redeem some of the losses of the night. Or of course you can lay there and toss and tumble and look at the clock or your watch every 10 minutes for the next how many hours. While you may not have a choice about the tornado in your head keeping you awake, you do have a choice in how to respond as always.