Of all the things we do on a regular basis, sleeping is one of the most extraordinary and least appreciated. Imagine: once a day, on average, we lie down on a comfortable surface and leave our bodies for hours at a time. It is sacred time too. We are very attached to sleeping, and we almost never consider giving up some sleep on purpose to accomplish personal goals. How many times have you heard people say, “I need my eight hours or I’ll be a basket case”? And if you suggest to people that they might get up an hour earlier or even fifteen minutes earlier to make time to do other things that they value but have no time for, you will find lots of resistance. People feel threatened when you tamper with their sleep time.
Yet ironically, one of the most common and earliest symptoms of stress is trouble with sleep. Either you can’t get to sleep in the first place because your thinking mind won’t shut down, or you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. Or both. Usually you toss and turn, trying to clear your mind, telling yourself what a big day you have tomorrow, how important it is to be rested, all to no avail. The more you try to get back to sleep, the more awake you are.
As it turns out, you can’t force yourself to go to sleep. It is one of those dynamical conditions, like relaxation, that you have to let go into. The more you try to get to sleep, the more you create tension and anxiety, which wake you up.
When we talk about “going to sleep,” the language itself suggests “getting somewhere.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that sleep “comes over us” when the conditions are right. Being able to sleep is a sign of harmony in your life. Getting enough sleep is a basic ingredient of good health. When we are sleep-deprived, our thinking, our moods, and our behavior can become erratic and unreliable, our body becomes exhausted and we become more susceptible to “getting” sick.
Our sleep patterns are intimately related to the natural world. The planet turns on its axis once every twenty-four hours, giving us cycles of light and darkness, and living organisms seem to cycle with it, as seen in the diurnal changes known as circadian rhythms. These rhythms show up in daily fluctuations in the release of neurotransmitters in the brain and nervous system and in the biochemistry of all our cells. We have these basic planetary rhythms built into our systems. In fact, biologists speak of a “biological clock,” controlled by the hypothalamus, which regulates our sleep-wake cycle and which can be disrupted by jet travel, by working the night shift, and by other behavior patterns. We cycle with the planet, and our sleep pattern reflects this connection. When it is disrupted, it takes us some time to readjust, to get back to our normal pattern.
A seventy-five-year-old woman was sent to the Stress Reduction Clinic with a sleep problem that had started a year and a half previously. She had also had a recent onset of hypertension that was under control with medication. She had been employed in the public schools and had retired ten years before. She reported that most nights she just wasn’t able to sleep and would spend the whole night “perfectly comfortable, not restless” but awake. Her doctor had prescribed a very low dose tranquilizer to help her relax, but she still thought of the medication with “fear and trembling.” She tried it a few times, taking half a pill. It did help her to sleep, but she hated taking it and stopped. She came to the Stress Reduction Clinic hoping she could learn to sleep better without depending on medication.
She did. She kept up the meditation practice faithfully throughout the course. She didn’t like the sitting meditation because she said her mind wandered too much, but she loved the yoga and did it every day, much more than we required. By the end of the eight weeks, she was sleeping, as she put it, “marvelously” every night, and was very pleased with her ability to do it without medication.
If you are having a lot of trouble sleeping, your body may be trying to tell you something about the way you are conducting your life. As with all other mind-body symptoms, this message is worth listening to. Usually it is just a signal that you are going through a stressful time in your life and you can expect that if and when it is resolved, your sleeping pattern will improve by itself. Sometimes it helps to look at how much exercise you are getting. Regular exercise, such as walking or yoga or swimming, can make a major difference in your ability to sleep soundly at any age, as you can discover by experimenting for yourself.
Sometimes people get caught up in thinking they need more sleep than they really do. Our need for sleep changes as we grow and is known to diminish as we get older. Some people can function well on four, five, or six hours of sleep per night, but they may feel that they “should” be able to sleep longer.
When you can’t sleep, you might try getting out of bed and doing something else for a while, something you like doing or that you might feel good about getting done. I like to assume that if I can’t sleep, it may be because I don’t need to be sleeping just then, even if I really want to be. When I have trouble sleeping, the second thing I do is meditate. (The first is toss and turn and feel upset until I realize what I’m doing.) If I don’t manage to fall back asleep after a time, I get out of bed, wrap myself up in a warm blanket, sit on my cushion, and just watch my mind. This gives me a chance to look carefully at what is so pressing and agitating that it is keeping me from peaceful sleep. Alternatively, I might just assume the corpse pose lying on my back in bed and practice the body scan.
