Lots of people today sleep very badly. I sleep a lot better and more now but I do always wake up at about 2am and fuss for about an hour. I read this today - that tells me that this is quite normal. How about you?
Our anxiety about sleep can stop us from sleeping well - also naps are good and normal!
"The data suggests that if you go back 100 years, people were sleeping an average of nine hours a night," Dr. Naiman says. "People also had a very different relationship with sleep at that time. Sleep patterns were very different. It was routine that people woke up in the middle of the night for about an hour or two. It was called night watch. Everybody did it. People also slept during the day.
Think of the Yin and Yang; the white wave representing in this case waking; the dark Yin wave representing night and sleep. There is a dark Yin sphere within the white wave. This is a place of rest in the middle of waking consciousness and natural rhythms. In the middle of the dark Yin wave, there is a place of Yang, a white sphere suggesting that there is a place where awareness, a kind of waking, awareness in the middle of the night.
When we lose sight of that, we overreact to two things. We tend to overreact to being sleepy during the day, and we tend to overreact to being awake at night. And overreactions cause anxiety."
To Nap or Not to Nap…
According to Dr. Naiman, we're actually biologically programmed to nap during the daytime, typically in the middle of the afternoon. Some European countries still adhere to the daily siesta and close shop for a couple of hours in the middle of the day when the heat is also at its most pressing. Most employers in Western countries, however, do not accommodate daily snoozing, so when the natural tendency to get drowsy sets in, you may try to alleviate it with coffee, or simply fight the urge to take a nap.
The problem is, you're now training your body to resist the urge to sleep, which can then lead to being unable to easily fall asleep at night.
"Also, in the middle of the night, when we falsely assume that any kind of awareness is pathological inside, people get up and go, "Oh crap, its insomnia." I've asked hundreds and hundreds of people over the years… "What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you wake up in the middle of the night?" The most common answer I've gotten over the years is, "Oh, shit." People wake up and they curse their wakefulness."
However, as Dr. Naiman explains, occasional waking in the middle of the night, perhaps as many as five times, is actually completely normal. You may pull up the covers or fluff your pillow, then go back to sleep.
"[But] when we learn this automatic judgmental reaction to wakefulness; as soon as there is a spark of it and we judge it, we spin out," he says.
Another common reaction is to look at the clock.
"Patients have actually said to me, "Gosh, I wake up, I get exactly 2:20 every morning." …It's the first thing people—they want to anchor in waking consciousness. They want a sense of control over this ephemeral night consciousness. This addiction to numbers is the problem.
There are nuances with sleep just as there are with waking. There are so many different ways of being awake, different kinds of experiences. Light sleep is fine. Being half awake and half asleep is fine. In fact, I really believe that in any moment in time during the day and at night, it's a mixed percentage. Right now, you and I are talking; we're probably 98 percent awake. I'm just making up a number. There is a restful part of us. We might say we're 2 percent asleep. Closer to bed time it might be 50/50.
What we call being sleepy is being 'part of awake, part asleep.' In the middle of the night when we get up to use the bathroom, we might be 95 percent asleep still and 5 percent awake just to find our way there. We need to allow a mix of these different forms of consciousness."
