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

I realised a long time ago that one of the most important aspects of my job is really helping people to listen and notice deeply – to become more conscious. I emphasise the word ‘deeply’ because, if we can get to a place of deep listening and noticing, then a kind of magic starts to happen and we start making the right, the most intelligent, choices. I don’t mean exam-passing, credential-attaining intelligence but a more inward-focused body-mind intelligence that starts to steer us in the best possible direction – deeper sleep, more energy and better life choices.

Breathe Deeply

So right now I invite you to wake up your ability to listen deeply. This is the first, vital step to becoming more conscious.

1 Sit comfortably. Place both feet firmly on the floor. Straighten up and breathe deeply into your belly and exhale long and slow.

2 Imagine sending that exhalation out through the lower half of your body and out through your feet. Breathe back in feeling your belly expand outwards.

3 Repeat the first two steps, but this time with your eyes closed. And now feel into your body. Is there any tightness or any rigidity? Feel your body … listen to it … what does it want? What is it telling you?

I was surprised when I did this simple breathing exercise while writing these words. I took my hands off the keyboard and followed my own instructions. I found myself leaning back a little and stretching the front of my chest, and as I did so I heard a little click as tension was released from my breastbone. (I didn’t even know that was there.) I opened my arms, as if stretching my wings, and felt a blissful stretch in my shoulders and upper back. (I didn’t even know my shoulders and back were tense.) I found myself releasing a sigh, ‘AAAAHHH.’ Now that I’ve straightened up and opened my eyes, I find I can breathe slightly more deeply. And I’m feeling somewhat more focused and relaxed at the same time.

Maintain a Relaxed State of Focus

Keep doing this as you read. Keep working on the art of listening deeply and noticing. You will find that you start receiving more and more ‘data’ from your intelligent body. And you’ll begin to find that you are more able to understand exactly what this data is guiding you to do.

Beware of resistance and protest – you may read something and think, ‘This is something I’ve never done and could never do.’ Strangely, this might be the very thing that you do need to do.

Imagine yourself in a vision of what you want to create – see yourself getting into bed and melting gratefully, without resistance, into a deep, nourishing sleep. See yourself waking in the morning, again with gratitude for the sleep you’ve had. See yourself moving with energy to meet your day with open heart and mind.

Chapter 2

Discovering the FAWA Formula (#ulink_858c4d3a-015e-5622-bd12-9a1cd0f3938d)

‘All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.’

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The FAWA formula isn’t something I learnt from a textbook or studied at university. Sure, I’ve studied for degrees and read a lot of books, but what I’m going to share in the following chapters comes from an inside-out approach that brings together several strands: academic studies, professional research and observations from my work. Much of my work is intuitive, perhaps because I have also been my own patient, and often I have found myself knowing something and then, with great relief, and sometimes years later, find the scientific evidence and data to validate what I have always known.

However, it was a lecture on homeostasis – maintaining internal balance and constancy – that finally woke me up to my life’s work. At the time I wasn’t quite sure why this particular lecture was worth listening to, but later, as I struggled to maintain a sense of balance in my own life, it all became clear.

At the time I was studying for a Doctorate in Physiology but, I guess like many students, I struggled to get out of bed in the morning and was more intent on having a good time. Even back then, I knew it was possible to sleep with your eyes open.

This time, I didn’t fall asleep. Instead I was entranced by the lecturer’s words as he spoke about how every biological process in the body – temperature, appetite, cellular fluid balance, breathing, heartbeat and the sleep–wake cycle – oscillates around a set point, following a sinusoidal up and down rhythm, as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: The natural rhythm of physiological processes

The more I studied (and paid attention), the more I became fascinated by how intricately and intelligently the body works to create balance, even in rapidly changing external conditions.

A few years down the line, I found myself in a City of London health-screening clinic measuring the physiology and wellbeing of lawyers, bankers and other corporate employees, and this was when things started to change for me and the FAWA formula was born.

Righting the Balance

I loved helping people to understand what was going on with their sleep patterns and energy levels, showing them how the world was impacting them and what they could do to stay in balance, offering reassurance and hope. I was particularly interested to notice that what I measured in the lab didn’t quite match what l learnt in my academic training; there was a mismatch between the theory and the practice.

My measurements seemed to indicate that people attending the clinic were overusing their fight-or-flight system or sympathetic nervous system (SNS). In other words, living as though they were in perpetual survival mode. Breathing patterns and respiratory measures, electrocardiogram traces, blood tests and even body fat levels (called ‘trunkal thickening’ to diplomatically describe a thickening waistline in response to stress) all provided data about how life in the speedy City was creating imbalance in the human physiology.

This was at a time when technology was increasing at an exponential rate as the Internet, mobile phones and email had just exploded on to the scene. Everything and everyone was accelerating. Our physiology was being stretched to its limits and I was seeing this in real time in the measurements I was taking in my lab.

Helping my clients to learn to keep up, adapt, and stay healthy and sane while going at this pace, I was fascinated to measure the changes in their physiological data when they came back to see me three months later. When they took my advice and used the FAWA formula, I saw how it made a measurable difference – even though they were just making relatively small changes. A grateful CEO asked me to develop a programme for his team that could be delivered in their corporate offices to teach his staff what he had learnt in clinic. I called this workshop ‘Managing the Pace’ and within a year I had feedback from over 1,000 employees who had attended it.

It seems to be the small changes that make all the difference to our lives.

