Balancing Sleep and Life: From Survival Mode to Thriving

Do you have a life you can only cope with if you get enough sleep?

Or do you have a life where your days are good regardless?

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Gentle Rebellion where overwhelm is optional. Sleep. Let's talk about sleep. Sleep matters, right? We know this even without reading the books. So you can read all the books about sleep. I did. You can read all the research about it. It's valuable.

Speaker 1: 0:29

But even without filling your mind with more information, you know how good it feels when you sleep really well. So sleep, are you sleeping well at the moment? Do you find it easy to fall asleep? Do you sleep all night? Do you sometimes wake in the night? How do you feel when you wake up in the morning?

Speaker 1: 0:57

But, more importantly, how essential is a good night's sleep to how your day goes? The reason I think this is a more important question than how do you sleep is because I realise that during my practicing burnout period so during the time when I pushed myself right to the edge and surfed the verge of burnout for years without realising thanks to overwhelm because overwhelm blocks all that information from me One of the things I did was hack my sleep. So this is about 10 years ago. There were some great books out and I still recommend the books. I'm not going to mention the books for a reason, because I'm not criticising the books. I'm just saying that there's a deeper reason for what happened. So see if this resonates with you, I read all the sleep books and was fascinated by it and I put all of the sleep hacking ideas into place and I started sleep better. So we can think about this in terms of comfort. So a comfortable mattress makes a huge difference to how you feel in the morning.

Speaker 1: 2:12

Pillows, duvet I love all of that. I'm not saying these things aren't important and I still take. That's why I'm not criticising those books. I still take those things with me. So I have the most beautiful mattress.

Speaker 1: 2:29

I absolutely love my mattress. I have the most lovely duvets and sheets. So one of the things I love is a recent discovery, actually, because when we were children we used to have flannelette sheets in the 70s. They all seemed to be the same. I think they all had this pale stripe on them.

Speaker 1: 2:49

If you're my age, you might know what I'm talking about that brushed cotton. Last year we bought these lovely sheets and duvets and pillows in brushed cotton with this beautiful oak leaf pattern on. Oh my goodness, it's so wonderful. Honestly, it's not just that it's soft, it's that it really seems to track the air in some way and make you much cosier and warmer, which is really really nice in the winter. And then in the summer I have this call max stuff. I don't know what it is. I really don't understand how it works. How can a sheet manage to stay cool? That's really clever, right. It's only cotton, so I don't know what they do to it. But yeah, I love, love, love my call max sheet and pillow. In fact, I keep the call max pillow case even with the warm duvet. So you can see I've really entered into this sleep hat hacking really seriously. It's really nice to put my cheek on a cool pillow all year, but it's really lovely to be extra cosy in the winter and then have cool bedding in the summer. It makes a difference.

Speaker 1: 3:57

I'm big on making it as easy as possible and as joyful and delicious as possible to sleep. It matters. I feel wonderful, as I'm sure you do too, after a really good night's sleep. It's magical. Sleep is magical, it matters. It's when our bodies heal and reset and we can dream and consolidate memories. Our brains are doing some amazing washing out. We've spent neurotransmitters. Sleep is miraculous, there's no doubt about it. There's nothing like a good night's sleep. So what was the other thing, oh yeah. So comfort, temperature, darkness.

Speaker 1: 4:41

There's research about darkness and sleep and the importance of darkness, which is a bit concerning, cos there's so much light and light's great cos it keeps us safe and it's warming and it's comforting and it matters. We don't want everywhere dark all the time. Light matters. It's part of civilisation. It's definitely a good thing. But a night, oh my goodness, isn't it wonderful to have darkness.

Speaker 1: 5:05

Or maybe you don't like complete darkness, I don't know, but I do. I absolutely love it. I live in the middle of the countryside. We have no street lights, we're in a dark skies area, so that the only light that disturbs me is the moon and the stars. When we have a clear night, it's just beautiful to have that darkness. And there there is a relation that I stay with regularly. Who doesn't have proper curtains? And they have. There's street lights outside and all the moons up, or it's summer, there's not much darkness, and I didn't sleep very well and I really struggle with that. I really, really do struggle. I do like darkness and I can see that my sleep hacking Maybe makes it hard for me to sleep when it's light, but I don't really care because I know the darkness is good for me and I just really really like that darkness.

