You guys, choosing a topic to write about today was hard. I know the top ten biggest changes I’ve made in my life, but I have no idea how to rank them in ascending order.
I’ve already written about water (“How to Change Your Life, sent 12th September), personal care (“Be a sexy, smelly animal”, sent 19th September), and fasting (“Fasting: Punishment or Reward”, sent 26th September).
From here on, it’s tough to know which change made more impact than another. Each is a massive needle mover. So I’ve decided to pick one at random, and the one I’ve picked is sleep.
I think I’ve been subconsciously avoiding writing about sleep because it’s such a cliche when you talk about wellness and health.
I even avoided putting it on my top ten list initially. (I had to merge yoga and movement into one email to make the space. Haha.)
I also doubted I could add anything to the super important and very serious science that’s been done on the topic.
We all know that we need more sleep, better quality sleep, and distraction-free sleep. Right? Put your phones away an hour before bed, have a bedtime routine, blah blah blah. We KNOW this. (Whether we do it or not is another matter entirely.)
What changed my mind and made me write this email? It’s been my Awareness Journaling Practice. (A daily guided journaling practice I invented and have been using for the past year).
Sleep is one of the metrics I track in my practice, and what I have learned about sleep over the twelve months of paying attention to my own has completely overtaken what I learned about sleep in the 42 years prior.
First, a little backstory. Anyone who had the fortune of travelling with me during my influencer ‘heydays’ would have heard me talk about sleep.
Entire itineraries would revolve around my sleeping schedule, specifically my requirement for eight hours of sleep a night. I would talk about it during the day, track my hours obsessively, and tally my sleep each morning. Depending on whether I hit the magic number, I would either go through my day rested and relieved or anxious and unsatisfied.
Gratuitous travel selfie, Switzerland.
My attachment to sleep was an unconscious thing, but I believe it came from a deep knowing that I was already anxious enough without adding sleep deprivation to the equation.
(I also didn’t know I was anxious for most of my life, but that’s an entirely different story).
Going through pregnancies and raising babies has been a massive lesson in what my body is capable of, too. There have been times over my baby-making years when I genuinely thought that I would go crazy from lack of sleep. It didn’t help that I refused to ask for help, rarely napped, and was more attached to the number of hours slept than to how I objectively felt after I woke up.
Nobody is as tired as a new, first-time mum trying to “do it all”.
Regardless, sleep has been on my radar for most of my life.
So, almost a year ago, when I created and started to fill out my Awareness Journal (my one-year anniversary is on 9th October), I included two sleep metrics: hours of sleep and quality of sleep.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
If I don’t get enough good-quality sleep, I will not give myself a fighting chance to feel good the next day.
I can’t stress that enough. It’s been my biggest lesson.
I am NOT GIVING MYSELF A FIGHTING CHANCE to feel good.
Lack of sleep or poor quality sleep causes me to wake up with my nervous system already activated—usually in fight-or-flight mode.
When my nervous system is activated first thing in the morning, it is very, very easy to partner it with anxious emotions – like anxiety, stress, worry, fear, unease, dread, impatience or variations of anger.
All of this happens quite subconsciously. And it happens before I even open my eyes.
Because my body is already activated, and its emotional state doesn’t feel good either, it’s a slippery slide into unhelpful thought patterns, too.
I call them patterns because we all have patterns of thought that we developed in our formative years, related to our core beliefs and subconscious stories about ourselves and the world. I don’t pay any more attention to my thoughts these days than I do to the news. Thoughts are not real. They’re only there to keep you where you are. I’ll share more about this during my free webinar in November. (Information coming.)
So I know that when I wake up tired, I usually also wake up in a fight or flight and anxious emotional states, and my early thoughts often go something like this:
What time is it? I have to get up. What do I have to do today?
Followed by a methodical jigsaw puzzle of everything I want to accomplish into a mind calendar.
Starting my day with an anxiously put-together mind calendar means this:
- I never get to be present all day because it’s all just list-ticking.
- I don’t get to tap into my intuition and give my body or mind what it craves, so I spend the day disconnected, disassociated, and disembodied.
- If anything interferes with my expectations for the day, I feel a deep sense of frustration and am way more attached to getting it all done than to surrendering to what’s going on around me.
- I’m completely tunnel-visioned. I’m only focused on the things and the DOING.
BONUS: when I’m really, really tired, I also like to add more things to my day and list so that I can feel really, really extra bad.
Nine times out of ten, when I’m having a rough day, bad sleep is involved.
This pattern of thought and behaviour is an old one for me. I’ve operated like this for most of my life because it stirs up the flavour of childhood when everything was rushed and stressful.
On a good day, I can recognise the thought pattern as it first arises and say, “No, thank you.”
On a good day, I can notice anxious emotions and easily regulate them.
On a good day, I can recognise the signs of a dysregulated nervous system and bring myself back into parasympathetic mode with yoga, breathwork, or somatic movement.
