When people hear that our son has anxieties and has sleep problems, they tend to give us the advice I would have given other people 12 years ago before this became our normal.

Have you tried relaxation tapes? Yes – different types, genres, voices, adults, children’s, music, quiet and many more. There can’t be many we haven’t tried over the years. He doesn’t like them and won’t tolerate the idea of them at the moment.  That doesn’t mean he won’t in the future, but right now relaxation tapes are not a solution and just add to the stress.

Have you tried meditation? Yes, and, like relaxation tapes, they don’t seem to work, so we have adapted our own versions. We do maths meditation where he has to count back in 3s from 306, for example (although I have to make sure that it will end in zero or the stress levels rise again). We also do A~Z of Marvel characters/Pokemon creatures or people he doesn’t like. This focuses his mind without him having to be aware of it emptying or switching off.

What about breathing? We do variations of breathing. He cannot and will not focus on breathing for any length of time (yes, there is a pattern here which I will address in a mo), so we do things like ‘imagine you’re blowing up a balloon’ or count 5 steady breaths then go back to breathing as normal.

I’ve read that grounding with 5 things you can see, 4 you can hear etc is very good for anxieties? Yep, tried that too. Again, we do our own variation. We are very rude to the general public, which lifts his mood. It might be ‘5 horrific dress combinations you can see, 4 awful hairstyles, 3 strange couples’ and so on. I think this works well as it makes being in a crowded place slightly more tolerable, he is allowed to be rude about people (but we do make sure we use an inside voice), and other people seem to be different and we feel quite normal.

Lavender? He actually hates the smell of lavender, but I am trained in essential oils for animals which is a bit different to aromatherapy in humans, and sometimes essential oils do work for him. His go to oils tend to be grapefruit, bergamot and juniper, although these can change.

Mindfulness, that’s the latest thing. Have you tried mindfulness? Actually, using our own variation on mindfulness is beginning to work. I tried it last night in desperation as I needed to sleep, and he needed to switch his mind off.  He was allowed to lie however was comfortable, he didn’t have to close his eyes or take deep breaths and instead, to begin with, he just had to concentrate on his legs and see what parts were touching the mattress and what parts weren’t (most of it was, but the backs of his knees weren’t). We then repeated this with parts touching the duvet, and spread it all over his body.  Because I hadn’t made him close his eyes, he was engaged and intrigued.  We then did do breathing, but not how you might think. I told him to breathe through his nose and concentrate on how his nose felt. How far did the cold go in, were his nostrils moving? Could he make his nostrils move more? We then did mouth breathing with similar exercises. Was his tongue cold, were his teeth cold (mine hurt) and then we tried to do silent mouth breathing, and both looked like strange basking sharks. We did various other exercises, and although he wasn’t fully relaxed and about to sleep, he was no longer stressing with a busy mind, and then settled down.  He won’t want to run through these by himself yet, but I felt like it was a bit of a breakthrough moment. I’m sure mindfulness trainers and practitioners will feel that this isn’t true mindfulness, but he was focused on the here and now rather than what happened last week, what’s happening this week and how long there is at school after half term until Christmas, and once he was focused, the stressors started to disappear and he slept all night, which meant I slept all night too.

The problem he has with relaxation tapes, meditation, breathing etc is that you have to empty your mind, and, at the moment, he really can’t do that. His mind is full and busy and amazing, and he thinks about ways to improve space travel, alternate universes, if the universe itself could be a sentient being as well as ‘normal’ things such as Minecraft, Pokemon and Marvel. However, his mind also worries and stresses and fills itself with thoughts that keep him awake at night.  If he tries to empty his mind, more thoughts fill the space. He now gets stressed at the thought of doing these, and that makes things worse before we start, so we adapt and create new variations. Some of these do work, some don’t.

If you are trying to help a parent of a child with additional needs and they dismiss or say no to everything you suggest, they are not being difficult, but the chances are they’ve tried it before and it didn’t work. If it worked for ‘someone’s friend’s daughter’s best pal’, it might not work for us, so please don’t be offended if we are sceptical or ask for more details.  We do appreciate people helping and there might just be something we haven’t thought of, but we live with this 24/7 and read, Google, and try to absorb everything that’s out there. If we roll our eyes, laugh or cringe, it’s nothing personal, it’s just that we’ve gone down that road already and it didn’t work.

Every person is different, and so are the coping mechanisms, therapies and answers that will work for us.