Speaker 1: 5:51

And then noise. Noise Can have a huge impact on how well you sleep. Some people like to have white noise Going on for them, so depends what works for you, but noise can make a huge difference. Personally, I absolutely relish the silence. I still wake up in this particular house and feel that blanket of silence and I'm just so grateful for it because I'm very sensitive to noise. So, to me, having silence, it's just joyful for sleep. I just love it and not just for sleep. I really really like silence. So what works for you? So we've got comfort, temperature, darkness, noise, and Then there's the whole routine thing going to bed at the same time, which I know that I I like to rebel against that.

Speaker 1: 6:44

I noticed when I'm like, no, I'm gonna push it, this is too early, or other times when it's I know some of the sleep hacking stuff. A lot of it says never have a lie in. I'm like don't forget that I raised two children. I had no sleep for five years. I still relish, I really really relish a lie in, because what's space for me when you have small children or when you have a very demanding job that insists that you, you kind of wake up, lurching out of this Deep sleep that you've just fallen into with exhaustion, just for the alarm goes and then you've got a get up and kick ass and Not having that anymore.

Speaker 1: 7:19

I, I love a slow start to my morning. It really really does serve me well and I relish a lie in in the morning. That's just my routine now. That's what works for me. A nice evening, relaxing, and then a nice relaxing start to my day. I just like that ebb and flow. Now I haven't always liked that. When I was younger I stayed up later and was, you know, out socializing more and Didn't really, didn't really think about sleep. It was easier to sleep when I was younger. It was the interruption to my rhythms by either Children, having children or an impossible job to do which was disturbing my sleep. So now that's not how I do things. Now I have things set up so I have the beginning and end of my sleep. That works for me.

Speaker 1: 8:12

My body knows I'm going to sleep and I always talk about it, as I have a sleep train and if I miss the sleep train then I kind of have to wait for the next one, and that's what they mean in that sleep packing is that you have these cycles and you need to tune into them if you want to have the best chance of a good night's sleep, because you can get into an overtide state you can. If you don't go to sleep at a certain point, then you've got to wait for the next, what I'm calling the sleep train. I don't know what they called it, I can't remember. So these things are worth looking at, but are they enough? Because the truth is, you can hack your sleep all you want, but if there's a lot of stress in your body, if you've overloaded your mind during the day, it can be incredibly hard to sleep even with all these things in place.

Speaker 1: 9:03

And what I found happen was when I was in that position where I found myself in a job, a new career of teaching that I loved and poured myself into, but was incredibly draining, was incredibly cognitively demanding, so to the point where my brain felt bruised. There was just so many different bits to it, so much to think about and, being the kind of person I am, it preyed on that need to do it really, really well, because being in a classroom with teenagers gives you great responsibility, not just for their exam results, which is pretty much all that's talked about. The pressure is immense Because if schools don't get the exam results, they can lose their headteacher, and then there's lots of instability and you have to constantly improve every year. And I get why that matters. I honestly do, and I used to buy into all of it. But the point is, the pressure of that was so intense for a person like me who doesn't want to let anyone down. So if you tell me, oh, heidi, you can have this huge impact on children's lives, well, I'm going to go all in on it, I'm going to hack it, I'm going to find the easiest way to have the most effect on their exam results and the most effect on their life results. So to me it was a gift. Look at this power I have. I can change the world from inside my classroom. I can make things better. So I went all in on that.

Speaker 1: 10:39

But the problem is, for a person like me, the job became impossible without sleep and that's very complicated for lots of reasons. So there's external pressures, then my own internal pressure, there's the way I was doing the job and there was the way I responded to how things were run, and then there's the whole political thing of is it a really good idea to run an education system with that much stress on exam results, and I can see why and I can see why not. But I don't really care anymore. That's not what I want to talk about, because it's not that particular job that was the problem. It was that I made it impossible. I chose an impossible job. So there are lots of jobs and I thought that was for me. I was really good at it and I loved, loved, loved moving into management roles, having a say in how things could be better. I loved all of that, I thrived on that.

Speaker 1: 11:46

But what was impossible about it for me was the emotional and cognitive toll which, like a frog being boiled gradually in cold water, I couldn't see what it was doing to me. I just couldn't see it, partly because everyone else was reflecting the same. So eventually, what had happened was I had to my sleep. So I was able to sleep well, despite all the pressure, if I went to bed at the same time, got up at the same time, had the right temperature, the right mattress, the right noise level. You know, everything was really really strictly controlled. So at one point I was sleeping almost like wrapped in a cocoon, you know, with earplugs in, I mask on everything, and if that didn't work I'd be awake in the night, worried that I didn't have enough sleep to cope with the next day, because the next day was impossible to cope with without adequate sleep. It was just really hard. I couldn't.