Sometimes meditating for a half hour or so in this way will calm the mind to the point where you can go back to sleep. Other times it may lead you to do something else, such as work on a favorite project, make lists, read a good book, listen to music, take a walk or go for a drive, or just accept the fact that your mind is simply agitated, upset, angry, fearful, or whatever it may be in the moment and embrace it in awareness without having to do anything with it. The middle of the night is also a good time to do yoga if you happen to be up, although that might wake you up even more.
To handle sleeplessness in this way requires that you recognize and accept that, like it or not, you are already awake. Catastrophizing about how bad your day is going to be because you’ll be so exhausted if you don’t get back to sleep doesn’t help—and may not even be true. You just don’t know. And forcing yourself to try to sleep doesn’t help either. So why not let the future take care of itself, especially since the fact is that right now you are already awake? Why not be fully awake?
As was mentioned briefly in the Introduction, mindfulness practice comes primarily out of the Buddhist meditative tradition, although it is found in one form or another in all contemplative traditions and practices. Interestingly enough, there is no God in Buddhism, which makes it a very unusual religion. Buddhism is really based on reverence for a principle, embodied in a historical person known as the Buddha. As the story goes, someone approached the Buddha, who was considered a great sage and teacher, and asked him, “Are you a god?” or something to that effect, to which he replied, “No, I am awake.” The essence of mindfulness practice is to work at waking up from the self-imposed half sleep of unawareness in which we are so often habitually, but not inevitably, immersed.
We tend to function on automatic pilot so much of the time that it might well be said that we are more asleep than awake, even when we are awake. In Walden, which is really a rhapsody to mindfulness, Henry David Thoreau said: “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.”
If we make a commitment to ourself to be fully awake when we are awake, then our view of not being able to sleep at certain times will change along with our view of everything else. Whenever we happen to be awake in the twenty-four-hour cycle of the planet’s turning can be seen as an opportunity to practice being fully awake and accepting things as they are, including the fact that your mind may be agitated and you are unable to sleep. When you do this, more often than not, your sleeping will take care of itself. It just may not come when you think it should and it may not last as long as you think it should, or it is more broken up than you think it should be. So much for “shoulds.”
If this approach sounds radical to you, it might be valuable to think of the alternatives for a moment. There is a multimillion-dollar industry built around drugs to regulate sleep. This industry is a testament to our collective loss of homeostasis or allostasis, to how widespread this single example of the disregulation of our basic biological rhythms is. Many people regularly rely on pills to help them to get to sleep or to stay asleep. Control and regulation of their natural internal rhythms and cycles are given over to a chemical agent to restore homeostasis. Shouldn’t this be the recourse of last resort, after all else has failed?
In the Stress Reduction Clinic, we put a lot of people to sleep, not that we mean to. It’s just that the body scan can be very relaxing. If you do it when you are at all tired, it is amazingly easy to fall asleep rather than to “fall awake,” even though falling awake is the basic invitation of the body scan in the first place—to drop into a condition of open and relaxed awareness as we visit and inhabit each region of the body in turn. This is why some people have to really work at staying awake through the entire body scan, and maybe even practice with their eyes open, or even sitting up. Some people may not hear the end of the CD for weeks. Some are even “out” by the time they reach the toes of the left foot, which is where we usually start, or by the left knee for sure! When we practice together in class, the instructor’s guidance is sometimes punctuated by snoring. That brings a lot of smiles and giggles, but it is only to be expected. Most of us are sleep-deprived to one degree or another, and when we get at all relaxed, the tendency is to go unconscious. So we have to learn how to fall awake as we get more and more relaxed. But it is a learnable skill, and a very valuable one at that. It just takes practice, practice, practice.
When people come to the clinic primarily for help with sleep problems, we give them explicit permission to play the body scan CD at bedtime to help them to fall asleep—that is, as long as they make the commitment to themselves also to use the CD once a day at some other time to fall awake. And it works! Most people with sleep disturbances report a marked improvement after a few weeks practicing the body scan (for one example, see Mary’s sleep graphs in Figure 3, Chapter 5), and many give up their sleeping pills before the eight weeks are up. Homeostasis is being restored, and you can feel it in the room as the weeks go on.
