Fast Asleep, Wide Awake: Discover the secrets of restorative sleep and vibrant energy

Ouch! Please don’t throw this book at the wall. Trust me, I do know what it feels like to not sleep and feel as if you’re the only person in the world awake at 2 a.m. It’s horrible. But I am going to show you how to change this and more.

As I’ve already said, the root cause of any sleep problem is not just about sleep, as there’s The Real Work that needs to be done. Invariably, by working with the unique FAWA formula you’ll likely to get to the point where you have to do and want to do The Real Work. You’ll arrive at the true meaning of your sleep problem and the work then brings about healing in your life (and in turn you sleep better).

If right now you can’t even imagine that your sleep ‘problem’ could be a blessing, can I ask you, just for now, to hold this thought at the back of your mind … a gentle possibility perhaps? Here are some real-life examples:

The woman who couldn’t get to sleep or stay asleep due to supporting her husband through his brain cancer treatment. Doing The Real Work she became aware of her relationship with perfectionism and control. She learnt how to safely feel and express emotions. She learnt how to embrace uncertainty.

The university student who suffered from nightmares and sleepwalking. Doing The Real Work she became aware of her relationship with perfectionism and control. She is learning how to be still and accept herself.

The professional athlete who couldn’t sleep before a big game because he kept mentally replaying his failure when he should have been sleeping. Doing The Real Work he became aware of his relationship with perfectionism and control, and how it hindered his ability to perform at his best. He is learning how to deal with failure and visualise success.

The 38-year-old city worker who was exhausted and burnt out from overworking. A near disaster brought him to my clinic when he fell asleep while standing at the top of the stairs – he was holding his three-month-old daughter at the time. Part of his pattern of overworking was related to his worry that he wasn’t good enough so he felt the need to prove himself. Things weren’t good at home too and his wife was finding motherhood very difficult. He was carrying the full weight of his wife’s problems on his shoulders. Doing The Real Work he became aware of his relationship with perfectionism and control, and is working on self-acceptance and self-esteem. He is learning about boundaries in his personal and professional relationships.

The 50-year-old investment banker who lost his way in life, despite having accumulated significant financial success. He was taking seven different types of medication to quell his anxiety, settle his stomach, control his pre-diabetic condition and cholesterol levels and help him sleep. Doing The Real Work he became aware of how much he had been living in misalignment with his personal values. He is finding meaning and purpose and discovering what true happiness means for him.

The HR manager who couldn’t switch off from the demands of her day. For over a year she had been waking in the early hours worrying and finding it hard to get back to sleep. Doing The Real Work she became aware of her relationship with perfectionism and control. She is learning how to manage the boundaries in her relationships at work and home, and how to manage her tendency to over-give at the expense of her own energy. She is building self-esteem and self-acceptance.

The accountant who, after months of sleep deprivation and running in survival mode, was signed off with stress and exhaustion. Doing The Real Work he became aware of his relationship with perfectionism and control. He is finding meaning and purpose.

Are you surprised to see how often ‘relationship with perfectionism and control’ comes up? Virtually everyone who comes to see me has something going on with his or her relationship with themselves. How they see and speak to themselves. Not feeling good enough. Not loving or even liking themselves. This might have made them successful in many ways – the fear of not being good enough drove them hard, but it came at a cost – they ended up sleepless and exhausted. Later I am going to show you how this absence of self-acceptance and self-love transfers into your sleep, creating a rigidity and inability to accept support. More importantly, I’m going to show you how to fix it.

These 10 beliefs form the philosophy behind my work as a sleep therapist and the FAWA formula. I know you need quick results so here’s a summary of how the formula will lead you from surviving to thriving.

The FAWA Formula

Fast Asleep, Wide Awake is in four parts to reflect the tried-and-tested FAWA formula I use with clients and patients whether in my consulting room, in group therapy or in an auditorium. By using the formula you can start to revolutionise both your sleeping and waking hours, and this is how we roll:

Part I – A Shift in Awareness

Understand what has been going on with your sleep by taking a Personal Reality Check, which consists of the same questions that I would ask you if you were sitting in a consulting room with me and will help you understand your sleep and energy. You may be surprised how simply taking this assessment will bring about a shift in your awareness that will immediately start to influence how you sleep.

Part II – The Energy Clean Up

Apply what I call the ‘5 Non-negotiables’ (5NNs)3 (#litres_trial_promo) to recalibrate your nervous system, clean up and free your energy. These five simple but powerful strategies are unique to my work, will very quickly begin to affect your sleep and energy levels – sometimes within just 72 hours of using them – and begin to lay the foundations for the sleep and energy tools to come.

Part III – Fast Asleep: Creating Pure, Deep Sleep

Next you’ll be ready for the Pure Sleep Programme to help you refine and deepen the quality of your sleep, and make way for healing and further energy optimisation. The tools here range from small and practical changes that you can make immediately (the Essentials) to the Deeper Tools, which work on the innermost level to bring about even more profound changes, which will also affect your waking hours.

Many of the Deeper Tools are based on Eastern philosophy on energy cultivation and health, and so incorporate yoga, chi kung (qi gong), breath exercises, visualisation and mental imagery, affirmations, mantras and more. These techniques work on the factors that influence your sleep at the innermost level. Some of them may be new to you or seem somewhat more esoteric than the more functional tools in Part I, but I simply ask that you try a few of them with an open mind and note how they affect and enhance your energy and wellbeing. What have you got to lose?

Part IV – Wide Awake: Doing The Real Work

In this Energy for Life Programme I share techniques and principles that I have been teaching people, as well as practising myself for a number of years, and as such have been rigorously tried and tested. These exercises and tools will help you to tap in to the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy you need to create something more of your life. Be prepared to go deeper with this section.

