“Sleep is the best meditation.” Dalai Lama
There’s a certain truth in that famous quote. Sleep is good for us. It lets us rest and recuperate.
And, let’s face it, we all know what a disrupted night’s sleep does to us.
If we’ve had a night where our thoughts were racing, where our system just wouldn’t settle, where we found ourselves woken once or more than once, or couldn’t get to sleep at all, we know the effect it has.
It’s not just feeling physically tired. There’s a psychological impact too.
Sleep disruption affects our attention, our working memory, our logical reasoning and our executive functions. So lack of sleep is not a solid foundation for being productive in whatever we want to do, whether that’s solving a problem in the business, sorting out the unpaid bill at home, finishing the project, or working on the relationship that isn’t going so well.
On top of that, lack of sleep affects our mood, so we’re not only less flexible in our thinking but may feel more irritable, sad or anxious.
Finally, lack of sleep impairs our motor skills, which is part of the reason driving while tired is such a bad idea.
So when the Dalai Lama says sleep is the best meditation, it starts to make an awful lot of sense, even to those who don’t meditate.
Restful sleep helps us think more flexibly, manage our mood and have those fine motor skills to hand. So when we think about operating heavy machinery, whether that’s literal, like driving a big piece of construction plant, or metaphorical, like leading a team through uncharted challenges, restful sleep becomes an invaluable part of the individual’s and the leader’s strategy.
And that’s always easy to accomplish. Just close your eyes and you sleep. That’s it, right?
Well, as I’ve said above, it’s not that simple. Our sleep can be disrupted from inside our own minds. Our restful few hours can be hijacked by thoughts of stress, worry or concern.
Our mind isn’t doing anything unnatural here. Night-time thoughts and fears are perfectly normal, a by-product of how our thinking system operates. A number of studies have shown a link between certain stages of sleep and heightened amygdala activity, the amygdala being the part of the brain closely associated with fear, anger and the human stress response. It has been reported that amygdala activity during REM sleep can be as high as when we’re awake. Given that the part of the brain which helps us put things into perspective is not similarly active, does this mean we have to accept these night-time hijacks and their impact on our thinking and mood?
You’ll be glad to hear it doesn’t. We can build skills to support our sleep, just as we would any other skill.
So here are five tips to help you sleep better. Let’s start with the simple behavioural stuff.
Tip one: think about temperature. We all know what it’s like when the room is too hot or too cold. How many of us have stuck a leg out from under the covers only to wake later with toes like icicles? Find the right temperature.
Tip two: get the room dark enough. That way we limit the potential for our internal sleep hormones to be pushed off balance.
Tip three: linked to that, limit your device use close to bedtime. Our beloved devices emit light in the blue part of the spectrum. This mimics sunlight and can interfere with melatonin (our sleep hormone) secretion.
Tip four: deal with whatever is occupying your mind. Would the other party to the contract really want you to email them at 3am? Probably not. So if something is on your mind, get a notepad and write it down, including any worries or concerns you have about it. Then take a few minutes to reflect on what you’ve written. Getting those thoughts out of your head can be cathartic, and you can use what you’ve written to identify the first thing you’ll do the next day, after you’ve slept, to move the matter forward. You don’t have to solve the whole issue in one go. Just identify the first step and agree with yourself that you’ll take it once you’ve slept.
Tip five: a specific behavioural technique I use with clients, combining controlled breathing and progressive muscle relaxation. It de-escalates our internal responses and calms the system down. It takes a little time to run through, so there isn’t room for it here, but if you’d like to know more, get in touch.
Using these approaches helps us build skills around sleep and harness its restful, recuperative power. We’ll be better able to think flexibly about the issues we face and better placed to bring a calmer, more helpful mood to them. So in a sense, just as the Dalai Lama says, sleep may act as a form of meditation, and our approach to what we face may end up closer to where we’d like it to be.
To hear a bit more, have a listen to the Fast Forward podcast episode I recorded with Trish Keating of Tech Manchester on the importance of sleep: link.chtbl.com/FstFwdTM