Awareness
The first step of the formula is focused on helping you understand what is going on with your sleep and your energy. This stage of my work often brings about a shift in awareness, which is crucial in being able to take responsibility and make different choices. In Tired But Wired I describe this as the ARC of transformation:
awareness
responsibility
choices
So an important part of this process is digging deep within so that you can understand why things have become a certain way and, importantly, what you need to do about it, as well as undertaking a personal reality check. You’ll also find how your beliefs can play a significant role in how you sleep. The questions I invite you to reflect on in your Personal Reality Check (see Chapter 5) are the same ones I would ask you if you were sitting with me in a consulting room at my clinic.
Step 2: Cleaning Up Your Energy
This next step is where my expertise as a physiologist really comes into play, and I cannot overemphasise the importance of this stage of the programme.
Often very soon after meeting my client/patient, I can make an intuitive assumption of how their nervous system is running – whether it’s in SAFETY or SURVIVAL mode. The questions I then ask – the ones you will reflect on in your Personal Reality Check – will validate this assumption.
Next I recommend five strategies, the 5 Non-negotiables (5NNs), to be implemented for at least the next 21 days. These five small strategies change the tuning of the nervous system and shift it from SURVIVAL mode to SAFETY mode. Once this vital recalibration has taken place the other sleep and energy tools can be applied to even more powerful effect. Conversely, these tools are totally ineffective if you’re running in SURVIVAL mode.
Another important aspect of using the 5NNs is that when you’re in a state of exhaustion you need some quick wins. You need to experience some positive changes – improved sleep and energy – to keep you moving forwards and to prepare you for the deeper work to come, and this is exactly what this step of the FAWA formula is designed to do.
The 5NNs are simple and doable – important if you’re exhausted and running on empty.
Soon you will learn exactly how to apply these 5NNs, but if you’re feeling intrigued they are to do with:
How and what you eat and drink.
What you do before your head hits the pillow.
Your relationship with information and technology.
Step 3: Refining Sleep Quality and Depth
Once the 5NNs have been applied, your body and nervous system are in a much more responsive state and you’ll be ready to work with the Pure Sleep Programme. The tools in this section range from simple, commonsense and practical Essentials to weird and wonderful Deeper Tools, incorporating techniques that I’ve learnt from Eastern philosophy and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). These techniques are based on sciences that have been around for thousands of years and they really work – I have seen this even with clients who’ve come to me with a lifelong history of sleep problems that has run in the family for generations. (Don’t forget, my original training is as a Western scientist and I am constantly looking for data to support my findings.)
These tools work by activating the branch of the nervous system that enables you to sleep. Your sleep will start to be more refined and deeper. You may still experience occasional sleep difficulties but they will feel less catastrophic because your energy levels will have lifted due to the energy clean-up in Step 2. You will notice that, as you worry less about not sleeping, this in itself – the absence of worry – leads to better sleep. It makes sense, doesn’t it?
To sleep beautifully you almost need to not care about how you sleep.
Step 4: Doing The Real Work and Tapping into Vibrant Energy
At this point, you’ll be ready for me to share a very special programme with you. The Energy for Life Programme will support you in doing The Real Work. With these tools you can explore happiness and meaning along with dealing with relationships, uncertainty and fears.
Years ago my work with sleep took a strange turn and I, a physiologist and sleep expert, found myself on stages in packed-out auditoriums talking about such things. But why? It’s quite simple really – in my quest to solve people’s sleep problems (and my own) I ended up talking about the very things that were stopping people from sleeping and draining their energy levels – absence of happiness and purpose, conflict in relationships, fear and uncertainty, and so on. Most significantly, in all of the tools I shared I seemed to be showing people how to reconnect with a part of themselves that had been missing or neglected. And what is this part? Well, you might want to call it spirit or even soul or God.
Earlier I described how my awakening felt like I was coming back to a very familiar place – coming home. However you choose to label it, when you reconnect with this part of yourself it will lead you back to peace, safety, better sleep and vibrant energy.
I hasten to add that the contents of the Energy for Life Programme are not original to me but rather they come from an ancient wisdom that has become all the more relevant in this crucial stage of our history when technology has brought with it a type of magic which – although wonderful in so many ways – ever seeks to draw us out of ourselves and away from our spirit and true source of safety. So my humble intention in sharing this toolkit is to remind you (because for some of you there will be no big surprises here), in practical and concrete ways, how to reconnect with your innermost self and spirit, so that you can sleep deeply and awaken with the vibrant energy needed to live a meaningful life.
My even deeper intention is that you will make these tools and practices part of your everyday life and that you will share them with your children, as it is perhaps the younger generation who are especially in need, at present, of reconnection with soul and spirit.
So here you have it – the unique Fast Asleep, Wide Awake formula. In the following chapters you’ll begin to understand some of the most important principles behind why you might be exhausted and not sleeping. Know that as you read and engage with my words the healing process has already begun.
Part I
‘I think the key to transforming your life is to be aware of who you are.’
Dr Deepak Chopra
Chapter 3
Understanding the Sleep–Energy Balance
‘Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.’
Marie Curie
I deliberated hard before adding this section on sleep because you will find that there is some theory to absorb and it’s
