The Psychology of Sleep

For 20 years I haven’t gotten much sleep. There are exceptions of course, a day, a phase, but this is the general reality of it.

This has often been part of the problem I’ve had with decent meditating: because if your body is too tired, the minute you sit down and truly relax, you fall asleep. I don’t have any problem dropping into significantly altered states. I have a problem not falling asleep because my body is sleep deprived. When my body isn’t sleep deprived, that is not really an issue, but that has almost never been the case, not since a period around the early 1990s when I was living with my meditation teacher, a lovely and powerful Asian woman who was feeding me broccoli and rice and a ton of energy work, and taught me to do this stuff in part through a rather amazing ability to ‘project’ energy to assist.

As it turns out, this sleep issue is hormone-based, health-related. Metabolic disorders are the end-result internal-symptom of hormonal disorders, which are directly related to sleep issues (among 1,000 other issues). So my being super-sized (the end-result external-symptom of the metabolic disorder) is actually related to my bizarre lack of sleep. I wake up after 3 hours and I’m wide awake. That turns out to be an adrenalin/cortisol issue which is fairly well dealt with by ingesting the right thing prior to sleep. Who knew?

So after the aging and health issues that come from a couple decades of serious sleep deprivation, I am finally attempting to get a handle on this and start getting more sleep. This has only just begun. I am also working hard to NOT work every waking hour that is left. What this mostly means is that I hardly know what to do with myself, and also have a lot of work I am not getting done.

It’s led me to wonder how much of my lack of sleep was, subconsciously, intentional. Maybe a degree of ‘defensiveness’ is maintained by the state of body that is chronically living on adrenalin/cortisol. Read some of the 70-odd articles on raypeat.com for interesting info on these topics (hormones, thyroid, and aging — they are all related).

I had a habit of abruptly waking up wide awake around 2am for many years. This began when I was a teenager, from a different source. My dad’s 4th wife (a paranoid schizophrenic, who certainly made me wish I had the merely violent previous one back) had a daughter a year younger than me. It was a bad situation. I won’t elaborate. It was so bad people probably wouldn’t even believe me. But back then, I was completely straight, with my biggest vices being my love for writing stories and playing guitar, while her daughter my age couldn’t be left alone for ten minutes without being drunk or stoned. Of course, the official story our dysfunctional family believed was that it was the opposite. I was the bad kid, she was an angel.

My dad played in a nightclub on weekends and my stepmom would go with him. I was in my room, since immediately my stepsister’s friends would come over, and none of them liked me; they were all well-dressed stoner snots who thought I was a lower life form because I dressed like some early 80′s version of Cinderella and didn’t get high. (Her boyfriend by comparison–an 18 year old–was a fabulous guy who’d always come in and play guitar with me for awhile. He had a band that got a recording contract and was just getting radio air time when he was killed in a motorcycle accident. Very sad.)

She and her friends would drink beer and smoke weed and when they left, they would always, but ALWAYS, leave just ONE PIECE of evidence somewhere. I mean so ‘always’ I came to think it was intentional. My stepmother would look for it and find it. And then–talk about ironic–she and my dad would apply their “separate punishments.” So for my stepsister, the one at fault, her mother would “have a talk with her.” My dad would come in at 2am when I’d been sound asleep for hours, I had not even left my room all night and had no clue what anyone was on about, and he’d whip off his belt, drag my ass out of bed (usually just in panties) and whip the hell out of me. And that was that. Enough of waking up to that at the same time 2 nights a week and you start waking up at that time–WIDE awake–without any help at all, thanks very much.

Later in life I didn’t go to bed until 1-2am and had to get up at 6am. When I returned to going to sleep earlier again, the waking up abruptly returned. Since I was way too awake to sleep, I just took up doing something constructive. For much of my adult life, my friends and coworkers have joked that “she’s a machine!” because of the way I can ‘drive’ myself with incredibly little sleep when it seems necessary; getting instead of 6 hours a night, more like 3. Sometimes none.

So for years I blamed my inability to sleep more than a few hours at a time on this 2am wake up call I had for … a few years I guess, when I was a teenager. I’m not sure if that is still behind the cause of the sleep, but I doubt it. Clearly the cause is hormonal now, because when I do what Dr Ray Peat suggests in his articles, and make a point to eat sugar (like fruit) (which I have considered the devil for years, being very low-carb!) along with protein, and eat something kind of sweet before bed, I sleep a shocking number of hours.

Also, dropping most foods (only because I can’t get grass-fed meats here and in Peat’s world, PUFA are the devil) and dropping to eating mostly just milk, with some orange juice and eggs in the morning (to my astonishment, Peat is right: the reactive hypoglycemia I get after a near zero-carb breakfast with even a little protein or especially eggs, is mitigated by the fresh squeezed OJ), gradually has been dropping what was apparently ‘inflammation’–I’m certainly not losing the carb-bloat, on an eating approach that gives me so many carbs per days I almost faint when I see the numbers!–and for the first in so many years I’d forgotten this was normal, I can actually find a comfortable position to sleep in.

The downside, is sleeping longer hours brings out issues with sleep apnea that are less issues when you aren’t sleeping hardly at all, obviously. That’s a whole separate thing.

I once had the advice during a meditation to ‘do a filter-search for the archetype of all the sleep you’ve missed.’ Now I am wondering if that is energy I have avoided intentionally. Would I be more ‘vulnerable’ if I were better rested and more ‘moderate’? What have I gained on some level of bad-decisions for being profoundly sleep deprived my adult life?

I find that I still naturally default to the habit of ‘pushing myself’ even when I am really exhausted, staying awake even when I should be asleep. I am forcing myself to pay attention to that and get some sleep when my body needs it.

Seth, and others, have recommended that sleep happen in 2 or 3, not 1, shift: that the body shouldn’t be asleep that length of time and that one would be closer to their dreams done in two parts. I have sometimes slept like this, 3+3 or 3+4.5 or 4.5+4.5. I would like to try this again but working for a living, and the kid in the morning and afternoon, sure complicate that. We’ll see.

I’m just wondering: why would I have chosen this, subconsciously, or in terms of belief systems? What am I changing, when I change my sleep, besides the sleep itself?

P