Since then I have shared the same formula in corporate auditoriums speaking to hundreds of people hungry for solutions to their sleep problems and exhaustion. As technology advanced, I found myself working virtually and globally across time zones and continents, sometimes sitting in my office at home and helping people around the world to get better sleep and to break out of the fatigue cycle.

Among my ‘well’ clients I also worked in a psychiatric clinic, helping those suffering with a host of mental illnesses including anxiety, depression, addictions, eating disorders, work-related stress and burnout, and my sleep and energy programmes soon became the most rewarding area of my work. Not only because I was helping people to find a way out of the most seemingly desperate of circumstances but also, perhaps, because I had once been a patient at that very same clinic years ago.

Waking Up

The seed of the FAWA formula comes from my personal journey.

The truth is that even while doing well academically and professionally, my personal life was shambolic. I was racked with fear and drove myself hard, all the time feeling that I really wasn’t good enough and worrying that I’d be found out. Sleep was a big issue and I was plagued by insomnia, lying in bed at night tortured by my own thoughts. In fact, it was this crazy sleep pattern that inspired the title of my first book, Tired But Wired.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have energy – but it was the wrong kind of energy: buzzing, hyper, anxious and restless, on edge and running in survival mode. At university, my friends thought I was the life and soul of the party, not realising that often my ‘gaiety’ was a big act, masking fear and insecurity, that would later plummet into depression and exhaustion when on my own.

I had a sense that things weren’t right but felt powerless to change anything. Why was I this way? My childhood hadn’t been easy or stable at the best of times, so perhaps this was partly responsible for my restlessness and inability to settle to sleep. I know it caused my mother great heartache – she even took me to a doctor when I was six months old because I wouldn’t sleep. But my earliest memories are of being a bit odd, not quite fitting in, sensing so much but not being able to articulate how I was feeling – and fear, which seemed to pervade my life.

A life-changing moment came in 1998 when, in a state of despair, I travelled to Australia for six months. I didn’t really have a plan but knew I had to get away from everything – a clinical label that I didn’t believe, a marriage that wasn’t working, therapy that didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere, medication that wasn’t making any difference. Here everything slowed down and my view of life changed. Suddenly everything became very clear to me. I could see that the choices I’d been making had kept me stuck and created dis-ease in my mind and body. In this brief moment I also found something within me – a refuge and stillness – and from this place I was able to see life differently and make profoundly different choices. I can only describe this as coming home, or touching God. Whatever it was, I surrendered and let go, and from that moment my life changed.

Deepening the Learning

After this awakening, I began to learn about balance and life, but in a different way to the way I’d been taught in conventional academia. What I’d been feeling and sensing suddenly began to make sense, and as if by magic, as I learnt more, opportunities to teach others from my experiences started turning up.

The most significant shift was in my relationship with fear – which had been blocking my happiness, my energy and life force, and stopping me from sleeping – and as I learnt how to sleep deeply and balance my energy, so my work with others deepened and flourished. I was so excited about these changes in my life and how I was feeling that I was hungry to learn more. I devoured books on healing and Eastern philosophy. I read about energy medicine and physics (a favourite subject at school), and the work of medical practitioners and doctors such as Dr Deepak Chopra and Dr Lissa Rankin who had both turned to holistic practices to bring about healing in their own lives and their patients. I attended workshops and seminars and experimented with different types of yoga and meditation. As I learnt I continued to heal myself and my own life, I took this learning into my work and delighted in finding new ways of bringing exhausted, sleep-deprived cynics (those corporate auditoriums) along with my thinking.

When I started delving deeper into the Eastern sciences, I began to get very excited by what I was learning about energy (probably because of my own personal challenges to manage my own energy). Western science and physics had taught me that energy was ‘the physical capacity to do work’ but in the ancient texts I started to learn more about life force energy.

Our life force, our energy, sits at the centre of our lives, enabling us to realise our potential, to achieve, to do whatever we need to do to get through the day and more, to be well and healthy and free of disease. When this energy is vibrant, it enables us to be the best that we can be. When we’re wide awake and filled with this life force, living just seems so much easier. We can cope with life’s challenges and demands. We make better decisions and more informed choices, acknowledge what is possible, sort the wheat from the chaff and get through our days feeling bright and in control.

Living with extraordinary energy fuels every day with more happiness and joy.

We can now measure this energy, as the Russian-born physicist Dr Konstantin Korotkov – a pioneer in the field of human energy measurement – has developed highly innovative technology for measuring the life force of all living organisms, including plants. His Gas Discharge Visualisation (GDV) technology has identified that all living things have an energy field that is measurable and is affected by their environment, external forces and influences.4 (#litres_trial_promo) GDV technology is now being used in Russia for medical diagnostics and increasing numbers of clinicians are using it in everyday practice. Now it is also being used in more than 40 countries for research and for the analysis of human energy fields. What this tells me, and I hope it makes you excited too, is this:

Our life force not only exists but we can supercharge it by applying the Fast Asleep, Wide Awake formula.

How the FAWA Formula Works

Starting in 2010, and looking over the data from thousands of clients, I began to see a clear pattern of how my clients and patients were overcoming their sleep problems to finding the energy to truly engage with life. I noticed that whether I was working face to face in my consulting room or with hundreds of people in an auditorium, healing seemed to follow the same five-step formula:

Step 1: Shifting Awareness

The first step of the formula is focused on helping you understand what is going on with your sleep and your energy. This stage of my work often brings about a shift in awareness, which is crucial in being able to take responsibility and make different choices. In Tired But Wired I describe this as the ARC of transformation:

awareness

responsibility