Why can’t I sleep? #1 reason you Cannot Fall Asleep!
Why will your body not let you fall asleep? Because it is checking you are safe. Sleep evolved to happen in a cave, and your bedroom has to convince it.
Why will your body not let you fall asleep? Because it is checking you are safe. Sleep evolved to happen in a cave, and your bedroom has to convince it.
I could not function, could not think straight, and the drinking each night made it worse. The survival mechanism will not stand down until the room feels safe. So drop the temperature. And go to bed when you are actually ready to sleep, not before, because lying there awake teaches your body that bed is where you lie awake.
One thing to try: Cool the room and only get in when you are genuinely ready to sleep. Not before.
In this episode
(0:08) Why can I not fall asleep, and what was going on for me
(2:44) Not functioning, and drinking each night for comfort
(4:53) The survival mechanism that has to be overridden
(7:44) Making the cave, and making it feel safe
(9:56) Go to bed when you are ready to sleep, not before
(12:05) Not worrying about the mind yet. Just the body
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Why will your body not let you fall asleep?
Because it is checking you are safe. Sleep evolved to happen in a cave, with nothing lockable and nothing centrally heated, and some part of you still runs that check every night.
The heart of it
You are not failing to sleep. You are being kept awake on purpose by a system trying to protect you.
Sleep is a skill. Most of us just get into bed and hope.
Nothing on your mind at midnight is actually a threat, and your body cannot tell the difference.
I studied this because I needed it. At forty I could not shut my mind down at night, and the less I slept the worse everything got. I could not think straight and I could not function.
And I drank. Not as a drinker, which is what made it awkward. I am paralysed, so I had to ask my carers for it, and they knew exactly what was going on. One became two became three, and eventually three did not work either.
So I read everything I could find about sleep, and the thing I worked out for myself is the one at the top of this page. I could not fall asleep because I did not feel safe enough to.
That is not irrational. A bill, an email, an unbought birthday present. None of them will hurt you tonight. Your mind does not sort by urgency, only by unresolved, and unresolved means stay awake.
So you lie there trying to force yourself down while another part of you is holding the door.
The fixes follow from that. Make the room a cave. Cold, about sixteen degrees. Every LED out. A notepad by the bed so anything nagging can be written down and considered handled.
And go to bed when you are ready to sleep, not before. Lying there for two hours teaches your body that bed is where you lie awake.
One small thing to try
Tense and release in bed. Toes, arms, then everything including your face, screwed right up, because nobody is watching.
Then three slow out breaths with a line on each.
I am safe and falling to sleep. I am relaxed and falling to sleep. I am comfortable and falling to sleep.
If that has not done it, count back from three hundred in threes. Sevens if threes are too easy. Lose your place and start again, because there is no prize for reaching zero. The counting is the whole point.
Questions people ask
Does a drink help me sleep?
It helps you fall asleep and stops you sleeping. Your body spends the night on the alcohol instead of repairing you, which is what a hangover actually is, and it gets worse as you get older.
Why write things down?
Because your mind stops guarding what it can see written somewhere. It is the cheapest trick in here and it works on most people the first night.
What about the phone in bed?
It tells your brain the sun is up and to produce the chemicals that keep you awake. Same for the television. Both are the opposite of a cave.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
sleep · overthinking · stress
Read the transcript
So welcome to stillness in the storms.
I want to talk to you about why can't I fall asleep?
And it's really interesting.
This one is because I had a problem with sleeping for a long
time myself and I just want to share with you what I learned about
that and then go over some hints and tips and really is celebrating
my log cabin deep sleep meditation.
My other meditation had been released I don't know, about five
years ago now.
And at the time I never realized I had a talent of putting
people to sleep.
But apparently I have my voice.
But hopefully this podcast will not put you to sleep.
Hopefully it'll give you some hints and tips.
So tonight when you go to bed, you will fall asleep really quickly.
And mainly I'm going to go over the one thing that stops us
falling asleep and that's really important.
We often go to bed and we put our head down on the pillow and we
just hope we fall asleep.
Very often we don't.
The mind starts racing, the heart starts beating even more and
we don't fall asleep.
And then we end up getting teasier and teasier.
So that's what I'm going to share on today's podcast.
So listen to the end for the three affirmations that are guaranteed
to put you to sleep tonight.
I'm Stephen Webb, your host, and this podcast helps you to have
some more inner peace in life when you have it least and you need
it most.
And why am I talking about sleep well in my five simple practices
for more inner peace.
One of those is sleep.
It should be the first one, a main one, because if we haven't got
our sleep sorted, there's no way we're going to sort anything
else out.
You know, sleep is the most important thing for the body.
