“A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book.”
-Irish Proverb
Our bodies have a lot to tell us about what’s going on with our lives. If we can still ourselves and learn to read the messages we have a tremendous ally in unwinding the difficulties of our life. It’s just that sometimes, in the busyness of our days, our bodies need to raise the volume to break through.
The story our sleep has to share with us is a particularly powerful ally. It’s one of the clearest stories we have. We can’t use our willpower to change how our body reacts to our desire to sleep. If we’re awake at 2 in the morning, we’re awake.
I posted a few weeks ago about sleep (click link) as the first part of what insomnia might be trying to tell you. In this post we’ll dive deeper into the messages.
But first a caveat – there are a number of forms of sleeplessness that can be managed with the help of your doctor. If you feel like you sleep through the night, but don’t feel refreshed in the morning, check first with the people you live with. There may be something they can share with you about your sleep habits.
If a housemate complains about your obnoxious snoring then it’s time to talk to your doctor about sleep apnea. There are new therapies in this area that are much less intrusive. Narcolepsy (falling asleep during the day), sleep terrors (like sleep-walking), and REM behavior disorder (vigorous movement when you’re dreaming) will also be evident to observant people around you.
If you’re painfully aware of your lack of sleep then it’s most likely that you’re dealing with plain ‘ole vanilla insomnia. What you’ll notice is that you either have trouble falling asleep or you wake up in the middle of the night.
Angela Hobbs has written an excellent book about all the factors that work against getting a good night’s sleep. She has laid out the subtle sleep irritants that are so engrained in modern life that we don’t even see them anymore.
You can’t fall asleep
Your body doesn’t think it’s time to sleep until your cortisol levels drop down and your melatonin levels rise. If your cortisol is high, then you won’t achieve that “cross over” and you’ll be lying awake until it happens.
Angela calls this a bad night of good sleep. The good news is that when you do nod off you are cycling through all the levels of sleep that repair your body and build your brain. The bad news is that your alarm is ringing before you’ve gone through enough of them.
Your mind re-sorts and organizes the events of the day and lays them into memory during the REM sleep of later cycles. Those are precisely the ones you’re running short on. During the day you may find that your mind is disorganized and you are less productive. You have more problems with memory or absorbing new skills because your brain isn’t integrating your daily learning into solid neural patterns.
There are two reasons this may be happening:
- You’re not be giving yourself enough time to wind down for sleep. Be kind to yourself and unwind your day earlier!
- You may be a night owl. We each have our own rhythm of life and we operate best when we can follow it. Our perfect morning wake-time is hard-wired and there’s nothing we can do to change it.
You sleep lightly and toss and turn
Angela calls this a good night of bad sleep. You are having the evening and morning hormone crossovers, so you are falling asleep and waking at a reasonable time. But you are close to wakefulness for a lot of the night and small disturbances will bring you back to consciousness. During the day this will show up as a lowered immune system because you’re not getting to the deep, restorative levels of sleep.
Reason: All too many
If there’s light in your room and your melatonin levels aren’t high then your body temperature may stay higher and you won’t drop into the deeper sleep cycles. If you chronically stressed then your cortisol may not lower enough to drop you down into deep sleep. The hormones crossover, but your cortisol level doesn’t dip as low as it used to and your melatonin level isn’t as high as it once was. There may be disturbances in the environment, like noise, light and electrical signals that excite your nervous system and prevent deep sleep.
If you wake up for longer periods in the night, that is a different kind of insomnia called psychophysiological insomnia. You may have a tendency to worry or be very aware of “dangers” in your environment. Something may have happened recently that is causing you more stress than usual. And then you worry about whether you’ll get to sleep and stay asleep. In a sense, you have trained yourself to have a bad night’s sleep in your own environment.
There are a few tip offs if this is happening to you. You’ll find that you can’t turn the worry off regardless of what you say to yourself. The worry train comes along and you can’t help yourself to stay off. You find that your muscles are stiff during the day and you get headaches easily. But most importantly, you can sleep well in other situations, like the living room couch or a hotel room.
Here’s what you can do
Practice some hormone balancing routines in the morning and evening.
- First thing when you wake up, get as close as you can to some sunlight. Stand by the window and soak up the sun or go outside for a walk. Getting light to your pineal gland will turn off the production of melatonin and set you up for a normalized hormone cycle for that night.
- In the evening develop some specific self-soothing routines to drop your cortisol level lower before you go to bed. Close down the electronics by 9 pm, start turning off the lights and do something peaceful for two hours before you turn in.
- Take a brisk walk after dinner and before you start your soothing routines. This will help lower the cortisol built up during the day.
- If you try this and start to fall asleep within 10 or 15 minutes, case closed. If not, your natural circadian rhythm may be different from what how your life is arranged and you’ll discover that you’ve been fighting it for years. But that’s a story for a different day.
Image: I Love Sleeping by bixentro. Licensed under Creative Commons
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