When I am tired, it is very, very difficult to do any of these things. I become unconscious. I get into survival mode. The slither of separation between my thoughts and my awareness of them narrows into nothingness.
And even now, with all my work and awareness, I can lose entire days to this energy and get through on autopilot, feeling dreadful the whole way.
(I can also still catch myself in it and do what needs to be done. Unfortunately- often, the only ‘self-care’ that can truly get me back to my centre is a nap.)
So, knowing what I know about my patterns, you better believe that good quality sleep is high on my list of priorities each day.
And it’s easier said than done because I co-sleep with my youngest, and I’m still breastfeeding throughout the night.
So how do I do it?
Well, I do the cliche things. Obviously. They’re a cliche for a reason.
I put my phone away after dinner.
I don’t bring my phone into the bedroom at night. Ever.
I have an evening routine. (Well, the kids’ routine is also mine—bath, pyjamas, books, story, song, cuddles.)
And I go to bed when the kids do!
Urgh. This last one has been a struggle for me for so long. Years ago, I used to go to sleep at the same time as Makia and felt so much turmoil over it. I felt like I “should” use the opportunity for some adult time, to connect with Dreamboat, or to get some stuff done. I felt bad every night when I drifted off at 8 PM.
Nowadays? I don’t give a fraction of a shit! I unapologetically tuck myself up at 7:15 and rarely fall asleep after 8 PM. Because I know that I need to get enough good quality sleep to give myself a fighting chance to feel good. That’s a powerful incentive!
I’ve also noticed another interesting thing about MY sleep that might be playing out in YOUR life without your knowledge.
My sleep times are dramatically affected by the moon.
When the moon is approaching full, I usually have 2-3 nights of broken or shorter sleep. I’ll either wake during the night or wake really early and not get back to sleep.
I commonly sleep for 6 hours or less on at least one night close to the full moon and still feel perfectly fine. There is just more energy around at that time of the month.
On the flip side, when the new moon is approaching, I usually have 2 to 3 nights where I sleep for 10 hours straight and still struggle to get out of bed the next morning.
My body needs more sleep at this time of the month.
I also:
Sleep less in summer and wake up much earlier,
Sleep more in winter and wake up much later,
And I need a touch more sleep when I’m menstruating.
All of these observations just help me recognise that we work in cycles, too. I don’t need to stress out because I only slept for 6 hours on the full moon or get into a story that I’m going to have a bad day and feel anxious—that easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By being in touch with myself and my sleep needs and prioritising what I need at all costs, I have so much more space, resilience, and capacity each day. I use it to create this very intentional, joyful life.
On the days when I’ve been particularly unsettled due to sleep circumstances beyond my control (also called children), I’m unapologetic about doing what needs to be done to come back to myself. I’ll take a sleep-in, a nap, or ask Dreamboat to take the kids somewhere far, far away.
If none are an option, I’ll release attachment to everything on my list. I’ll tear up the mind calendar and leave it blank. I’ll instead focus on very nourishing practices, nutrition and tasks.
Alternatively, if I need energy for something I can’t get out of, I’ll change my state using one of my many practices – loud singing, aggressive dancing, energising breathwork practices, interval cardio training or otherwise.
(Although I try not to force my energy high when it is naturally low too often as it can burn me out.)
I’ve been on some tangents. And said many words, as I am known for doing. Let me summarise this entire email into one pertinent statement. And I’ve already said it more than once. Here is your takeaway:
- If you don’t get enough sleep, you are not giving yourself a fighting chance to feel good.
Don’t you want to feel good? Then do whatever you need to do to prioritise good-quality sleep.
Do what YOU need to do to make this happen. Adjust your bedtime. Be conscious of technology and content consumption and how they impact your sleep. Be conscious of what you’re eating, drinking (or imbuing in any way) and how it impacts your sleep. Be conscious of the lunar cycle and how it impacts your sleep. Be conscious of what you personally need—this differs from person to person. Just be conscious, alright?
And sleep.
Gratuitous paparazzi shot of Dreamboat and I sleeping in Zimbabwe, pre-kids.
Now and again, I will go on a spectacular self-sabotaging mission and stay up until midnight watching “Too Hot to Handle” on Netflix. And you know what? I know I’m on a spectacular self-sabotaging mission when I’m doing it. I’ll do the work to figure out why I’m self-sabotaging, but I just want to hate myself a little for that evening. So I do. We all go backwards. It’s okay to go backwards. But let it be a rare deviation, not how you live your life.
Give yourself a fighting chance to be happy. To be AWAKE. To be ALIVE. There is so much to be alive for when these patterns and bad habits no longer rule your life.
I love you,
Lauren xx
P.S. The day I wrote this email’s draft, I went on a spectacular self-sabotaging mission and stayed up until after 11 PM reading. Of course, my daughter chose to come down with a fever that night, and we were up at 5 AM the next day for a full day of mothering—no daycare. I could quite literally only laugh. The universe is always teaching us a lesson.
**Originally published to my email database on the 4th of October, 2024**
Subscribe here.
