Why You Aren’t Sleeping as Well as You Could
We have a sleep-and-dream crisis. It’s more insidious than we realize, in part because the deficits & suffering created by insufficient sleep & unskillful relationships with dream can remain invisible to us—yet another case of spiritual anosognosia & cultural amnesia.
People getting 6 hours of sleep per night will, after several days on that schedule, begin to perform as poorly as people who had zero sleep for two days straight. And here’s the kicker: If you had zero sleep for two days, you would most likely report feeling compromised, but if you had 6 hours of sleep for several days, you would likely report feeling tired but not compromised. We start to fail to register how out of kilter we become.
You likely either experience some level of sleep challenge or at least know someone who does. According to the CDC, as many as 42.8% of adults experience short sleep, & as many as 84.3% of high school students experience short sleep (& a good many of the latter have relatively new drivers licenses).
The CDC also report that 18% of U.S. adults use medication to fall asleep, with 8.4% reporting a daily or near-daily use. And the NIH report that almost 40% of adults report unintentionally falling asleep during the day, with as many as 70 million people in the U.S. facing some kind of chronic sleep disorder.
Maybe you experience this yourself. Maybe your team members experience it. Maybe your clients, friends, or family members experience it. In all those cases, the sleep-and-dream crisis affects you—costing you time & money, creating needlessly strained interactions, leading to less-than-optimal decisions, and, on the grandest scale, keeping us all from creating a better world while it simultaneously keeps us locked into behaviors that degrade the conditions of life we all depend on.
I keep referring to “sleep-and-dream” because they belong together. Ultimately, sleeping, dreaming, meditating, waking, & dying all go together in profound ways. As a philosopher I revere this interrelation, & have recently enjoyed thinking about it with two experts in sleep-and-dream, Rubin Naiman, PhD, FAASM & Leslie Ellis, Ph.D., RCC.
Leslie wrote A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy. Don’t let the title fool you: You don’t need to be a clinician to benefit from this well-written, highly accessible guide intended to demystify the practice of attending to our dreams.
And we very much need to attend to our dreams. Not only does dream work go together with psychological healing (while sleep and dream disorders go together with mental health challenges), but, as Rubin likes to say: The main reason people don’t sleep well is that they don’t have a good relationship with dreaming. As he also likes to say: We live in a wake-centric world, & the key to better sleep, better dreams, & better lives involves learning to fall in love with and surrender to sleeping & dreaming.
Who out there needs more sleep and dream?
Links associated with this post:
https://dangerous-wisdom.captivate.fm/episode/recovering-sleep-and-dreams
https://dangerous-wisdom.captivate.fm/episode/attending-to-our-dreams-dialogue-with-dr-leslie-ellis
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wisdom-love-good-nights-sleepa-case-study-leaders-all-nikos/?trackingId=CBfOTkzlQzuu33Df7souHg%3D%3D
https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/data_statistics.html
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db462.htm
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/sleep-deprivation
https://drleslieellis.com/clinicians-guide-to-dream-therapy/
https://aeon.co/essays/we-live-in-a-wake-centric-world-losing-touch-with-our-dreams
https://aeon.co/essays/the-cure-for-insomnia-is-to-fall-in-love-with-sleep-again