Читать книгу Fast Asleep, Wide Awake: Discover the secrets of restorative sleep and vibrant energy - Dr Ramlakhan Nerina - Страница 12

‘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 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

 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) 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.