The Power of Sleep

Welcome to today’s talk, which is about sleep.

Now, we all know sleep’s important because we all know the effect of not enough sleep on our thinking, on just on our entire being. But I thought I’d talk about a few the reasons that you may not have thought of why sleep is important and also a few tips that you may not be aware of for helping you sleep more if that’s what you need and also a few words on sleeping less. Because sometimes we get into a pattern of oversleeping, and weirdly, that can be just as tiring as not sleeping enough.

So why is sleep important?

Well, of course, we all know that basic thing of you haven’t had enough sleep, and you’re just knackered, and you can’t think, and your brain is not functioning. We all know that feeling. So sleep is important just for that reason. Sleep’s also important because sleep deprivation can really, really affect our mental state. It’s a form of torture.

They use prolonged sleep deprivation in some torture places. So if we become too sleep deprived, we can actually start to hallucinate. Now, you may think hallucinating is a good thing, but I understand, because I’ve never been through that, but that particular sort of deprivation is not good.

Sometimes we lack sleep because of a trauma. I remember when I was living in Holland, and a burglar got into my flat. I was living on my own. The burglar got into my flat. Fortunately, I’ve got a really, really loud voice and I shouted at him, and when I’m frightened, my voice goes low, so I scared him off.

But for quite a while after that, I found sleep incredibly difficult, because I wasn’t expecting him to come back. But at the same time, there was this somewhere, this visceral fear that this experience might be repeated.

Trauma can do it. Stress can do it. I bet you’ve had those times when you wake up at two, three in the morning, and it’s going round and round in your head something that you’re worried about. It could be money. It could be one of the kids. It could be a family member and there’s another reason why sleep is really, really important. That’s from the spiritual perspective.

From a Hawaiian perspective, sleep is the communication from your higher self. That’s the, if you like, your connection with the divine. So it’s communication from your higher self to your unconscious mind. The job of the conscious mind is to interpret the messages that come in sleep. So from a spiritual perspective, certainly Hawaiian spiritual perspective, and other traditions as well. It’s not just the Hawaiians. Sleep is really important because our dreams are these messages.

In a lot of traditions, dreams also offer the opportunity for prediction, for understanding signs and symbols, and dream interpretation is something I teach, but we don’t generally tend to dream unless we sleep. So sleep is important for our spiritual development as much as for our physical well-being, our mental well-being, and our emotional well-being.

We know what sleep is. You lie down and you go to sleep, or you sit in a chair and you go to sleep. We all know what sleep is, but what you may not know is that sleep isn’t just one constant thing. There are phases of sleep. For example, REM, rapid eye movement, is when we’re dreaming. So that’s a really important phase.

One of the challenges with alcohol is that it quite often cuts out the REM phase of sleep so we don’t get good dreaming. I don’t know about you, but I have certainly, in my time, woken up with a hangover at five o’clock in the morning. There’s something that alcohol does to our sleep ability. We often think that alcohol will help us sleep. Certainly, when I had my burglar experience in Holland, and I didn’t know as much about these things as I know now, I tried drinking to get to sleep. It didn’t help.

The quality of the sleep was not good. And I was waking up at five o’clock in the morning not feeling rested at all. If alcohol is your sleep drug of choice, and you’re still not getting the sleep that you want, you really might want to take a good hard look at that, because it’s not as useful as you might think it is.

When we sleep, our brains seem to dump stuff out. Our brains seem to process, and they seem to get rid of those things that we don’t need to be. It’s almost like a file tidying. Tidying the filing cabinet going on in our brains. Sleep’s important for those reasons as well.

Now, what can you do about getting more sleep? You’ve probably heard the tips about switch off computers and TVs for an hour or two before you go to bed. The reason for that is that the way that the light comes at us from TVs and computers, it actually can affect our, it activates, it agitates our brains. So when we go to sleep, we’re in a state of, or when we try and go to sleep, we’re in a state of agitation.

Another suggestion, another thing a lot of people do is have a warm milky drink before bedtime because it’s soothing. Something that soothes the system. Might not be a milky drink. It might be a herb tea. So something like chamomile. Personally, I think chamomile’s disgusting, but if chamomile works for you. So some of the herb teas, and you can get sleepy time blends and all these to help the system relax, because we do sleep better when the system, and that includes our brain and our body, when the whole system is relaxed.

Reading in bed, not with a tablet, but reading a book in bed. Some people find that’s incredibly useful. Keeping your bedroom, your sleeping space as a space for really relaxing, keeping it calm. Ideally, and it may not be possible, but if you can, keeping computers and TVs and all that stuff out of your bedroom so you create a Zen feeling, having nice sheets, having a nice atmosphere, and making sure that you minimise the light getting in because one of the biggest detriments to sleep is light coming in.

Not just to actually falling asleep and staying asleep, but also to the quality of the sleep that we have. When there’s light coming in, the quality of the sleep, we don’t actually get the healing and the relaxation that we really need that sleep will bring us. There’s a couple of other things, though, to think about and that really is more about general lifestyle.

Do you get outside every day? Going outside every day can really help with sleep. Do you move? Because when our bodies haven’t been moving, and it’s time to go to bed, the body is just not, it’s not in that space to go to bed. It’s not tired. How can you create healthy tiredness? Well, movement, exercise, going outside, looking at what you eat and what you drink. If you drink a lot of coffee, and caffeine actually is in tea and it’s in cocoa so be conscious of those as well but obviously coffee is the big one, but if you drink a lot of coffee, and you’re absorbing a lot of caffeine, that can affect your ability to sleep.

Now, I don’t have kids and my heart really goes out to parents who have very noisy youngsters who get up early and wake them too early, or won’t go to bed, or wake in the middle of the night. There is something about how you can manage those routines with your kids. How can you help your kids sleep? Wear them out, or do what you need to do to get your kids to sleep properly? Because a quiet house is very conducive to sleep. A noisy house may be less conducive to sleep.

Those are some thoughts on sleep. I know that you’ve probably heard these before, but sometimes it’s really good to have a little refresher. Certainly when I was teaching stress management, I didn’t know a lot of these things. I learned these things through teaching stress management, and it really did make a radical change to my life, particularly the one about alcohol, and particularly the one about actually physically getting outside, getting fresh air into the lungs at some point in the day.

I hope it’s been interesting. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments. I’m doing these lives every week at the same time. If you’re interested in joining the Kukui Collective, which is for women who want to really connect with Huna and really make changes through frequent release work and frequent meditation and coming together as a group, then do get in touch, and I’ll be talking to you soon very shortly.

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