Speaker 1: 12:46

If you can't think straight, it's easy to make a mistake and then in a classroom situation, kids kick off very easily and then you lose control and it can spiral very, very quickly. It's quite, it's very on the edge and there's a thriving in that, there's an exhilaration in that, in that living that close to the edge, but it's also oh God, it's tiresome. It just costs too much to live in survival mode because, well, we're not designed to live in survival mode, we're designed to thrive. That's when everything comes together, that's when we feel at our best, that's when we have the best impact on the world. That's the whole how we are in the world. If we're moving through the world in survival mode, ie through the fog of overwhelm, so we can't think straight, quite anxious that if certain things don't turn out in a certain way, then everything will fall to pieces, that's kind of survival mode. It's just, it's no way to live, but it's also unnecessary and that's what I didn't get.

Speaker 1: 13:46

Before I thought I had no choice. I thought, well, the job's difficult, but I can make it better. So I just worked on problem solving it and I spent eight and a half years problem solving and that had some really good impacts, but overall it didn't deal with the deeper problem. And the deeper problem was this I had created a life for myself and worked really, really hard for that and loved it in so many ways, but it was a life that required that I had a good night's sleep, a very strict good night's sleep, in order to cope with it, and more than one or two nights that weren't adequate was just insanity lied there. It was just too hard. That's what my problem was. There's a deeper level there. There's the expectation that I had to do those things in order to have that level of success. That's the problem. That's what contributed to my burnout. Instead, now I've created a life very gradually, through following my heart, listening to my body and through unpicking the reasons for the implosion of that successful life.

Speaker 1: 15:04

So the shame and the fear of being dragged back into it. I don't know about you, but I often have this feeling of being dragged backwards into shameful situations, into vulnerable situations, into painful episodes in my life when I felt I had no choice, no power. So that's related to childhood, but it's also to me, related to times in my adulthood where I just haven't felt like I had any choice, like I had no choice. I seriously thought I had no choice but to keep going into a job where it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to look after myself properly. In fact, I would argue I wasn't ever looking after myself properly when I was teaching and I feel that that was actually drummed into me in my teacher training that the kids came first and that you just had to work harder. And if it meant staying up till midnight to prepare lessons or mark their work well, you had to do that. And that didn't work for me, because going to bed at midnight, to get up at six and do it all again just didn't work for me. It made me ill. It also made me feel slightly insane, but at the time I felt I had no choice.

Speaker 1: 16:15

Now I know better. Now I know that I get to decide, that I do have some choice, but I couldn't see it before because I was in survival mode. I can only see this with hindsight, which is why I'm sharing it with you. I can now see that being in survival mode meant that my nervous system was in high alert. It was stuck in high alert. That's what survival is. If I don't do this, then that terrible thing is going to happen. If I don't complete this on time, I'm going to let somebody down and this terrible thing is going to happen.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Everything I was doing was actually driven by fear and shame, but it felt like I was being driven by achievement and satisfaction, because all of those were there in the mix. But when the fulfilment and the satisfaction has underlying it fear driven behaviour, it is rubbish. Quite frankly, I don't know about where I'm putting it. It's a nonsense. That's saying that in order to have the successful life you want, you have to sacrifice the part of you that can feel at home in yourself, that can feel at ease, that you can't ever quite relax, that you can't ever quite go. I'm safe, I've made it, I'm of value and I think that's it, isn't it? That's the freedom. At least that's the freedom I'm seeking is to feel safe, to feel at home, but also to have that, to always be on that edge of personal growth where I'm exploring what it would be like to be I don't know, to be more myself, to be more fully myself, to dare to do whatever that thing that's calling me to do. Once. It's that exhilaration of adventure, but from a place of knowing that I'm okay, there's nothing wrong with me and I don't need to prove myself by running, by fear-driven behavior, by shame-driven behavior. I'm not and I haven't got that sussed. Not at all. It's not like I moved.

Speaker 1: 18:30

I moved from a relatively safe career in terms of financial stability and being fired despite the fact that I was living with the deep stress and knowledge that at any point, anybody could walk into my classroom and accuse me of not doing something, and they would be right, because the job was impossible and I couldn't. Nobody can do it, or it's just not possible because nobody thinks about it. There's a lot of you know, a lot of our jobs are a buildup of well-meaning intentions where, oh, we'll just add this into the job, but nobody ever takes anything away or considers how long it would take to do that. In fact, it's very difficult to work out the length of a task. Nothing has made that clear to me than working for myself.

