Episode 52: A Practice For Getting Back To Sleep When Your Mind Is Active

Today I had an interesting conversation with a client and a practice you could say emerged out of it. A practice that I myself have been doing in certain circumstances that I’ll tell you about in just a few moments, which I thought would be useful for them as well. It’s probably best to begin by talking about the circumstances in which you would want to engage in this practice, and then I’ll tell you about it.

Quite a few of us wake up in the middle of the night, either because we had a bad dream, or because we’re getting up to use the bathroom, or get a drink of wate,r or we’ve got a body pain that maybe we need to see to or stretch, or something like that. As you get older, these sorts of things are more common, but sometimes we’re also woken up by our own active minds, perhaps worrying, being anxious, mulling over things.

I know that myself, even though I realized it was completely irrational, the night before the beginning of a new semester where I had classes particularly face-to-face classes, that I would be teaching to a new crop of students, even though I’d been teaching for quite a while, sometimes I would wake up and not be able to fall asleep, and it would undoubtedly be because I was anticipating this new situation that I was going to be in.

So I was talking with this person and they said that they have been waking up like that, not regularly, but off and on for a number of years in the middle of the night and then having some difficulty getting back to sleep. And I think this is very common, or at least we read that many people struggle with this sort of thing.

You’re now awake, you’re lying in bed and your mind is working and it keeps you from being able to drift back off into sleep. Why? Because there are emotions that are associated with what it is that you’re thinking about. And I won’t say that these are all necessarily what we would call negative emotions. But I will actually use a term that the Stoics preferred for the pathē, the emotions that are troubling. They called them, among other things, perturbationes.

And the singular for that is pertubatio. And it means something like being shaken up, being upset, being steered around. They talked about these emotions as being perhaps contrary to reason or disobedient to reason. And they’re things that we feel. And so why do we feel them?

Well, we could be thinking about the day that happened before or even the week and And it could be the totality of it or it could be a particular incident. And we’re ruminating on it and thinking: Oh, I should have done this instead of that. Or when I was in a conversation or a conflict with this person, I should have said this, or it wasn’t right for them to say that. Or we might even think about our own mistakes that we made, and feel embarrassed, or ashamed, or guilty about them.

So that is the aspect of the past, probably the immediate past. Although sometimes people wake up in the middle of the night and they’re troubled by something that they did or something that somebody did to them years and years ago. But it’s more common that it’s something fairly immediate.:

The other thing that people might be thinking about instead of the past is the future. What is coming up ahead? And it could be the day that is facing them and some of the challenges that they are anticipating running into. It could even be things that we think are going to be good, but we’re not quite entirely sure about and we could worry that things are not going to turn out the way that we want them to, even though we’re anticipating something that would be pleasant or even joyful the future could also just like the past extend off

Quite a ways we could be worried about our finances, worried about our job situation, worried about the economy as a whole, worried about our eventual demise. All sorts of things can figure into that. We can be concerned for people other than ourselves as well, both past and future oriented.

And you could even be focusing on the pr