Sleep
{12 minutes}
Sleep
There are 10 centers in the brain that keep us awake, and 2 that put us to sleep.
There's a Gary Larson The Far Side cartoon from the 1990s that shows a TV technician leaving the living room of a family where all the family members' heads are tilted sideways. The caption says something like, I think I see what the problem is. In the background, we see the television rotated on its side.
Sleep difficulties are so common in modern American culture, that sub-maladies (we're talking not even about the primary difficulties of sleep, but sub-disorders) have their own television commercials. I was on an airplane the first time I saw a commercial for Restless Leg Syndrome, and I thought I was watching a spoof. I tapped my wife on the arm, laughing out loud, and said, Hey, Check this out! She goes, No, that's real. I want to say, with deep compassion, that just because a population of people have a given symptom, and a pharmaceutical has been created that suppresses that symptom, doesn't mean that what is being treated is actually a problem, or the source of the problem. Restless Leg Syndrome is not a thing. Sedentary American syndrome is a thing. Dys-regulated Autonomic Nervous System is a thing. While we are not anti-pharmaceutical, the orientation of Restorative Practices is toward the source of illness, not masking of symptoms.
Neurobiologically, there are 10 centers in the brain that keep us awake, and 2 that put us to sleep. Although we've always been doing it, sleep is in many ways a fragile enterprise. In new mothers, hormonal changes take place after birth that sensitize a woman to the sound of her infant's cry. This is a biological imperative: the mother needs to awaken to check on the infant.
In order to sleep well, we have to down-regulate our threat responses, and a culture where most people spend most of their time in a fight or flight response isn't good at this. There are also a great many common-sense things that we can do to disrupt or support our sleep, and that many of us don't really think about. These generally fall under the category of what sleep specialists call Sleep Hygiene.
In this modern era, we also need a category for technologically-driven sleep disruption. So any list of sleep hygiene must include recommendations like Don't sleep with your Phone! I know what you're thinking. Gabriel, how can you say that? My phone has an app that is supposed to help me sleep. My phone has a sensor that goes on my wrist that measures my sleep. Yep.
Gentle reader. Lest we here, at the Restorative Practices Alliance, reveal too quickly our ancestral technology bias, we will remind you that humans have been sleeping for 2 million years without the aid of iPhones. For much of that time, most of us did not have sleep disorders. What follows is a list of general sleep hygiene recommendations. Do with it what you like:
1) Use your bed for sleeping, and sleep-related activities. Don't watch TV in it. Don't work in it. Don't eat in it.
2) Ask yourself- What else is in my bed that might be disrupting my sleep? I remember reading this on a sleep questionnaire, and it was the moment of the Larson cartoon where the technician understands the problem. At the time, my daughter was three years old. She was in my bed, disrupting my sleep. Predictably, at about two am, she would wander into our bedroom, where my exhausted wife and I would place her between us. For the next five hours, she spun in circles like a helicopter, raining random blows across my face, throat, and body. Every so often I would hear my wife cry out Ouch, or wake up when a tiny toenail raked my nostril. I remember the glorious moment when we realized we didn't have a sleep disorder, we had a Daughter Disrupting Our Sleep Disorder. At different times, we've also had a Cat Disrupting Our Sleep Disorder, and less frequently (because they aren't noctural) a Dog Disrupting Our Sleep Disorder.
3) Don't use your phone as an alarm clock. Buy an analog alarm clock. Put your phone to sleep in another room. In addition to the blast of blue light it will shine in your face at 3:37 am when you check it because you can't sleep, you will also find yourself thinking about the text message from your boss that you didn't mean to see, but couldn't avoid when you checked the time. Banish that adjectival device to another room.
4) If you can't sleep, don't stay in bed. Get up. Sleep doctors recommend this. No one dies of insomnia. (In 2012 I didn't sleep for 37 days. You go crazy long before you die of insomnia. I know this sounds tongue-in-cheek, and I'm not making a joke about mental illness. What I'm saying is that when we aren't sleeping, we often get really distressed by this, and we freak ourselves out. I'm just gonna tell you that not sleeping for a night, or two, or three isn't going to kill you. You won't enjoy it, you won't be performing at your best, you shouldn't drive heavy machinery. But don't worry about it. Instead, do something constructive. Go read. Listen to a book on tape. Meditate. Practice self-compassion. Ask yourself why you don't think you are sleeping.) Prior to getting married, I didn't sleep for four nights. This was in 2004. I was, and am, totally in love with my (at the time) fiancée, and I had no idea what was going on. Our families were arriving in town, we were making final arrangements for the wedding, and I didn't feel nervous about it–I wasn't having doubts, or second thoughts, but I could not sleep at all. This went on for three nights, until finally, I was pulling my hair out. I had tried smoking weed, meditating, taken every herbal supplement I could think of. At about 3 am, as I was literally banging my head against the bed, my fiancée woke up and said, What's wrong. I told her I hadn't slept for 3 days. I told her I didn't know what was wrong with me. That I'd tried everything. That I didn't know what to do. It was like I couldn't help myself. It was like nothing I did by myself made me feel alright. I just didn't understand it. I knew we were getting married, and that meant that my life was going to be different from this point forward, and that I wouldn't be independent in the same way, but inter-dependent with her. And I didn't know what that meant, or how that was going to feel–because I'd never had this experience before. I was just feeling so alone. She wrapped me in her arms. I felt her hand on my heart. That's great, I said. That feels really nice, but aren't you going to help me sleep? Shouldn't we do something. She snuggled up to my neck. I love you, I said, but instead of just lying there, could you help me somehow? And then I started snoring, apparently. That's what she told me the next day. There are probably multiple morals of that story, but here: if you can't sleep, don't trip. Often there's a good reason we can't sleep, and if we can address the source of the problem, sleep will spontaneously resolve.
For more helpful, and perhaps patently obvious tips on sleep, watch the video above.
Related Practices:
Good sleep is related to so many things: stress, our relationship with technology, proper sleep hygiene, diet, exercise, our ability to self-soothe. On the organization side: Tidy Up your Nest. On the diet front: Proper Nutrition, Eat Seasonally, Don't Drink that Stuff. On the mindfulness front: Quiet Your Mind, Meditate in Nature, and Meditation. Learn to Create a Restorative Ambiance. Align your schedule with that of the natural world.Photography: | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.