Sleep & Grow Rich

There are a zillion hacks for beating sleeplessness. Drugs and counting sheep are just two of them.

My take on this is a little different.

For one thing, and this is the main thing, you’re simply not tired enough to drift off into blissful slumber.

Yesterday, leaving our kids to their homework, my wife and I set off to visit a museum we frequent, usually with them in tow. This sojourn introduced its own stresses and satisfactions.

Would we have enough to talk about, just the two of us? That notion made our trek feel like a first date.

Would we only talk about our kids, thus diminishing the “date-ness” of the escapade?

We had a nice drive in. Sadly, an uninspired docent guided our tour. She had her pick of the “highlights” of the collection and yet she chose the most uninspiring pieces to share.

Adding to the disappointment, when she asked for our input, my wife offered hers, which was a brilliant comment, but shunned by she who asked for it.

This induced my lovely to whisper, “Let’s ditch the tour,” which we did, forthwith.

On the drive home we stopped to buy some specialty foods at a store we don’t have in our neighborhood. I had to deftly evade a runaway bunny on the freeway, and then we went to the beach, adding our kids for the occasion.

I jogged and they surfed.

By the time we made dinner, around 6:00, I was tired enough to hit the sack. I was seriously bushwhacked, between the tensions of the outing and the powerful headwinds I fought as my feet pounded the chilly autumnal sand. I mentioned this to my wife, whose drooping eyelids fluttered in agreement. She was spent, too. Of course, 6 PM was too early to retire as sleeping in mid-evening portended middle of the night insomnia. So, I waited until 9:00, and I had no problem drifting away.

I awoke around 2 AM for a half hour, did some reading, and went back to bed until 8:00.

Yep, that means I got about 11 hours of shut-eye.

I said I was tired!

And this is the point. Wear yourself out. Take a long ride. Visit a museum. Then hit the waves or the sand.

This was my prescription for exhaustion, and of course, you don’t have to replicate it, jot for jot.

But there are things you can do that match this list of activities. But note that word, activities.

When we reduce it to a single term, we were active!

We got out. There was tension, drama, physical activity, between driving and seeing the passing landscapes, and walking around the cavernous museum buildings.

The topper was the ocean visit, which by itself would have taken a pleasant toll. But that, added to everything else, and making and serving dinner did us in.

Trying to sleep when you’re not tired is a big mistake. Yet it is something people do all the time.

Erroneously, we believe we can turn off our consciousness the same way we turn off a bedside lamp. One click or snap of the fingers and we’re out like a light, but clearly sleep doesn’t work on command.

We don’t command it. It commands us.

When we’re tired enough, it overwhelms us.

One sign that sleep is stalking me is when my eyes tear-up for no reason. They water so much that I have to wipe away the excess moisture.

“You want to stay awake?” the Sleep Monster mocks. “Then try doing it with blurry eyes that refuse to clear!”

At that point, it’s simply easier to succumb than to resist.

And what happens after that? What sort of sleep do I experience?

Well, it’s usually blackout sleep. Dreamless until awakening, I’m dead to the world for a long, uninterrupted span.

It’s also refreshing.

Let me repeat what Mr. Miyagi admonished his young protégé in the movie, Karate Kid, “There is no ‘try’ in karate.”

You can’t force it. What Miyagi didn’t explain is the fact that when we try too hard to do anything, we set into motion opposing forces. These create the equivalent of friction.

Bruce Lee noticed when most new martial artists want to punch faster, they “muscle-it,” pushing too hard. That actually slows down strikes and kicks instead of speeding them up.

We engage opposing muscles that prevent us from optimally impacting the target.

Say you want to sleep, telling yourself you desperately need it. You’ve shorted yourself on this vital repast for a few evenings or even weeks of months, and you simply must have it. Now!

That’s forcing matters, and it backfires.

How does forcing yourself to drink glass after glass of water, feel? Not so good, is it?

Forcing any naturally occurring bodily function typically produces nasty side effects.

And yet we still command ourselves to sleep.

I realize there are sleep gurus that hawk the benefits of selecting a sleep time, and then sticking to it. Supposedly, this is a means to achieving a minimum quantum of sleep every day.

But what if you’re not tired when the appointed hour arrives? That ship can’t leave the dock until you’re fully on board.

So, what happens? You notice you’re not sleeping “on time.” This goal isn’t being attained, leading to frustration, and that leads to more wakefulness.

A vicious cycle of unwanted sleeplessness is inaugurated, leading to the question, “What’s wrong with me?”

To most questions, the simplest answer is usually the best and most accurate. This principle is called, Occam’s Razor, if you want to look it up.

“I’m not sleeping because I’m not sleepy.”

That is a perfectly reasonable, utterly simple, and generally applicable explanation.

You don’t have a problem. You’re simply not tired.

Your body knows it, but your conscious mind fights against it. So, what does your mind do?

It devises a way to exhaust you, if you’re not going to get up and expend yourself in a more constructive or congenial way.

Then you worry. Worrying is an exhausting endeavor. It burns calories. It makes your heart pump faster, keeping you awake.

Finally, you give up on getting to sleep. This may take the form of bolting upright and bouncing out of bed. You might decide to clean the house or put your clothes on hangers.

Soon, you’ll be doing the stuff that will tire you out. And because you are no longer striving for sleep, or as Mr. Miyagi would say, because you stop trying, you relax enough to hit the sack harder, faster, and without resistance. You’re back to where you should have been to begin with.

When you put head to pillow your amount of exhaustion should be such where you’re surrendering to the inevitable. You have so little conscious energy left that you have none available to wage any resistance.

As a wise sage, Jane Roberts put it in The Personal Sessions, Book 4:

“To solve a problem you begin to minimize its characteristics, diminish its importance, rob it of your attention, and refuse it your energy. The method is the opposite, of course, of what you are taught. That is why it seems to be so impractical.”

Fighting non-sleep only adds to its influence over us. That which we resist, persists.

Turn your attention to other things.

Pick up a dictionary. Turn to a random page. Select the first word you see. Read the definition.

Go on to the next. Let your mind wander. Muse over meanings. Let thoughts cascade through your awareness, darting here and there.

Savor words you’ve heard, but you never had a meaning for.

Appreciate how you’re learning with no specific impetus for completion and no time constraints.