Get to sleep stay asleep
The last thing you think about before you go to sleep. Why is this relevant? It really sets the tone for how we sleep. When we are asleep we have different sleep cycles. Body repair and then mental re-coalition takes place. The first four hours are really devoted to physical recovery. Then the last four hours are really devoted to mentally clearing out things and collating things for coherency, etc.
On the physical side of it, this is where hormones are pumped into our body to repair. So not only do we not get mental recovery but we don’t get physical recovery without enough sleep. So, we get inflammation. Which is the gateway to majority of the diseases out there. Why I want this to be a topic is to help promote how to get to sleep and stay asleep.
In my experience, the importance is to sit there with our head on our pillows at night and give ourselves permission to get to sleep. The reality is that life does not need us for those seven hours. Though we think it does or we think we need to solve one more problem before we go to sleep. The challenge there is that often times resolving problems and significant challenges on a battle fatigued mind that has ten, sixteen, eighteen hours of effort put into it that’s expended there’s not a lot of energy. There’s a lot of neural battle fatigue. It’s really easy to make an amateurish middle error that could cost us dearly on many different levels. When we put our head on the pillow and we say to ourselves, deliberately, that there is nothing more I can do today. There’s certainly plenty of time to screw it up by staying up later and trying to resolve things more efficiently when we are dull. Again, the risk of that going south is very high. When we go to sleep, when we give ourselves permission to go to sleep, because we have affirmed and we have consciously committed to that then we are really trusting our body and its intelligence to provide answers to difficult problems that would be in our minds inbox in the morning when we wake up refreshed. That is the value of allowing yourself to sleep.
In order to do that we have to be able to trust that side of ourselves. That we know to instinctively be true. When our human nature is trying to talk us into “you better do this” “you better solve this” “you better get this straightened out” that’s a human nature thing that’s a fear based survival instinct we live with day in and day out. Which has not been proven itself to be successful over time. When we look at the reality of what our track record is with that; can we successfully engage this other way of thinking? When we think about letting go for seven hours and we say to ourselves “you know what? The world doesn’t really need us for these next seven hours.” There is nothing so urgent that you need to respond to, generally. Of course, there are always a few exceptions. But that is more than likely not the case.
In review, when we have vetted and checked off everything and we lay in bed at night and we say is there anything left to do. If there is, is the risk of ruining it on a battle fatigued mind that we will regret actually worth it? The answer is most likely, no. the gift is when we wake up the next day and check our mental inbox generally a better solution is there because we trusted in this process.
So, when we do that, when we give ourselves the permission to go to sleep, along with maybe a little help from diaphragmic breathing to slow things down, then we allow ourselves to get to sleep and stay asleep. With the assurance that we will have a much better morning, and be much clearer than we were the night before. We will have more confidence. Once we do that a few times we will really start to see the merit of it.
I’ll admit it IS hard to trust it. Our human nature does not want to trust it. It wants to take control. It wants to manipulate. It wants to steer the bus with a death like grip. But this will really give you a lifetime engagement that will give you the wisdom to create the legacy you ARE capable of.