It's the most important thing for the mind.
And unless we can have at least 7, 8 hours sleep average most
nights, then your body's not going to function that brilliantly
during the day.
It's sleep that we need to repair the body.
But why?
Why did I study sleep?
You know, I'm an inner peace teacher.
I'm a meditation and mindfulness teacher.
And why am I bringing up sleep on this podcast?
Well, when I hit my rock bottom when I was 40, the biggest
problem I had at the time was I was lacking sleep.
And no matter what I did when I went to bed, I could not shut my
mind down.
And because I was unable to shut my mind down, I was ending up
in this spiral of less sleep.
My health was going downhill.
I couldn't Function.
I couldn't think straight and it was this vicious cycle and I ended
up drinking.
I ended up drinking more and more Southern Comfort each night.
And because I'm paralyzed, I had to ask my carers for a drink
and it was becoming embarrassing.
And it's okay, just saying.
And I wasn't a drinker.
So you imagine this.
I didn't really drink in front of my carers at all.
And suddenly here I was, they knew I was suffering, they knew I
was pretty much going through a terrible time.
And I started to drink every night.
And one drink led to two drinks, led to three drinks, and
eventually it got to the stage where even three drinks wouldn't
allow me to go to sleep.
So I realized I had to do something about it.
And I started reading books on my iPad and reading was really difficult
for me, so I had to just find a way of going to sleep.
So I started reading books about sleep and I got loads and loads
of hints and tips and I learned techniques of going to sleep.
And the main thing I learned is sleep is a skill, something that
you can learn to do.
We very often just go to bed and we put our head down and we hope
we fall asleep.
You know, we're completely tired, we're completely knackered
at the end of the day and we go to bed.
And we just hope the circumstances are perfect for going
to sleep.
Very often they're not.
But our mind is racing.
We have something on our mind all the time.
So what's the number one reason that we are unable to fall
asleep?
And I didn't read this in any books, I've just realized it over
the last few years.
And mainly when I'm lying in bed not able to sleep, I think, why
can't I fall asleep?
And I realized one thing and that is because I didn't feel safe
and comfortable to go to sleep.
And if you think about that, that's perfectly logical because
for millions of years we've slept in caves, we've slept in forests,
and these weren't centrally heated, lockable homes.
So we had to make sure that we couldn't fall asleep until we were
not only completely knackered maybe, but.
But which would override the survival mechanism.
But we wouldn't fall asleep until we were or until the mind and
the body felt completely safe and relaxed.
It's no good falling asleep and then some kind of bear or saber
toothed tiger wander into the cave and starts to fight us, starts
to nibble on our feet or whatever.
So we had to feel Safe.
And in today's age, the overzealous fear in us, the overactive
mind doesn't allow us to feel safe because we're thinking that,
oh, we got to buy someone something for our birthday.
We're thinking, we've got to order this thing or we got a reply
to this email.
We got to say this to the boss or we need to pay this bill.
None of those things are threatening our lives right in this
minute.
However, the mind is active on them, so therefore it's preventing
us from going to sleep.
So we lie there trying to force our minds to shut down, trying
to force our bodies to relax.
Meanwhile, the body and the mind is fighting against us.
It's going, no, don't go to sleep.
Whatever you do, don't go sleep.
Because there may be something going wrong here, there may be some
bad things happening here.
And therefore you actually, you're trying to go sleep while your
body is trying to stay awake.
So the one thing we can do to help us to go to sleep is make sure
we got a comfortable environment to go sleep.
A comfortable and safe environment.
That's what I want to help you with now on two things, really.
Firstly, how do we prepare for sleep?
And I'll give you a couple of hints and a couple of tips there,
and then I'll talk to you about what you do when you get in
bed.
And part of this is taken from Navy SEALs.
If you think of a Navy SEAL, they don't know when they're going
to get their next sleep.
They don't know when and how long they're going to sleep for next.
So they have to sleep in the most dire circumstances and they
have to do it whether they're tired or not.
They have to catch a 2, 3 hours sleep when it's available,
not when it's convenient to go sleep at 10 o' clock at night.
And they learn to go sleep.
They learn it as a skill.
It's part of the training.
So I'm going to take you through that process of what they
do at the end of this podcast.
But just before that, how can you prepare your room and prepare
your evening for the best chance of a good night's sleep?
First of all, think of your bedroom as the cave and the way it
was for millions of years.
So that's what we want to create.
So we want to create that cave and also to make it safe.
So the first thing you do is reduce the temperature of the room,
reduce it down to about 16, 17 degrees.
I'm not sure what that is in Fahrenheit, but I'm sure you can
work it out.
Remove any LEDs in the room, any lights.
