Night Bookending

Bookending is one of the useful tools I learned when I was a part of SCA. I'm not sure how common the term is, so I'll explain just in case you don't know:

Bookending is checking in both before and after an event that has potential triggers.

I'm noticing a desire to do that as I'm in the beginning of this nofab thing, particularly to check in before bed with my plan and to check in again in the morning.

Tonight, I'm settling into bed, and I've found a really good talk on youtube to listen to. It feels pretty good to be going to bed listening to something that will be useful to my work. I feel engaged in the talk.

There's some desire to M, but the talk has more of my interest, at the moment anyway! And that makes me happy -- happy to notice I'm widening the time I have to spend on things of interest to me, happy to notice that I'm finding something to go to sleep listening to (Before, I wouldn't listen to podcasts or anything much at bedtime because they interfered with my fantasizing.). I'm also playing around with sleep positions. I've almost never M while lying on my back (Almost never slept lying that way either!), so I'm trying that. I'm also resting my head on my hands at times -- just various things to change the patterns a bit.

I'm hoping for a good night's sleep, and to glean interesting information from this talk. If i make it all the way through an hour long talk, it will mean both that I'm not getting to sleep that fast and, more importantly, that I've actually listened to an hour of something without pressing pause to indulge my own nightmarish sexual fantasies.

I'll check in again in the morning. Thank you all for being here! I'm glad this forum is here.

 

I made it!!

I know for sure now that it's possible to go to sleep without the M or the accompanying nightmarish fantasies. And this time, it wasn't a lot of effort.