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

choices

So an important part of this process is digging deep within so that you can understand why things have become a certain way and, importantly, what you need to do about it, as well as undertaking a personal reality check. You’ll also find how your beliefs can play a significant role in how you sleep. The questions I invite you to reflect on in your Personal Reality Check (see Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)) are the same ones I would ask you if you were sitting with me in a consulting room at my clinic.

Step 2: Cleaning Up Your Energy

This next step is where my expertise as a physiologist really comes into play, and I cannot overemphasise the importance of this stage of the programme.

Often very soon after meeting my client/patient, I can make an intuitive assumption of how their nervous system is running – whether it’s in SAFETY or SURVIVAL mode. The questions I then ask – the ones you will reflect on in your Personal Reality Check – will validate this assumption.

Next I recommend five strategies, the 5 Non-negotiables (5NNs), to be implemented for at least the next 21 days. These five small strategies change the tuning of the nervous system and shift it from SURVIVAL mode to SAFETY mode. Once this vital recalibration has taken place the other sleep and energy tools can be applied to even more powerful effect. Conversely, these tools are totally ineffective if you’re running in SURVIVAL mode.

Another important aspect of using the 5NNs is that when you’re in a state of exhaustion you need some quick wins. You need to experience some positive changes – improved sleep and energy – to keep you moving forwards and to prepare you for the deeper work to come, and this is exactly what this step of the FAWA formula is designed to do.

The 5NNs are simple and doable – important if you’re exhausted and running on empty.

Soon you will learn exactly how to apply these 5NNs, but if you’re feeling intrigued they are to do with:

How and what you eat and drink.

What you do before your head hits the pillow.

Your relationship with information and technology.

Step 3: Refining Sleep Quality and Depth

Once the 5NNs have been applied, your body and nervous system are in a much more responsive state and you’ll be ready to work with the Pure Sleep Programme. The tools in this section range from simple, commonsense and practical Essentials to weird and wonderful Deeper Tools, incorporating techniques that I’ve learnt from Eastern philosophy and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). These techniques are based on sciences that have been around for thousands of years and they really work – I have seen this even with clients who’ve come to me with a lifelong history of sleep problems that has run in the family for generations. (Don’t forget, my original training is as a Western scientist and I am constantly looking for data to support my findings.)

These tools work by activating the branch of the nervous system that enables you to sleep. Your sleep will start to be more refined and deeper. You may still experience occasional sleep difficulties but they will feel less catastrophic because your energy levels will have lifted due to the energy clean-up in Step 2. You will notice that, as you worry less about not sleeping, this in itself – the absence of worry – leads to better sleep. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

To sleep beautifully you almost need to not care about how you sleep.

Step 4: Doing The Real Work and Tapping into Vibrant Energy

At this point, you’ll be ready for me to share a very special programme with you. The Energy for Life Programme will support you in doing The Real Work. With these tools you can explore happiness and meaning along with dealing with relationships, uncertainty and fears.

Years ago my work with sleep took a strange turn and I, a physiologist and sleep expert, found myself on stages in packed-out auditoriums talking about such things. But why? It’s quite simple really – in my quest to solve people’s sleep problems (and my own) I ended up talking about the very things that were stopping people from sleeping and draining their energy levels – absence of happiness and purpose, conflict in relationships, fear and uncertainty, and so on. Most significantly, in all of the tools I shared I seemed to be showing people how to reconnect with a part of themselves that had been missing or neglected. And what is this part? Well, you might want to call it spirit or even soul or God.

Earlier I described how my awakening felt like I was coming back to a very familiar place – coming home. However you choose to label it, when you reconnect with this part of yourself it will lead you back to peace, safety, better sleep and vibrant energy.

I hasten to add that the contents of the Energy for Life Programme are not original to me but rather they come from an ancient wisdom that has become all the more relevant in this crucial stage of our history when technology has brought with it a type of magic which – although wonderful in so many ways – ever seeks to draw us out of ourselves and away from our spirit and true source of safety. So my humble intention in sharing this toolkit is to remind you (because for some of you there will be no big surprises here), in practical and concrete ways, how to reconnect with your innermost self and spirit, so that you can sleep deeply and awaken with the vibrant energy needed to live a meaningful life.

My even deeper intention is that you will make these tools and practices part of your everyday life and that you will share them with your children, as it is perhaps the younger generation who are especially in need, at present, of reconnection with soul and spirit.

So here you have it – the unique Fast Asleep, Wide Awake formula. In the following chapters you’ll begin to understand some of the most important principles behind why you might be exhausted and not sleeping. Know that as you read and engage with my words the healing process has already begun.

Part I

Shifting Awareness (#ulink_29362308-1248-508f-9f2d-5af8518f4965)

‘I think the key to transforming your life is to be aware of who you are.’

Dr Deepak Chopra

Chapter 3

Understanding the Sleep–Energy Balance (#ulink_2fca56c2-5785-5bd3-b2a4-9ea31e1881fa)

‘Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.’