You want it as dark as possible.
Put your notepad and pencil next to the bed.
And the reason why I say put a notepad and pencil is because if
you have something on your mind, you can then just quickly pick
it up, jot it down and then it's done and the mind thinks it's
dealt with.
So therefore that will leave the mind and you'll no longer be
worrying or stressing about it.
And you might have two or three things come up, but eventually
your mind would go, okay, I don't need to worry about all those
things now, which is pretty awesome.
And stay away from your mobiles or your TV or anything like
that, because they just wake the mind up.
They're like the light.
It's like the morning coming in, the sun coming in the morning.
It just tells your brain to produce more chemicals to keep you
awake.
You know, we also know not to drink coffee and any stimulants after
the mid afternoon.
And contrary to popular belief, alcohol does not help you
sleep.
It might help you to fall asleep, but you don't stay asleep
or you don't have a good night's sleep where it heals your
body, hence you have a hangover.
Especially as we get older, it's harder for the body to deal
with the alcohol poisoning overnight, so you wake up in the
next morning.
Your body might have dealt with alcohol, but it hasn't done
any repairing for the body.
And this is why sleep is so important, is because it helps you
to repair your body.
It helps you to prepare the day's thoughts, the neurons in your
mind.
And yeah, I'm not really a biologist, but I know certainly from
all the books I've read and from my experience I've taken notice
how I feel in the morning.
Sleep definitely helps to repair the body.
It doesn't do it so much during the day because it's keeping
you awake and keeping you doing the things you want to do.
Your exercise and your thinking and your seeing and all
of those things.
The other thing is go to bed when you are ready to go to sleep,
not before.
Don't go lie in bed for two hours watching telly.
You know, your sleep really does need to happen the moment you
get in bed, and that's intimacy, of course, but this can
be a great way to aid insomnia.
Anyway, that's a different story.
That's a whole different podcast that one is.
And prepare A few things in the morning so you don't have to
think about them.
When you finish your evening meal, don't go and sit down for two
hours and then get up and get everything sorted, sort everything
and then sit down and relax.
Because we tend to sit down for the evening just before going
to bed.
We get up and then we start sorting the stuff for the morning,
which really just wakes the mind up to the final step.
And this is how you will fall asleep.
And if you come here to get a good night's sleep or to fall asleep,
this is exactly what you come here for.
And hopefully let me know in the comments whether this works.
And.
But this is what you do.
You might want to write down or take note of this, but here goes.
The first thing you need to do is just when you're lying in bed,
just tense your body.
So tense your toes and then let them release.
Tense your body and let it release.
Tense your arms, let it release.
This tells your muscles that it's okay to relax, that this moment
is okay, this moment is perfectly fine the way it is and
it doesn't need to worry.
And then do the whole body, every single part of the body, including
your face.
Don't worry about what you look like.
No one's watching.
No one's watching.
Well, hopefully no one's watching you, but honestly, just
screw up your face, scrub your eyes, nothing like that.
And then just allow your whole body to relax.
And then just take a few deep, slow breaths.
Take an in breath normal and breathe out slowly.
And do that for three breaths and imagine your body going to sleep.
We're not worried about the mind at the moment, we're just thinking
about the body going to sleep.
And then the next thing you can do is over the next 10, 15 breaths
or so, just breathe in normally and then breathe out slowly.
And as you breathe out slowly, you can say these three affirmations.
So you breathe in and then breathe out slowly.
I am safe and falling to sleep.
I am safe and falling to sleep.
I am relaxed and falling to sleep.
I am comfortable and falling to sleep.
What these do is just allow your mind to stay focused on something.
It allows your mind to slowly relax and keep active of something,
but not too active to stay awake.
And it stops it worrying about the daily things because otherwise
that's when it won't fall asleep.
Now then, if that doesn't work, just that this is the cream
of the crop.
This is the one thing that is almost guaranteed to put you to sleep
and that's come back from 300 in multiples of three or seven.
You might find seven a little difficult.
I do so I do it in threes.
But if you find threes really simple do it in sevens and just take
a breath in normally and then breathe out slowly.
300 take a breath in slowly.
Take a breath in normally and breathe out slowly.
293 and just continue.
If you lose count start again.
There's no competition.
There's no like can I get to zero or something.
It's just a matter of keeping your mind busy enough so you will
fall asleep.
So hopefully that's helped.
Hopefully that helps you to get a good night's sleep tonight.
Let me know in the review.
You can always head over to my website StephenWeb.com and download
the 5 Simple Practices for Inner Peace.
Hopefully you'll have some nuggets and some wisdom from this.
Thank you for joining me.
This is Stephen Webb and this was Stillness in the Storms.
