SLEEP FOR YOUR LIFE

Try to live a less stressful life, and you will sleep better.  Be willing to lose some sleep once in awhile; it’s not a life-threatening problem, and if your mind keeps racing it is probably telling you to slow down.  —  Ernest Callenbach, from Living Cheaply with Style 

Last week I lost a friend and a teammate. We played together in college, and more recently at the Masters level this summer. He had been having severe problems sleeping well for nearly a year, and it was hurting him badly. Finally he came to the point where he couldn’t take it anymore, and he took his own life.

He was a good man, a monster of a water polo player, and a well-loved husband and father. I don’t know what kind of help he had for this. I didn’t have any idea what he was going through until after it was too late. Unfortunately he didn’t feel that he had any options left.

I’m writing this week’s column in his honor, and in the hopes that maybe what I say here might save somebody else the kind of torment he went through – and the kind of grief and agony his family will be going through for a long, long time to come.

I’ve had times of not sleeping well for a week or two running, and I know the feeling of having little or no positive feelings because of it. It’s horrible. I can’t imagine what it must be like to experience this for months or years at a time.

Compared with previous generations, we get about 20% less sleep than we used to. Chronic lack of sleep is connected with stress, depression, anxiety, anger, poor performance at work, and dangerously drowsy driving. It is also connected with health problems such as obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and heart disease.

If you average only 4 hours of sleep a night, it affects your brain as though you had not slept for three nights in a row. As central as diet and exercise are to good physical and psychological health – and they are huge – good sleep is at least as important.

But there are things that you can do if you’re having sleep problems. There are some nutritional things that I’m sure somebody could suggest here in the forum (or see the note by Jack below), but that is not my expertise. If you’re not sleeping well, here are some things that you can do behaviorally that can help:

–          Don’t drink alcohol before bed.

–          Close the computer and turn off the TV a couple of hours before you go to bed.

–          Develop a calming ritual before bedtime (not TV or drinking).

–          Cut back or eliminate caffeine.

–          Read a familiar fiction book that you’re fond of to help you relax and settle in to sleep.

–          Practice purposefully relaxing during the day:

• Meditate for 20 minutes/day
• Do progressive relaxation (tense and then relax each part of your body one by one)
• Slow your breathing to 4-6 breaths/minute for several minutes

–          Keep a diary of your sleep patterns; pay attention to when you sleep and when you don’t. What’s the difference? Are there any patterns that you can see? Of the hours you spend in bed, what percentage are you actually sleeping?

–          Have a regular bedtime, and a regular waking time – don’t change that for the weekend.

–          Don’t exercise close to bedtime.

–          Do exercise earlier in the day.

–          If you have worries, write them down. If you have things to do the next day that you are thinking about, write them down. If you have problems you are trying to solve, write them down. Let them go for the evening, knowing that you have written them down and can get back to them the next morning.

–          Remember that the middle of the night is the most pessimistic time for many people. If you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re trying to figure out or solve a problem in bed, remind yourself that you’re not likely to solve anything at that hour, or in that situation. Write it down and let it go for the night. If you can’t let it go, move to the next two steps below.

–          Your bed is not for solving problems, it’s for sleep and intimacy with your mate. If you’re doing anything else in bed like problem solving or ruminating or watching TV, either stop doing it, or get out of bed and do it somewhere else.

–          If you’ve been trying to go to sleep for more than 20 minutes, get up and do something boring – read a boring book, clean the house, make up socialist slogans, anything that is likely to make you groggy.

–          Read my column, Sleep Like a Hobbit. If you wake up in the middle of the night, it doesn’t mean that you’ve blown your night’s sleep. We naturally have two cycles of sleep; relax, read a bit of your favorite familiar fiction book, and settle into your second sleep. It’s the anxiety of thinking that you’ve blown your night’s sleep by waking up that causes a lot of the trouble for people at that point of the sleep cycle.

–          Sleep deprivation can become a chronic cycle of worry and anxiety. It can become a conditioned response that fuels itself, so you can end up feeling anxious that you won’t sleep well, and then that anxiety keeps you from sleeping well, and then you get more anxious that you won’t sleep well… Find a way to break that cycle, using some of the suggestions on this list.

–          Whatever it is you’re worrying about, remind yourself that sleep is more important than any of it, and that you’ll be better able to tackle the problem effectively having slept reasonably well.

–          If you wake up ruminating, dispute the negative thoughts and worries (Know Your ABC’s).

If this has been going on for a long time, and you’re feeling the kind of awful torment that can come from serious lack of sleep, eliminate all of the stress and anxiety in your life that you possibly can. Change your lifestyle to accommodate a low stress routine.

If your work is causing you the stress that is costing you sleep, stop doing it – find something else that you can do. If you need to downsize in order to afford to lower your stress, do it. The stakes can be high enough that you may need to make a choice between your present lifestyle and your health… or your life.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it will give you some things to try. Everybody’s different, so what may help one person may do nothing for another. Just keep trying them to see what helps you, and keep practicing what works, even if it helps only a little bit.   If there is one action that I would most encourage you to take, it is this:

If you need help, ask for it.

Tell somebody, get a medical evaluation, talk about it, let people know. Trust me, there are people who love you and care about you, and they will want to know if you’re in trouble. They will be happy and honored if you would ask for their help.

Do what you need to do to get the sleep you need. It is an essential but underappreciated ingredient in a healthy, happy life; and sometimes it can even be necessary for life itself.

*Note by Jack Wheeler:  I’d like to thank Joel for such a tribute that will help many others.  I’d also like TTPers to be aware of two nutritional formulas developed by my genius friends, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw.  The first is SleepScape. It is not designed to put you to sleep, but to enable you to sleep more efficiently.

One of the worst sleep problems is waking up in the middle of the night, your brain starts ruminating about problems, and you can’t shut your brain up and go back to sleep.  SleepScape provides your brain with nutritional support to prevent this.  It does a lot more for your sleeping brain – see both links above (the second is the actual product).

In addition are their Serene Tranquility formulas.  For sleep, you want either Night with Tryptophan, or Night with 5-HTP – see the links to determine which may be best for you.

I’ve been using SleepScape for a while now (it just came out), and it works really well.  Combined with one of the Serene formulas, even better.  All of Durk & Sandy’s formulas are produced by my friend (and TTPer!) Will Block’s company, Life Enhancement Products.  

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