Lessons About Sleep from Experience

In my experience, it is easier to sleep when both the body and mind are tired (moderate exertion is good; exhaustion means you have overdone it). 1. Physical exercise alone can make you feel mentally happy, excited, stimulated by new experiences, and emotionally stirred up, which can actually make it harder to sleep. Travel can sometimes have the same effect. 2. Mental activity alone can leave your mind in disarray, while a sedentary body lacks exercise and has excess energy yet feels tired. This is also a state of disarray, and it can make sleep difficult too. 3. So I adjust the balance between mental and physical exertion. Moving house is actually a challenge on several levels—mental, physical, and emotional—and makes it easier to sleep. 4. But I often push a little too hard mentally or physically and end up depleted and exhausted. When that happens, I go for a stroll to relax my body and mind. A moderate amount of tiredness makes it easier to sleep. 5. The best approach is still to balance activity and rest with a high level of overall awareness. When your energy is high and your mind is peaceful and free of anxiety, sleep comes naturally. There is no need to put yourself through the wringer.

A few more points:

I. Psychological Factors

1. Going for a stroll is something I highly recommend. It is wonderful for both body and mind, and for sleep too. When I feel very uncomfortable physically and mentally and have no other way to deal with it, I turn to this all-purpose solution.

1. Your psychological state has a great deal to do with sleep problems.

a. A common issue among young people is that their daytime lives involve too much alienation and objectification. They do not get to be themselves and lack an existential experience of agency and subjectivity. They feel mentally unfulfilled, which leaves them restless and overstimulated at night, looking for things to do and scrolling on their phones to make up for the emptiness of the day. At its core, this is an existential challenge. I have analyzed it at length in other articles, so I will not go into it again here.

b. For middle-aged people, it is more often unresolved psychological issues that torment them. They need to find ways to work through those issues.

1. This also makes me reflect on how important it really is to love yourself and be yourself.

1. Noise and sensitivity to noise really are major challenges for people today.

Noise also causes me a great deal of distress and leaves me feeling helpless. But an improvement in my state of mind really has helped with my sensitivity to noise. In the past, the more anxious, tense, and resistant I felt, the more troublesome my noise sensitivity became.

My state of mind has improved greatly over the past two years, and my sensitivity to noise has decreased considerably as well. Where I live now is actually quite noisy, and sometimes it still drives me to the breaking point. But overall, it is not an issue that makes me feel completely doomed. I do not like earplugs, so I bought a pair of 3M industrial earmuffs. They block out sound very well. Although they were uncomfortably tight at first and make it difficult to lie on my side, they are still very useful much of the time.

1. Improving your state of mind involves all sorts of inner work: stop seeking outside yourself, lessen greed, anger, and delusion, quiet the ego, cultivate inner stillness, practice acceptance and reconciliation, embrace tranquility and non-action, let things take their natural course, and allow your inner self to be at peace.

II. Physical Factors

1. Not drinking water or eating after 7 p.m., and keeping dinner as light as possible, will reduce the demands on the digestive and urinary systems and help with sleep.

1. Difficulty Getting Yourself to Shower

One interesting little thing is that people feel too lazy to shower, yet also worry that showering will wake them up and make it hard to sleep. But without a shower, they feel dirty and do not want to get into bed. There is really no need to worry: you feel comfortable after a shower, which makes it easier to sleep. Another small everyday tip is to shower earlier, around seven or eight in the evening, while you are still feeling relatively alert. Often, when your awareness and energy are low, you drag things out until eleven or midnight and end up restlessly scrolling on your phone, which gets in the way of taking that shower.

The question of when to shower also shows how important it is to know your own energy and awareness curves.

1. A moderately cool temperature makes it easier to sleep.