You might feel tempted to dive straight into the sleep and energy programmes but I ask you to trust the process and go through each of the four stages in turn. As you’ll discover in the following chapters, I’ve developed and fine-tuned the FAWA formula over many years and each step is vital in creating that transformational sleep–energy balance. Therefore, waking up and cleaning up your energy in Parts I and II is a prerequisite to rediscovering the energy you’ll need to get the maximum benefit from the programmes that follow in Parts III and IV.

Warning: Side effects from using the four-stage FAWA formula will include finding peace, inner safety and calm amidst the chaos. You may also find that somehow, for some reason, you simply feel less busy although you still get a lot done. Be prepared because you may also begin to experience more happiness and joy.

A New Way of Living and Thriving

I believe that we are in the midst of a very significant time in our evolution – a time when the old ways of being, doing and living are no longer working for us and, if we try to keep doing it the old way, we risk simply burning out. Technology is evolving so fast and it is forcing us to find different ways to go deeper, our DNA cannot keep up and so what we’re experiencing is a vital step in our evolution, which is responding out of necessity to enable us to do more than merely survive. All the way down to the cellular level and beyond to the microcellular level, changes are taking place in order to enable us to adapt. Strands of DNA, hitherto thought of as junk, are becoming activated and functional to enable us to adapt to a world that’s going faster: to help us think faster, respond faster, live faster. And all due to living in a way that is unnatural to us.

Technology is our greatest drive to evolve – it’s a gift.

Nature has given us a way in which we can do this through the magical process of sleep but we need to understand it and learn how to do it in a way that will enable this vital transformation to take place.

The FAWA formula will help you to sleep well but it goes far beyond this. You will learn how to tap into energy that will enable you to start truly living and evolving. I hope that the fact that you’re holding my book in your hands means that you are ready to work with me: that you are sick of feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and surviving; that you long to slide effortlessly into pure, deep sleep from which you wake up with the energy to face life.

I’ve had the immense privilege of being able to help so many people and I continue to do so. I never stop feeling grateful for this, nor do I ever take this for granted. I say thank you every day and several times a day. I am now ready to share what I have learnt.

Chapter 1

Getting Ready to ‘Be the Change’ (#ulink_10ecd5f8-728a-540a-97bf-0e6d17aaaed2)

‘If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.’

Albert Einstein

Possibly the hardest part of learning to sleep deeply and living vibrantly is acknowledging that something needs to change. You need to change. And change can be painful.

If you know anything about behaviour change you’ll already know that it takes a certain amount of time to break a habit and to form a new one – usually about 21 days. Cultivating the right frame of mind by being in a state of receptiveness enables that change to happen more easily and starts to take hold immediately. So before you embark on your mission, you may find the following helpful in preparing your body and mind to becoming the change you seek.

Slow Down and Prepare to Sleep

Slow down as you read. This is not an exercise in speed-reading. Every now and then put the book down and just allow the words to sink in, so that you start to integrate the techniques simply by reading them. This in itself will bring about the softening that is needed for deep sleep to take place.

Prepare to sleep even while you’re reading this book. By this I mean, lighten up, drop your shoulders and relax. So many sleep/energy problems are simply due to us trying so hard. To give you an example, when I demonstrate breathing techniques I often observe how – before even starting the exercise – the person will sit bolt upright with an intense look of concentration on their face, jaw clenched, shoulders hunched and, in one case recently, right on the edge of her chair while gripping the seat – as though she was just about to set off on a race!

Stop trying so hard. It is this same rigidity, and desperate bid to control, for perfection, to get it right … that often stops us sleeping in the first place.

Gentle Discipline

You may find that you’ll need to exercise some gentle discipline and give up old ways of being to restore your sleep–energy balance because I’ll be asking you to make some changes to your daily routine that may feel uncomfortable or unaccustomed.

Now if you were a teen coming to me with sleep problems, I might have something different to say. I might remove the word ‘gentle’ from the equation (sometimes I need to be a little tough in order to help bring about changes). I might have to crack the whip to get the electronic devices out of the bedroom in order to help them clean up their act and establish healthy, sleep-conducive routines and habits, as this is what is called for in this situation.

However, I can only ask that you find a balance between applying gentle discipline and strong willpower to make these powerful tools work for you. Are you the perfectionistic, driven, teeth-grinding control freak or a floppy teenager? Forgive the labels but I’m exaggerating for the purpose of illustration. My point is, find your own balance point.

If you decide that a gentler approach is needed, how do you go about this because this stance might be completely alien to you? Well, the first thing is to relax your grip on the goal. I understand that if you haven’t been sleeping and you’re exhausted, you’re desperate to see some results. You might tell yourself, ‘I hope this works.’ I recommend a subtle shift in mindset in which you become curious rather than goal-focused and you say to yourself, ‘I wonder what will happen if I do this?’ Do you see the difference? The latter is softer, more open to whatever happens – and that’s exactly what is needed to sleep.

Learning to Listen Deeply

For many people listening is a lost skill. In our noisy world we’ve become so used to living on the surface of life, talking but not really listening, watching but not really seeing, hearing but not really understanding, and because of this we stop feeling too.

When you slow down, you listen and feel what your body is telling you.

When you listen deeply you might start to discern that what you need is to get up and move, rather than have that cup of coffee, or to eat something nourishing, rather than continue sitting there staring at the computer screen. You might spot when your mind is producing a continuous stream of unhelpful thoughts, which are driving even more tension and rigidity into your body. This state usually only becomes apparent when you get into bed at night when you might start to think, ‘Where did that come from? I thought I was feeling fine a minute ago.’ You might start to notice that, even though you’ve been consumed and overwhelmed with the worries of your life, there are also a few (and actually maybe more than a few) gifts that you’d stopped noticing – that you’re taking for granted and have stopped seeing.