4
Sleepless in Seattle—and Everywhere Else
Life sucks when you’re tired.
More than 40.6 million Americans—that’s more than one-third of the adult population—have some trouble sleeping at night, according to the CDC. These issues range from restlessness to severe clinical insomnia. For some people, insomnia looks like lying in bed, fighting to go to sleep while lists from the day and plans for tomorrow rattle around in their brains. For other people, insomnia means having trouble going to bed at all, instead spending their nighttime hours puttering around the house or scrolling through social media because they can’t get their brain and body to power down together. And for still others, insomnia is a series of short bouts of almost falling asleep before suddenly being pulled out of it because the lyrics from their fourth-grade chorus recital suddenly rise to the surface and refuse to be quieted. There are countless other ways that sleeplessness can present itself, and they’re all maddening.
When I was “living my dream” on Broadway, every night became a battle for me to fall asleep. Every night as I tried to sleep, some combination of anxiety, screwed-up circadian rhythm, and adrenaline from that night’s performance pumped through my body. I would lie in bed for hours, wide awake yet desperate for rest, knowing every minute that passed would leave me that much more exhausted the next day, when I was expected to perform at the top of my game.
A recent study out of Canada found that people who regularly clocked fewer than six hours of sleep per night suffered from acute impairment in their reasoning and perception, and that the long-term effects of sleep deprivation were akin to those of chronic binge drinking.1 The same study noted that “driving while sleep deprived . . . is the cognitive impairment equivalent of drunk driving.” Is that really what you want as the norm for your life—drunk driving through your day?
We all know that decent sleep is important for physical and mental health. Some of the top NBA players sleep as much as twelve hours a night to rejuvenate. Our parents have drilled that into us since we were kids, first when we started fighting naps as toddlers, and later when we were begging to stay up later to read one more chapter or watch one more show. Did our parents have a self-serving agenda, needing us to go to bed for their own sanity? Most definitely—but that doesn’t mean they weren’t right. Daytime clarity, workplace productivity, longevity, a strengthened immune system, even weight loss—these are all proven benefits of an adequately rested mind and body. And yet even though we all understand the vital importance of sleep, what’s the first place we tend to cut corners when faced with an extra-full schedule? You guessed it—our sleep. We go to bed later, get up earlier, pull all-nighters, and rely on caffeine, energy drinks, or whatever else is available to keep ourselves awake and grind through the day, then barely rest before doing it all over again the next day. I know I’ve been guilty of it, and there’s no doubt you have, too. Why do we continue to do this to ourselves when we know better?
We live in a go-go-go! world that tends to equate resting with laziness, even though we can get much more accomplished at a much higher level in much less time if we approach each day thoroughly rested. We all know it, yet we still think we can somehow beat the system. I have news for you: Nature is a perfect accountant. It’s sort of like a casino: You can try to cheat the house—and you may even get ahead for a little while—but in the end, the house always wins. You can’t short yourself of two hours of sleep per night and expect your body not to notice. In one month, that comes out to more than fifty-six hours of missed sleep. Think about that. If you go to bed one hour later and get up one hour earlier than you should for one month, you’re shortchanging your body almost two and a half full days’ worth of rest.
Plenty of my meditation students tell me their jam-packed schedules don’t allow for a full eight hours of sleep every night. For the sake of argument, I can accept that, but there is something everyone can do to create deeper, more efficient sleep in the time you do have. Care to take a guess at what that thing is?
Sleep vs. Meditation
Scientists used to believe that the brain and body both powered down when a person went to sleep. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when neural imaging became more advanced, that researchers were able to trace how the body and brain interact while seemingly at rest all night.
A normal adult will experience 90- to 110-minute cycles of sleep stages throughout the course of the night. Hooked up to that normal adult’s brain, a scanner will show what looks like a series of hills and valleys as the person’s mental activity rises and falls in predictable patterns during sleep, depending on whether the person is in a light sleep, deep sleep, or rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Scientists have classified these phases of brain activity into various types of “waves.”