Marie Curie

I deliberated hard before adding this section on sleep because you will find that there is some theory to absorb and it’s definitely not my aim to blind (or bore) you with science – particularly if you’re feeling tired. However, an important part of this work is about making better choices. I know that it is with this clarity that a shift in awareness is created that is vital for change to occur.

So please don’t be tempted to skip this chapter as you will learn a great deal here. Of course, I see some pretty extreme cases at my clinic, notably parasomnia – nightmares, night terrors, sleepwalking and talking – but even these can be overcome when you understand exactly what is going on and how, by making small changes, these distressing symptoms can be avoided.

Surviving or Thriving

If you’re out of balance and not sleeping, you might be running on the wrong type of energy. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation because the wrong type of energy affects our ability to sleep, and not sleeping sends us further into the wrong type of energy. But what do I mean by ‘the wrong type of energy’?

So far I have been using two labels, which I will continue to use throughout this book – SAFETY and SURVIVAL. I use them to describe the two energy modes or systems that human beings have evolved to enable us to live.

The SURVIVAL energy system is the ‘fight or flight’ system, discovered by the scientist Walter Cannon in the 1920s. We use this in crisis and when we’re under threat from predators, when there are inadequate food supplies, harsh climatic conditions or poor shelter. This system resides in a primitive part of the brain called the limbic system within the amygdala. Although, for most of us, the nature of threat has changed in today’s world, we still use this survival system when we perceive that we’re under threat. In SURVIVAL mode we run on adrenalised fear-driven energy and we don’t sleep, as it’s not conducive to surviving.

In the SAFETY energy system we produce the hormones of wellbeing – you’ll learn more about these shortly and I’ll actually show you how to produce them in Part IV. The body’s resources are used for healing, repair, growth and development. In SAFETY mode, life feels harmonious and we sleep.

Table 1: The SAFETY and SURVIVAL systems

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) determines which of these energy systems is more active. It runs the length of the body and is divided into two branches:

The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), the SAFETY branch of the nervous system – which runs the body when we are in rest, repair, healing and sleep mode – is vital for maintaining everyday functions from the integrity of cell functioning to the heartbeat and how we breathe and sleep. The PNS ticks over quietly, keeping us well via the activity of the vagus nerve, which runs from the diaphragm and abdomen through to the brainstem. This important nerve maintains your health, enabling healing and repair. It is also connected to the circadian timer, the sleep control centre in the pineal gland in the brain. Keep it in mind because many of the tools I’m going to share with you are focused on activating it.

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS), the SURVIVAL branch, kicks in when we’re in fight-or-flight mode, when we feel stressed or anxious. We need this stress-hormone-producing part of the nervous system to help us perceive and react to threat. The body is flooded with adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol, and we are ready to fight or flee. The SNS was essential to our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, as we faced harsh and unsafe conditions, food was scarce and we had to face off wild animals or tribes. But in modern times the SNS is more likely to be activated by a difficult phone call or meeting, the kids playing up in the car or a stressful journey to work and an overflowing inbox.

When we’re in balance these two branches of the nervous system operate in harmony throughout the day, swinging back and forth like a pendulum, affecting our energy levels, the rest–activity balance, our motivation and drive, how we feel – hungry, thirsty, hot or cold, sleepy or focused – and these rhythms produce the fluctuations in our mood and energy throughout the day, the hum of our energy. The pendulum swings back and forth between the SNS and PNS roughly on a 90-minute cycle called the ultradian cycle.5 (#litres_trial_promo) We will return to this shortly when we look at how the ultradian cycle plays out while you sleep.

The reality is that a healthy balance can be elusive with our 21st-century lifestyle forcing us to go faster and faster. Many people end up in a state of constant hyperactivity in which the SNS is always in go mode – so-called ‘sympathetic overdrive’ – and the PNS shuts down. We begin to run on adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol, we feel as if we can’t stop, life feels chaotic and over-busy, and we get sick as soon as we stop (a classic sign of sympathetic overdrive). And of course we can’t sleep. Or if we do, sleep is noisy, jagged and exhausting.

The Effect of Survival Mode on Our Energy

Survival energy is adrenalised, edgy, anxious, restless, impatient, threatened, fearful, hyper-vigilant at one extreme and then plummeting into exhausted, apathetic, hopeless giving up. With my patients I see greater extremes of manic and psychotic, which fall into the trough of depressed and suicidal. These are the roots of bipolar disorder.

Conversely, when we are running on sustainable energy, on the higher end of the scale, we feel vibrant, joyful, passionate, exhilarated and positively challenged. In its lower state, sustainable energy feels pleasantly tired, mellow and chilled out. Sustainable energy is about feeling safe and in this state we run on the safety hormones of love and wellbeing – serotonin and oxytocin. We produce the hormone melatonin – and so can sleep. We need all of these energy states and feelings but we don’t want to be stuck in SURVIVAL mode. Many people have become so used to existing in this way – they have habituated to this type of energy – and they can’t imagine it being any other way.

Table 2: Survival and sustainable energy

Looking at Table 2 above, ask yourself the following questions and take a note of your answers:

Where do you feel your energy lies at the moment?