Speaker 1: 19:14

How many hours does it take to produce a podcast every week, to write a book, to get better at marketing, to up my coaching skills by completing another certification? Like, how long do the? We don't know how long these things take. You can roughly say, but we're only ever roughly saying, and then time bends anyway. When we get into a state of flow, it's brilliant. It can take five minutes to do something from a state of flow and with clear intention and purpose. It can take weeks, months, years to do it otherwise. So it's very, very difficult to do a lot of jobs because there's just stuff being piled on you constantly by well-meaning people oh, we'll get them to do that and that and that, we better get that done and that done and that done and just cascades down until people are just completely overloaded. And because most of us want to do a good job and we're scared of losing our jobs and this is part of the problem, isn't it? The fear of losing what you have can dig you into a whole of even more survival, and that's just really sad because it's unnecessary.

Speaker 1: 20:26

I really believe that understanding the importance of looking after yourself properly, including your nervous system, noticing when you're stuck in fear and shame and not doing that to other people as much as you can. So that for me would include manipulative marketing messages. But I look at some of my previous marketing messages and think, did they tap into fear because that's what I was taught to do? I mean, I don't think I did anything terrible definitely not. But now I would say, yeah, I would go more positive always. But that's difficult because it's not as attention grabbing and my message matters. So I don't know.

Speaker 1: 21:15

I'm not saying. What I'm trying to say is I'm not perfect. I don't have all the answers. What I'm sharing with you is have you created a life where it's absolutely essential, like literally essential? You can't cope without adequate sleep. If you go too long without adequate sleep, insanity lies that way of your emotional, emotional reactivity. Those are volcanic eruptions. They're becoming very, very ineffective in your work because you can't think clearly. Or are you moving further and further away from that, gently rebelling against that nonsense and moving into? I have a life where, regardless of how well I sleep, I have fantastic days because that's where I am right now. That doesn't mean if I don't sleep well, I'm happy about it quite the contrary. I still prioritise my sleep. I've told you all about my duvets, but I think that question is really worth considering. How have you created your life? Do you have to sleep in order to get through your day Survival mode or can you still have an amazing day regardless of having a rubbish night's sleep or a late night having fun, because otherwise there's no room for fun, is there?

Speaker 1: 22:42

When I'd hacked my sleep and everything else I hacked, my life became so scheduled there was no room to breathe. It was just ridiculous. I was having to say no to good things because if I didn't sleep, particularly like on a Sunday night, if I didn't sleep well on a Sunday night before going back into the fray on a Monday, my whole week would start off badly and it would be impossible. So much of my life outside of work was spent recovering and preparing either. I was pretty good at not bringing work home, but I'd argue I was still bringing work home, because a lot of my weekend was spent recovering to go back into the fray.

Speaker 1: 23:23

It got worse and worse and worse, until I'd wake up on a Saturday morning, even having slept better, because it was a Friday night and also because I was just the sheer exhaustion of having survived the week. I'd wake up feeling very heavy and then I'd have this excitement. Once I remembered, in that horrible split second when you wake up in the morning and think, oh, another day at work, oh good, it's Saturday. You know that split second realisation. And then I'd have this impossible list for the weekend of all of the things I needed to catch up on that I didn't have time for in a working week. Plus I'd have scheduled in, you know, time with my partner, time with friends, time with family. So also trying to reclaim my life at the weekends, plus just that.

Speaker 1: 24:09

What happens to that lovely free time where you're just not scheduled, where you're just mosing on around, you know, where you're just pootling Very important pootling time, pottering time to me anyway, what about you? So my life became ridiculously scheduled and sleep became less of I don't know just a good, magical part of my life and more an absolutely essential thing to be prioritised at all costs. So I thought I had it sussed because I had this really good schedule and I had ways to sleep really well. But with hindsight I can see that hacking my sleep contributed to my burnout. Oh, that's something to think about. Yeah, seriously prioritising my. In fact, I would argue that prioritising my entire self-care contributed to my burnout, because I was managing my stress rather than looking at why I needed to manage my stress. The deeper thing is does my life work for me or am I working for my life? What about you? For more resources to help you gently rebel? Please visit my website, wwwhydymarkcouk.