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Sleeping less than 7 hours increases our risk of death from all causes by 12 freaking percent.
And yet, we’ve all had trouble sleeping. It took me 30,000 hours of mindfulness to learn to calm down, but don’t worry—I’m here to give you the best insights from all that and save you a good chunk of time.
It feels unfair, right? It’s not like we can just flick a switch and fall unconscious. Many of us try to use alcohol like that, but although it might knock us out, it greatly reduces the quality of our sleep.
Many of us wake up throughout the night. 1 AM, 2 AM, 3 AM... then we’re wide awake, mind racing, and can't get back to sleep for ages, if at all.
Others of us wake up ridiculously early, long before the alarm—then that's it, we’re up for the day, even though we desperately need more rest.
Some of us find that even if we do get a decent chunk of hours, we wake up feeling like we've just run a marathon. Then we shuffle about like zombies all day, barely able to do enough to satisfy our commitments. We can't focus, we forget what we were saying mid-sentence, and even simple decisions feel overwhelming. It feels like we’re looking at life through a dirty window. We’re easily irritated; we snap at coworkers; everything gets on our nerves.
We might struggle with nagging headaches, digestive issues, general achiness, and a weak immune system.
The Main Thing That Ruins Your Sleep
But worst of all—the thing that’s most bothered students of mine who’ve struggled with insomnia—is the mental feedback loop they get stuck in. They start worrying hours before bed, ’will I get any sleep tonight?’ And it doesn’t seem to matter whether they take pills or don’t, whether they tick all their nighttime routine boxes or don’t—the anxiety always wins.
If all this sounds familiar to you, you’ve probably tried medication. And you’ve no doubt found that there’s a trade-off. Pills might get you to sleep, but you wake up feeling even more groggy in the morning. And, worst of all, you may have ended up addicted.
No matter what you’ve tried, you may have noticed something…
Trying to make sleep happen—by any means—is like trying to undo a knot by pulling on it harder.
30 Years of Insomnia
A dear student of mine who’d struggled with all this for over 30 years told me about a pattern he’d noticed: his sleep quality was linked to what was going on in his life (and how much he worried about it).
When he had an important meeting in the morning, he knew he may as well forget about sleeping the night before altogether—decades of experimentation had done nothing for him in this scenario—he knew he wasn’t going to sleep, and that was that.
Yet on Friday nights, when he knew he had the whole weekend to just be tired without consequence, he slept like a baby. I pounced on this part of his story.
‘Believe it or not, this is great news!’ I said, ‘this proves that your issue is greatly—if not entirely—about worry and anxiety. And that’s exactly what I help people with.’
This student had experience in meditation, but he told me he was caught between two types of practice. Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep, he’d sit up in bed and do a formal vipassana meditation: the classic body scan. He found benefit in the practice, but rarely did it actually help him sleep. Other times, he did something else—something that would turn out to be the counter-intuitive solution he was looking for, once he leaned into it.
The Counter-Intuitive Secret to Better Sleep
The trick this student needed—like every other insomnia sufferer I’ve worked with—was simple: stop trying to sleep and, instead, just rest. Instead of being the hunter, trying every type of weapon to kill the prey of sleep, be the forest in which that prey will eventually choose to settle.
Rest, without judgment, as the vast, still sky through which the clouds of restlessness and anxiety come and go.
We’re not talking about rest as the opposite of restlessness. We’re talking about settling into the vast, empty expanse of awakened mind—that which is the essence of all experience, be it acute irritation or the deepest sleep—containing everything, yet affected by nothing.
Awareness doesn’t care if you sleep. Awareness doesn’t care if you don’t sleep. Awareness doesn’t care if you’re tired. Awareness doesn’t care if you make a catastrophic mess of tomorrow’s meeting. Awareness can’t care about these things. It’s like a mirror, which perfectly reflects tiredness, anxiety, and all other experiences. But the mirror itself isn't tired. It simply reflects what is, without preference or judgment.
But how, exactly, does this help? Well, awareness is always restful. It has never been irritated. It cannot be irritated. It has never suffered nor wished things were different. And recognizing this awareness as your irreducible nature is to taste that always-restful quality, which underlies restlessness itself!
In this way, you cut through the whole drama of trying to sleep—which is, itself, preventing you from sleeping! You say ’to rest is enough,’ and the more deeply you feel this, the more likely it is that sleep actually will sneak up on you! You’ve ‘won the battle’ not by adjusting to your enemy’s plan (night-time routines; pills) but, rather, by withdrawing from the battlefield to position yourself on higher ground.
Paradoxically, by ceasing to go after what you want, you get it. This is a universal law: wanting something too badly pushes it away.
Of course, this doesn’t mean don’t make your bedroom comfy; don’t honour your circadian rhythm. But it means that once you’ve carried out reasonable preparations, rest naturally as the nonjudgmental awareness that perceives all your experiences, be they restlessness, sleeplessness, anxiety, worry, doubt, or anything else that occurs.
This is a practice. I’m not expecting you or anyone else who tries this to suddenly break a months-long insomnia streak. The student I mentioned above did have formal meditation experience and that certainly can help. But you’re not excluded from this practice of natural rest even if you’ve never meditated a moment in your life! That said, if you feel you can’t access this rest I’m talking about, don’t worry. Just keep coming back to my posts—I bang on about this all the time. And do some more typical meditation until you’ve ‘loosened your grip’ on things. (There’s a link to my basic breath meditation instructions below.)
By leaning into natural, uncontrived rest as his primary practice, that student of mine experienced profound improvements in his ability to sleep. Together, we broke a pattern of over 30 years of chronic insomnia. That’s the power of what I’m sharing with you here.
I know it can sound too good to be true. I know it can sound too simple. We’ve all been conditioned to think that if something is wrong, we must do something to fix it. Here, I’m encouraging you to go the opposite way; the much less common way—I’m encouraging you to do absolutely nothing. Most of us find this difficult to begin with. But trust me, if you just keep coming back to these posts and reading to what I have to say—and certainly if you take my 1-minute quiz below and start a dialogue with me—you can find peace.
With love from my sofa,
Dan 💙
~
Sleep study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20469800/
Basic meditation instructions: https://youtu.be/qpZc_fFiqRQ?si=aiXzZPu4QhhWzJfu
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