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‘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 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?

 How has it been recently?

 Are you feeling safe or are you running in survival?

Now let’s look at what happens when you sleep – pure sleep.

Pure Sleep

This is relevant for you even if you consider yourself to be a ‘good sleeper’. Some people define being a good sleeper as the ability to fall asleep and stay asleep easily, and they might say, ‘I haven’t got a problem sleeping but I just can’t get out of bed.’ Remember, there is a vital distinction between sleeping and pure sleep – the ultimately restorative and rejuvenating sleep with just the right amount of dream process and the right amount of deep, dreamless sleep in which you do nothing other than be. Such sleep has an innate organising power: it sorts out our emotional world, clears and tidies our mental filing cabinets, and heals and rebalances the body. From such sleep you wake feeling and looking deeply refreshed, and ready to face life with open arms.

The Benefits of Pure Sleep

According to well-validated Western scientific studies there are three main reasons why we spend so much of our lives sleeping.6

Restore

To help us recover from the demands of being awake.

Protect and Clean Up the Brain (the Cortex)

During our waking hours mental activity stimulates the production of natural chemical messengers in the brain called ‘excitatory transmitters’. These transmitters can become toxic to the brain. Scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center have recently discovered a system that drains waste products from the brain as we sleep. Cerebrospinal fluid, a clear liquid surrounding the brain and spinal cord, moves through the brain along a series of channels that surround the blood vessels. The brain’s glial cells manage the system and so the researchers called it the ‘glymphatic system’. It is thought that it is particularly active during deep sleep and helps to remove a toxic protein called beta-amyloid from brain tissue. This protein is renowned for accumulating in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.7

Learning and Memory Consolidation

Sleeping sorts out our mental filing cabinets so we wake up feeling mentally sharp and clear. I’m going to tell you more about this vital function later because for some people it is the reason why they wake up exhausted, feeling as if they’ve been thinking all night or even oversleeping in a vain attempt to recoup energy.

Many others and I also believe that sleep serves a couple more vital roles. These roles are perhaps not as well validated by Western science but have been identified and explored by older sciences such as Indian Ayurveda (medicine) and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for thousands of years.

Restore Life Force Energy

Time and again my work has shown how people are able to regain some special part of themselves when they start sleeping well. For example, the actress/singer who was too exhausted and depressed to get out of bed who started singing again and signed a record deal within six months; or the stressed mother who sets up her own company. It’s more than just having a good night’s sleep and more energy, it’s a rekindling of passion, inspiration and courage.

Pure sleep is an awakening of spiritual energy.

Self-healing

The healing benefits of sleep are related to all of the above functions but I feel they deserve highlighting. What happens when you sleep on a problem and wake up feeling better? Or when you go to bed with aches and pains and wake up with no pain at all? Or if you cut yourself and wake up and the wound has virtually disappeared? The body is constantly renewing itself. Up to 75 trillion cells repairing, regenerating and rebalancing. This process is fast-tracked when you sleep.

The Journey Through the Night

There’s a kind of magic that takes place when you sleep. Sleep is not one constant state, but rather a progression through various states with extremely unique characteristics.

Earlier I mentioned the 90-minute ultradian cycle, describing it as setting the hum of your energy. This cycle continues throughout the night as we sleep in 90-minute cycles. Disruption of these cycles when we cross time zones causes sleep disruption and jetlag. The hormones, neurotransmitters and the circadian timer in the pineal gland beautifully orchestrate all this activity.

This important gland in the brain’s hypothalamus is also known in Eastern medicine as ‘the third eye’, and it is sensitive to the daily cycle of light and dark. So when the light level entering our eyes and hitting the light-sensitive retina at the back of the eye drops below 200 lux, this switches on the circadian timer and stimulates the production of the all-important sleep hormone melatonin. The healing PNS becomes more active and the sleep cycle is switched on. The awake cycle is stimulated as light levels increase via a group of cells, also located in the hypothalamus, called the Suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The SCN suppresses the production of melatonin and signals the body that it’s time to wake up. The active ‘doing’ SNS switches on, body temperature increases and hormones such as cortisol are produced to get us going. Every organ system in the body receives a signal to up-regulate (get active) or down-regulate (slow down) and in this way our physiology is kept in an optimal state of balance and fine-tuning.

Western sleep science is relatively young and we are still learning more. Spending a night in a sleep clinic generates polysomnograph recordings, which are measurements of brain wave activity during sleep. The patient is wired up to monitoring equipment with electrodes and an EEG (electroencephalogram tracing of the bioelectric activity of the brain) is produced, which informs the sleep clinician about the person’s sleep patterns and potential disorders. In 1937 Alfred Lee Loomis, an American also known for significant work in developing radar, first described the stages of sleep. Loomis and his team used EEG recordings to identify five different levels of sleep.8 In 1953, another team of scientists discovered that REM (rapid eye movement) sleep was a distinct state, leading to a rethinking of the way sleep was designed and giving us the model we use today.9

The Five Stages of Sleep

So let’s look at each sleep stage in turn as it may help you to get a sense of why our sleep (and energy levels) may be less than ideal.

In total, there are five stages of sleep that can be easily distinguished from each other: two are light sleep, the following two are slow-wave or deep sleep and the fifth is a short 15-minute burst of REM sleep. Sleep can also be divided into two entirely different states:

1 REM (rapid eye movement) sleep

2 non-REM (nREM) sleep

Additionally, non-REM is subdivided into four sub-stages, which are distinguishable by levels of brain-wave activity. The sleep science community has more recently combined non-REM stages 3 and 4 into one stage (stage 3).

A typical night’s sleep consists of about 75 per cent non-REM and 25 per cent REM sleep. The 90-minute cycle repeats throughout the night, each time taking us through the five layers from light to deep sleep and REM sleep. Although I keep emphasising the importance of deep sleep, each of these layers is vital and we have to go through them all while we sleep.

Non-REM Sleep

The first four phases of sleep are non-REM sleep and during these phases, unlike REM sleep, we can move around. Neck and jaw movements are the most common movements. If you suffer from teeth grinding (bruxism) or restless legs syndrome (RLS) both of these are more likely to be evident in the first two stages.

Fully Alert and Awake

In this stage of full consciousness, an EEG brain trace would show a predominance of beta-wave activity. This, of course, is where we spend most of our waking hours. This is the thinking, information processing and mentally alert mode, apparently processing 30,000–50,000 thoughts per day. This is the most overworked layer of our consciousness and one that has started to intrude into our sleep, as you will now see.

Stages 1 and 2 – Light Sleep

These are the first phases of sleep that we enter from being fully awake and alert and here there is predominantly alpha wave activity. Sleep is light and lasts a few minutes, and can be easily interrupted by a gentle nudge, snoring or even – very commonly – thoughts. These sleep phases are initiated when your melatonin levels and sleep debt (level of sleepiness built up throughout the day) are at their highest and, while it could be the easiest phase to slide into, it must be entered with care.

By this I mean falling asleep on the sofa in front of the TV in the evening can sabotage your efforts to subsequently enter the next stages of sleep, as you can deplete your melatonin levels and then find you just can’t get to sleep. This problem is exacerbated if you then sneak a look at your emails or social media notifications, as blue light is a potent suppressor of melatonin.