Sleep: How do you let go of the day?

The other night, I spent a fair amount of time with one child who was scared. It was midnight and I was tired. But there was no way that this one was going to sleep. So I sat beside her until sleep came.

Children get scared and don’t sleep. The dark is scary, the open closet door is scary, and under the bed is scary. That lurking unknown something is scary.

But sleeplessness doesn’t end in childhood. Adults, too, have a hard time sleeping. We call it insomnia or anxiety or restlessness. We may not worry about the open closet door. But we lie in bed and wonder how we’re going to make the mortgage payment, or whether our son is actually going to his college classes, or if our boss will support our project, or if our marriage is falling apart, or if we should move to Tibet.

Life gives us a lot to consider. And for many of us, the chance to lie down in the dark may be the first moment of the day for these many considerations. Our minds start the work of processing that conversation with our sister, that interaction with the rude store clerk, the beautiful bouquet of flowers that our aunt sent.

Oh, but to sleep. How can we do anything without sleep? Sweeter than the purest nectar, sleep is a balm, a tonic, a literal life-saver. If this doesn’t ring true to you, if you are one of these people who say, “I only need five hours of sleep a night,” I encourage you to look at the research. It says things like people who sleep eight hours a night live longer, healthier lives. They don’t gain weight as easily. They have better sex. They’re more productive and have fewer accidents. They are happier.

We improve so many of life’s struggles with sleep. So what do we do when we’re too scared to sleep? Too anxious to sleep? Too thought-full to sleep?

There are a lot of answers to those questions, of course. But the shortest and easiest answer I know is: we pay attention to our breathing.

Breathing doesn’t get as much respect as it might. Sometimes, we take it for granted. But it is nothing less than the source of our lives. And that source is pretty powerful. When we watch and listen to our breath, we calm ourselves, we steady our minds, and we ease our bodies. It is impossible to have a steady, calm breath and a racing, frantic mind. The two don’t go together. If you manage your breath, you calm your body. Then you can sleep.

Going to sleep is about letting go. It’s about trusting that life is working. It’s about knowing that you’ve done what you can for one day and that the only thing left to do is to sleep.

When I was a kid, I was lucky to have some key lessons in how to sleep better. When I was very small, my mother would sit by my bed and tell me that it was time to pack up everything that happened during the day and put it on a shelf until tomorrow. This wasn’t a literal packing up of toys and books and clothes, but a psychological packing up of worries, excitements, and wonderings. I didn’t need to forget about them; they would be there for me to unpack in the morning. But there was nothing to do with them at bedtime. It was time to sleep. That shelf might have been heavy some nights, but it held the work for me while I slept.

I also remember a friend of my parents sitting with me one night at bedtime. I was excited and didn’t want to sleep; there was a party in the next room. This woman changed my world by telling me that I could breathe through my toes. She talked to me about breathing deeply and feeling the breath come in through my toes, go all the way through my body and back all the way out again. Over the years, I’ve developed and learned a lot more about breathing and relaxation, but breathing through my toes has gotten me through a lot of life.

As an older child, at about eighteen, when I was filled with existential angst and deep concerns about the state of the world, another woman gave me another trick that changed everything.  

She said to me, “You need a worrying time.” The idea is simple: don’t ignore your worries, but don’t allow them to take over your whole life. Give them their time, each day. As a young woman, I spent twenty minutes a day worrying. I’d pack a lot into those twenty minutes. I’d consider all that could go wrong, I’d grieve for the small girl in Nicaragua who lost her whole family to the war, and I’d wonder what would happen next in my life. If any of these thoughts came to mind during the rest of the day, I could assure them that they’d have a chance the next day, during worrying time. Other than that, they had to leave me alone.

Over time, worrying became less of an issue for me. Today, I still sit for at least 20 minutes a day, and I practice—not worrying—but focusing on my breathing, and allowing my thoughts to come and go without following them, without getting caught up in them.

When we can train our minds to be calm and let go of thoughts, even for just a time, we can go to sleep more easily.

At midnight, I asked my girl to consider her breathing. She was unconsciously holding her breath, something fairly common for many people. At first, she was annoyed with the idea, her mother’s perpetual focus on her breath. “I can’t,” she said in exasperation.

But I ask her to keep trying. You’re going to focus on something, so what’s it going to be: the creature in the closet or the calming in your chest?

Then I just started a little thing that works every time. Imagine the clear blue sky, I said. The sun is warm and the air is still. Maybe there’s a little yellow butterfly whispering about. The sky is clear, blue, soft and calm. Breathe that blue sky into your feet, I say. Breathe that blue sky into your calves…your knees…your thighs. Relax into the clear blue sky. Fill your body with the clear blue sky. You are the clear blue sky.

She can’t resist the lull of the words, the soft images, and the overpowering gentleness of the kind blue sky. By the time I reach her head, she’s already asleep. We’re both ready to let go of the day, and let sleep do its magic.