Some people in the MBSR program find it equally effective and easier when they want to go to sleep or to get back to sleep to just focus on their breathing as they lie in bed, letting the mind follow the breath as it moves into the body, and then following it back out all the way and letting the body just sink or melt into the mattress with each outbreath. You can think of it as breathing out to the ends of the universe, and breathing in from there, all the way back into your body.
Let’s think for a moment in a bit more detail about how we manage to “go to sleep” at night. At a certain time, we lie down on a padded surface in a darkened room, close our eyes, and let the mattress hold us as we settle into the sheets. Things start to feel a bit hazy, and hopefully, off we go as delicious sleep comes over us. Because we are so practiced at falling asleep under certain conditions, when we come to practice the body scan, particularly because it is done lying down on a comfortable surface with the eyes closed, we have to learn to travel along the road of deepening relaxation as we settle into the present moment with awareness, wherever we are focusing in the body, and recognize when we are coming to a fork. In one direction lies haziness, loss of awareness, and sleep. As we have seen, this is an extremely good road to take on a regular basis. It helps us to stay healthy and to restore our physical and psychological resources. Sleep is a blessing. In the other direction lies wakefulness, heightened awareness, and deep well-being, outside of time. This is also an extremely restorative condition to inhabit, worth cultivating on a regular basis. Physiologically and psychologically it differs greatly from sleep. The ideal is to cultivate both sleep and wakefulness in your life on a daily basis, and to know when one is more important than the other. They are both blessings, in different ways.
Our great attachment to sleep usually causes us to worry a lot about the consequences of losing sleep. But if you subscribe to the view that your body and mind can self-regulate and correct for some of the disturbances in sleep patterns we experience from time to time, then you can use your sleep imbalance as a vehicle for further growth, just as we have seen that you can use other symptoms, even pain or anxiety, to experience deeper levels of wholeness. But it requires a whole lot of deep listening in your life.
In my own case, I got few nights of totally uninterrupted sleep when our children were little. This meant learning to live with getting up a lot during the night. Every once in a while I would go to bed really early and catch up that way. But mostly my system seemed to adjust to getting less sleep and less dreaming, and I managed quite well during that time.
I think one reason it didn’t exhaust me completely and that I didn’t get sick as a result was that I didn’t fight it. I accepted it and used it as part of my meditation practice. I mentioned in Chapter 7 that I frequently found myself walking the floor at night with them when they were babies—comforting, chanting, rocking—and, using the walking, the singing, the rocking, and the patting to be aware of them as my children, to be aware of their feelings, their bodies, my own body, their breath, my breath, to be aware of being their father. True, I would just as soon have been back in bed, but since I wasn’t and couldn’t be, I used being awake as an opportunity to practice being as awake as possible. Seeing it this way, being up at night became just another form of training and growth as a person and as a father.
And now that our children are long grown up and living lives of their own, there are still times that I find myself waking up in the middle of the night. I sometimes relish them. When I do, I get out of bed and I sit or do some yoga or both. Then, depending on how I feel, I might either go back to bed or work on projects that I want to complete. I find it very peaceful in the middle of the night. No phone calls, no disturbances, especially if I stay away from my email, tempting as it is to check and then get seduced into communicating with the world. That can also be wonderful, especially if done with at least a modicum of mindfulness and joy in connecting with people I want to connect with. But the night offers other gifts too precious to ignore. For one, the silence. The stars and the moon and the dawn can be spectacular and give a feeling of connectedness that you don’t get if you are unaware of the heavens at night. The mind usually relaxes once I stop trying to get back to sleep and focus instead on using the precious gift of these hours to be as present for them as possible.
Of course, people are different and we have different rhythms. Some people function best late at night, others early in the morning. It’s very useful to find out how you might use the twenty-four hours you have each day in the way that works best for you. And you can only find this out by listening carefully to your mind and your body and letting them teach you what you need to know—in the hard moments as well as the easy ones. As usual, this means letting go of some of your resistance to change and experimentation, and perhaps giving yourself permission to get enthusiastic about exploring the unexamined and often limiting conditions of your life. Your relationship to sleep and to all the hours of the day and night is a very fruitful object of mindfulness. It will teach you a lot about yourself if you worry less about losing sleep and instead pay more attention to being fully awake.