Unquiet Slumbers: The Stress of Sleep

Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.
Thomas Dekker

The inability to have restorative sleep is the result of taking stress to bed with you. With a few exceptions, such as sleep apnea or a large animal on your chest, most sleep disturbances are simply daytime disturbances that want to stay up all night and party. During my personal struggles with anxiety, bedtime was something to dread. The desire and need for sleep stood there like the twisted opening of a Halloween fun house just daring me to step inside. Nightly, I lived with the basic truth that if you want to destroy sleep, start thinking about it. Obsession breeds exasperation, and exasperation is not a good bed partner. Exasperation hogs the covers and has very cold feet.

The subtle trick that the mind plays on itself during the dark hours is to convince itself that it can now solve the problems that eluded it during the day. The brain begins to lay out ideas like Reese’s Pieces in front of E.T. The promise is "just one more and then you can rest easy, you will have figured this out." The "this" can be anything from restructuring your stock portfolio to planning the layout of your garden. The mind’s efforts would be comical if a sense of humor wasn’t one of the first things to go when you are really tired. Attempts to stop the dripping faucet of thought usually end up the way most amateur plumping projects do; a bigger mess to deal with than when you started.

It is a huge irony that most of us sleepwalk through our waking hours only to feel so completely wired during the period where we actually give ourselves permission to be unconscious. This twist of the natural order is behind the no-sleep cycle. The key to a good night’s sleep is tied directly to the quality of your waking hours. While many of us roll out of bed, very few take the next step of conscious awareness. The great teacher Anthony de Mello was famous for chiding his listeners to "wake up!" His message was that many of us slumber through our daily lives and then wonder why we find ourselves in such dire straits. If we can introduce even a modicum of mindfulness to the daylight hours—really participate in the act of living, moment by moment—our night hours can only respond positively. If one has been truly present in the events of the day, there is no need for the mind to try to balance things out at night.

Waking up to your life is not a mental process, it is a spiritual one. This means allowing your entire being to experience the wonder of the world around you. Resist the urge to figure out everything; you are way too tired for that. A mindful day does not stir up the mind to such a frantic pace that it continues to whir throughout the night. When you put the body to rest at the end of a mindful day, the brain rests easy after being allowed to carry on its usual functions without the constant ego interruption . When you stop getting into bed with every unresolved issue, every nagging concern and every constant reminder that there was something you could or should have done, you will finally rest in peace.

The next time you find your mind tossing and turning under the blankets of unquiet slumbers, turn your attention to your breathing. When you focus on this natural process, the raging river of thoughts slows down to a trickle. If the mind shows up with the critique of "that breathing sounds a little irregular to me, I’m sure it’s a sign of a lung disease that needs to be checked out on Web MD" it simply means that your attention has drifted away. Bring it back to your breath and the next thing you know you will be throwing your pillow at the alarm clock as it tries to motivate you to start your day. Or, in my case, you will find a dog on your chest who is eagerly awaiting your conscious presence to come and fill her food bowl.