As soon as you drift off, eye movement decreases and the brain shifts from its conscious, waking state into one where it produces slower alpha and theta waves. After anywhere from one to ten minutes, the brain suddenly produces a surge of oscillatory brain activity called sleep spindles or sigma bands before slowing down drastically. As you sink into a deeper sleep, the body becomes far less responsive to external stimuli, eye and muscle movement all but stop, and your brain continues to produce slow delta waves until you move into REM sleep. This is the stage during which you may have your most vivid dreams. Your eyes move rapidly despite being closed, and your heart rate and blood pressure both elevate. REM sleep can last for up to an hour before your brain pulls you back up to stage 1 and the sleep cycle begins again. Although scientists still do not fully understand why the brain and body react to sleep as they do, they do know that each of the deeper stages of sleep has various benefits, such as repairing muscles and healing injuries, converting new information in the brain into memories, and processing the previous day’s events.
This shallow-deep-shallow cycle is repeated throughout the night in a near universal pattern among healthy adults living amid the mainstream demands of the industrialized world. Interestingly, however, sleep studies conducted on meditators show that their brains tend to advance quickly through the initial stages from light to deep sleep and then stay in the deeper states until morning.
When you sleep, your mind continues to process information it gathers from your day, which is why we often have stress dreams during particularly demanding times or nightmares after watching scary movies. The brain is filtering through all its recent input and aligning it with the long-term beliefs and structures present in your subconscious. As we already discussed, stress escapes the body in the form of thoughts, since stress originates in the brain. If you have a backlog of stress, which is true for pretty much everyone living in Western society, your brain is forced to use your sleeping time for stress release rather than rest.
Here’s a clearer way to think about this rather abstract concept; it does require some math. Think of this “math problem” as illustrative math, not a scientific study. On an average day, between your responsibilities at work, staying on top of your sales numbers, preparing for the big presentation you have next week, paying your bills, picking up after your kids, and walking your dog, you acquire ten “units” of stress while you’re awake. You go to bed at night and sleep, which is enough rest to burn off seven units of that stress. That doesn’t sound too bad, right? Right—except that you wake up still carrying three units of stress from the day before. Then you acquire ten units of stress that day, which means you’re now carrying thirteen units. You go to sleep that night, release seven units—and wake up with six. Acquire ten more over the course of the day for a total of sixteen, sleep, release seven, and wake up with nine, twelve, fifteen, eighteen. Wash, rinse, repeat. You’ve been doing this your entire life.
See the problem? This stress builds up over time, and sleep, for most of us, has not been an effective enough form of rest to handle the level of demand most of us have been under. This is what leads many people to investigate meditation.
Sleep and meditation are not the same type of rest. As a matter of survival, Nature will not allow both your body and mind to have deep rest at the same time. One or the other must always be on duty. When you are in blackout sleep, your breathing gets deeper to keep your body oxygenated in case a tiger pounces and you need to spring into fight-or-flight mode. When you’re meditating, your body is able to rest while your brain stands guard; this is why it can feel like you become hyperaware during meditation—your brain is staying alert so you don’t become a tiger snack. Sleep is rest for your brain; meditation is rest for your body. You need to have both to thrive, and meditation allows you to do both more effectively. Hee Sun-Woo, a producer in New York City, wrote to me and shared, “I slept through the night for the first time in twenty years after following your methods.” It was a simple shift in his daily routine that paid dividends in rest.
The Fourth State
The three states of consciousness most of us are familiar with are waking, sleeping, and dreaming. However, in recent years, scientists, sleep specialists, and other experts have conducted more than 350 peer-reviewed studies whose results were published in more than 160 scientific journals, and the findings all pointed toward the same conclusion: There are more than three states of consciousness, and meditation is one means of accessing these states.
I call the fourth state “the bliss field”; the more common term for this state is transcendence, but that word has accumulated a lot of different associations and baggage. The original term is turiya, a Sanskrit word for “the fourth” or a state of pure consciousness, wholeness, or union with the source.
Turiya: A hypometabolic state of “restful alertness”; the state of consciousness, unique from waking, sleeping, or dreaming, you enter when practicing nishkam karma meditation. When you are in this state, much of the brain lights up in scans, as opposed to when you are in mindfulness or directed-focus practices, where a smaller portion of the brain lights up but is very bright.
