advice from a sleep expert plus a little magic

“What we need is a sleep expert,” a friend said, and today, I have one for you.

His name is Roger Cole, a sleep researcher and well-known yoga teacher from California and don’t we all need that when anxiety and maybe late night horror movies like the news and extra chocolate keep us awake. Even a little dark chocolate can mess with Mother Nature.

Now that’s bad news.

In a recent Zoom workshop, Dr. Cole said sleep is all about flipping a switch from alert to catatonic. There are things that keep us awake and things that knock us out. We know this but we forget, like when we think it’s critical at midnight to discuss the kinks in our relationship or take apart the shoe closet or investigate new countries to live in.

If you’re under 30 it may not matter. If you’re over that, it probably does. Another reason to envy the young.

First off, Dr. Cole teaches what flips the switch. There are things that make us alert -- cold, noise, light, muscle tension, pain.  And there are things that make us inert -- comfort, warmth, stillness, quiet, darkness.

The trick, he says, is to maximize the inducers and minimize the intruders, which sounds obvious, but not to all of us, especially those who come from the school of “one more thing.”

“Just one more thing and I’ll be up,” is what we announce from the basement where we’re doing wash or from the fridge where we’re not snacking, no way, just checking up on all those poor cold things.

But even before you flip the switch, you need to give yourself permission to do it. Again, this might sound intuitive, yet how many of us think sleep is almost wimpy. For some, there’s an inverse relationship between needing to sleep and wanting to sleep, like knowing a late-night pizza could accidentally “swip the flitch” in the wrong direction, yet doing it anyway. Mother Nature gets all confused.

Let’s continue.

Once you give yourself permission to sleep, and once you check your alert vs. inert list, it’s time to think about what will happen when you actually hit the bed.

But before you head upstairs, you should do a yoga sleep pose. Easiest one is your legs up on a chair or couch and your back down on the floor which lowers your heart rate and quiets your mind.

Let everything go. Briefly.

Then it’s time to pop up and go up and prepare for the main event by brushing and flossing and hopefully not starting some new project along the way.

Are you in bed? Good. Then Dr. Cole says do the following: Get into a comfortable posture, intentionally relax your muscles, get mindful and let go of your thoughts (a bit of magic here), then do a popular breathing practice called 4-7-8 breath (Google it for more details).

Basically, breathe in for 4, hold for 7, exhale for 8. Repeat 3 times then simply wait for sleep to happen.

This is where the magic part really takes over.

So it’s the middle of the night, and I’ve been a faithful student. I fell asleep, it all helped, but now I’m up again. Dr. Cole would advise me to repeat the in-bed steps (but don’t overdo the breathing part) and wait again.

I’m repeating and waiting.

If you’re waiting too, let’s ask Mother Nature and the great poet John Keats for some additional help from “To Sleep”: 

O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close/ In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes.

Or, in more modern language:

I’ve done it all/ It’s the end of another long day/Abracadabra/ Won’t you meet me half way?

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

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