'I Didn't Think a Workshop Could Change Anything. I Was Wrong.'

Sandra works in a school kitchen in Motherwell and has done for most of her adult life. She is the kind of person who describes herself as someone who gets on with things, which is another way of saying she spent about three years not telling anyone that she was sleeping an average of four hours a night and waking up every morning with her heart already hammering.

"I thought it was just age. I thought, you're in your fifties, this is what it's like. Your body stops working the way it did."

Her GP thought differently. She had gone to the surgery about something unrelated — a routine appointment — and mentioned in passing that she was tired. Her doctor asked a few more questions, recognised what Sandra was describing as a pattern of anxiety-disrupted sleep, and handed her a leaflet about Vibrant Health Advocates – Copper. Sandra took it home, put it in a drawer, and left it there for six weeks.

"I didn't think a workshop could change anything," she says plainly. "I've been in enough training days at work to know that sitting in a room listening to someone doesn't usually do very much." What changed her mind was a conversation with a neighbour whose daughter had attended a session. "She said it wasn't like that. She said they actually showed you things. I thought, well, I'll go the once."

The session Sandra attended was in a familiar hall five minutes from her house. She knew the facilitator by sight from the school run, years earlier. That helped. What helped more was the first half hour, in which the group was walked through the physiology of anxiety — what it does to the body, why it disrupts sleep, why willpower alone is not an adequate response to it.

"Nobody had ever explained it to me like that. I'd been thinking of it as a weakness. A character thing. And they just said: no, this is what cortisol does. This is what your nervous system is doing and why. And I thought — that's not weakness, that's just biology."

Over the following four-session series she practised the extended-exhale breathing technique, restructured her wind-down routine, and started keeping a brief evening list of the next day's tasks. None of it was dramatic. None of it cost anything. By the end of the series she was sleeping between six and seven hours most nights.

She has since recommended the programme to two colleagues and her sister, who lives in Wishaw. "I tell them what I told myself: just go the once. You can always not go back." She pauses. "But you probably will go back."

Vibrant Health Advocates – Copper has workshop series starting in Motherwell this month, with no waiting list and no referral required, though GP and social prescriber referrals are also welcome. If Sandra's experience resonates with yours, we would be glad to see you.