You know that feeling when you’re just drifting off to sleep but are still conscious? Think of that mental place as a hallway. If you pass through one door, you’ll end up sleeping; if you pass through another, you enter turiya. Both destinations lead you to a place of rest, but in one case, it’s rest for the body, and in the other, it’s rest for the brain. It’s actually quite simple, except that we rarely think about the difference between such similar-feeling but vastly different modes of consciousness.
Meditation is like giving a gift to your body—a chance to take some time off instead of requiring it to always stand guard ready to launch into fight or flight to protect your brain and keep you alive while you sleep. When you meditate, your body can stand down and release accumulated stress while your brain becomes hyperconscious.
Meditation Is the New Caffeine
In case you missed it, meditation takes only half an hour out of your day, but it helps relieve you of roughly the same amount of stress as a full night’s sleep. Mathematically, that doesn’t seem possible, but remember that sleep and meditation are vastly different forms of rest.
The state of consciousness achieved in meditation is anywhere from two to five times deeper than sleep. By this estimation a fifteen-minute meditation is roughly equivalent to a sixty-minute nap; completing two fifteen-minute meditations is like giving yourself an extra two hours of sleep. Additionally, because you’re resting your body rather than your mind, your brain can prioritize intense destressing and repairing the body during meditation. You know that feeling when you go into the office on a Saturday, when no one else is in the building—or maybe you just turn off your phone and your e-mail alerts so there are no interruptions clamoring for your attention? It’s a completely different sense of accomplishment and efficiency, all because you don’t have twenty other things pulling you off task while you’re trying to work.
In chapter 10, we’ll discuss exactly how meditation allows your brain to more readily notice subtle differences and detect patterns and themes, which is one of the things that makes you more productive. You can’t eliminate demands from your life, but you can take steps to train your mind to better adapt to whatever comes your way.
And the icing on the meditation cake? You come out of your meditation more alert. There is no “nap hangover” as you try to wake up because you never went to sleep in the first place. Your brain releases bliss chemicals during meditation, not sleep chemicals.
This is also the reason I like to refer to meditation as “the new caffeine.” A lot of people—maybe even most people—use caffeine as a substitute for sleep or as a productivity tool. Need to get moving in the morning? Grab a cup of coffee. Need a pick-me-up in the afternoon? Swig a caffeinated soft drink. All you really need is caffeine, right? Wrong. What you really need is rest.
It’s true that caffeine makes you feel more awake, but not because it gives you deep rest. You feel more awake because caffeine masks the brain’s ability to feel tired.
I used to think that caffeine was nothing more than a mild stimulant that bumped up the nervous system to a slightly higher level, which was the reason it made everyone more productive. But it’s not as simple as that. Caffeine is molecularly similar to a chemical called adenosine, which is the hormone your brain produces throughout the day that makes you feel sleepy and cues you to go to bed when your body is ready.2 When caffeine is ingested, it actually blocks your brain’s adenosine receptors, which means your brain can’t tell you’re tired. That’s the reason you’re able to accomplish more after a dose or two of caffeine. That may sound good, but caffeine is really just hijacking your nervous system.
Now, blocking those receptors in your brain is not bad for you in and of itself—that is to say, it’s not hurting you while it’s happening. But when the caffeine wears off and leaves those adenosine receptors open, all the adenosine your brain has been producing while you were rocking your caffeine high comes flooding in. This is what creates the crash and leaves you reaching for a second, third, or fourth cup. As John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, says, if you’re reliant on caffeine, your energy is not your own.
Caffeine synthetically stimulates neural activity in the brain. When your pituitary gland notices this increase in neural activity, it thinks there’s some sort of an emergency happening, so it triggers your adrenal glands to start releasing adrenaline. Since adrenaline is the number one stress chemical that gets released when you launch into a fight-or-flight stress reaction, caffeine is putting your body into mild crisis mode, and with it comes all those jittery side effects we discussed back in chapter 1. In short, caffeine artificially excites the nervous system.
I want to be very clear here: I am not saying you should never drink coffee again—I actually enjoyed a cup or two of Bulletproof coffee myself in the writing of this book. I just want you to make informed decisions about any mind-altering substance you put in your body. If the pros outweigh the cons for you, then enjoy. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that caffeine is giving you energy. It’s not.
Can caffeine make you more productive? Sure. But it’s only a temporary boost. That’s why meditation is such a superior alternative. Rather than looking to external sources and ultimately depleting your adrenals, it provides a sustainable and renewable resource of energy within yourself for as long as you continue your twice-daily practice. Like caffeine, meditation will make you more productive, but it does so in a very different way: through a form of rest that is exponentially deeper than sleep, and in a manner that de-excites (rather than stimulates) your nervous system.
When you allow your mind and body to become more naturally in sync, you can decrease (or even eliminate) the amount of synthetic stimulation you previously required in order to feel fully awake and productive. Because you’re not masking your brain’s request for sleep but are instead developing an ability to rest more effectively, you’re setting yourself up for much more productivity in the long run. By stopping the biological depletion cycle that has become the norm in our culture and replacing it with a self-sufficient means of elevating your personal and professional performance, you’re laying the groundwork for a more engaged, creative, rested, and healthy version of yourself to emerge.
Imagine a world where meditation stations are more common than coffee shops!
Ziva Case Study 3
Insomnia No More
To say that I had a troubled relationship with sleep before I began my meditation practice would be an understatement. I would stay up late knowing I had to be up early. I convinced myself that anxiously replaying my day over something I said or didn’t say was how I processed things.
I would doze off, only to wake up in varying degrees of anxiety a few hours later. In the middle of the night, I got my second wind. Wide awake, I would begin piddling around my apartment, checking e-mails, reading, showering. By the time I finally got to bed in the early morning hours, I was frustrated with myself, knowing I only had a few hours of sleep ahead of me.
With the buzz of my alarm, eyes half open, I’d groggily survey the scene: my bed in shambles, pillows strewn on the floor, my body in a completely different location from where I had begun the night. Every morning I woke up feeling more tired than I’d felt when I went to bed the night before.
Working with Emily’s techniques changed everything.
Now my sleep is so intensely deep that I have to set myself up for success before I even get into bed: The lights must already be turned off, my sheets pulled back, and my body positioned in just the right spot. Why? you ask. I now fall asleep so quickly and so deeply that wherever I land is where I stay until morning. When I wake up, it looks as if no one was even in the bed.
I had heard miraculous stories of people curing their insomnia overnight. I eagerly anticipated the surge of energy and clarity I heard friends describe after beginning meditation.
That was not my immediate experience.
I couldn’t believe how exhausted I was. I was irritable, my body ached, and I fought to stay awake more than three hours at a time. Each day I would walk in and take my seat, and within thirty minutes, I’d be knocked out. I basically slept through the entire course and then some. Thankfully, I was off from work that week and able to luxuriate in a sixteen-hour-a-day sleep schedule.
But this was not the magical experience I had signed up for. Where was my surge of energy and clarity? What about my damn bliss? I remember going up to Emily after one of the classes and asking, “Why am I sleeping for sixteen hours straight? I can’t do this forever—I have a job. I have a life.”
What I was experiencing was the unstressing that Emily had spoken about. It was intense. My short temper and fatigue made even my mom question whether meditation was a good fit for me.
Within a week and a half of twice-a-day Ziva time, I was sleeping a solid eight hours. The following month, I found myself naturally going to bed earlier and waking up much, much earlier. I’m talking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, refreshed and ready to greet the day hours before my alarm clock went off. In fact, I didn’t use an alarm for the next three years. I was sleeping only four to six hours a night and experiencing sustained and focused energy all day long. When I would feel a slight dip in energy late in the afternoon, it was my body telling me it was time for my second meditation.
Now, five years into my twice-daily sittings, I need about eight hours a night in the winter months and only four to six hours in warm weather. I rarely feel tired. Meditation has given me the freedom to enjoy the kind of deep rest that can only be experienced with a relaxed nervous system. My well-rested nervous system has trained my body how to receive and integrate energy from sources other than sleep: sunlight, nourishing foods, quiet time, inspiring conversations, and meaningful connections.
Sleep was just the beginning of my meditation life upgrade. Getting to the chair twice a day every day has shown me how to show up more fully and authentically in every area of my life. Meditation has given me the clarity and confidence to make big strides in my career and positively transform my relationships with family, friends, and money. Sharing the gift of meditation is one of my favorite things.