Written by Regina Gee of Wellspring Coaching
Defining Sleep / Rest / Renewal
Sleep is one of the 7 Core Areas of Health, and getting adequate, restful sleep is essential in our wellbeing; it impacts all aspects of our mental, physical, emotional, social, and spiritual selves. Sleep is a structural support, it is our maintenance, our regeneration, our recharge, and our place of ultimate healing. It is hard to wrap our head around the importance of sleep because sleep is typically defined by what it is not; we think of sleep as the absence of wakefulness. Sleep is much more than the lack of being awake. Sleep is the time our bodies use to take care of themselves, taking a break from digestion and movement, the time our brain washes itself and makes sense of our experiences. When we expand the way we think about sleep to include the presence of rest and renewal we are able to better conceptualize sleep and therefore able to prioritize it.
“There is an inbreath and there is an outbreath, and it’s easy to believe that we must exhale all the time, without ever inhaling. But to inhale is absolutely essential if you want to continue to exhale.” Brené Brown
Sleep and rest are part of the cyclical lives we live as humans. Our bodies move through time in a series of structured rhythms, 24-hour circadian rhythms, 90-minute ultradian rhythms, and hormonal cycles. Our flow of consciousness moves through states of sleep, dreaming, and waking guided by our exposure to light, our internal clock, and our internal homeostatic drive, combining external and internal experiences to create an equilibrium – balancing our need for rest with our activity and the environment. To use Brené Brown (and Joan Halifax’s) insights, waking and sleeping are as intertwined as inhaling and exhaling; one cannot be sustained without the other.
The Experience of Sleep
When we sleep, we withdraw from the sensory stimulation of the waking world; we stop taking in visual, auditory, and other sensory input (with the exception of smell, which we continue to sense while sleeping). In deep sleep, brain activity, cardiovascular function, breathing, and other physiological processes slow down. Energy is shifted from our waking physiology to resting physiology, participating in rejuvenation, restoration, and immune function. There is intuitive wisdom in this. Sleep is the inbreath for the outbreath, the contraction for the expansion, the cocooning for the metamorphosis, the being for the doing.
“Resting is not a waste of time. It’s an investment in wellbeing. Relaxing is not a sign of laziness. It’s a source of energy. Breaks are not a distraction. They’re a chance to refocus attention.” Adam Grant
Connecting to Your Sleep Health
As you consider this core area of health, how do you reflect on your relationship with sleep? What place does sleep hold in your life? Do you feel rested when you wake up? Do you dream? Do you sleep as much as you would like? How much sleep is best for you? Do you fall asleep easily? Do you stay asleep? Do you enjoy sleeping?
“Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness—one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights.” Katherine May
When we understand sleep as more than “a lack of wakefulness” we open up space for sleep & rest to be contemplative practices, endowing them with meaning, supporting the fact that there is an ebb and flow inherent in the way we exist. Sue Monk Kidd writes about how the Greek word for rest is hesychia, a term that also came to mean praying. Meditation and prayer are states of altered consciousness, and so is sleep. This connection can help us understand sleep as an essential component in wellbeing while also having its own spiritual, resilient, and purposeful identity.
Caring for our sleep is a tangible way to invite a rooted respect for ourselves and our bodies into our lives. Sleep is our ability to renew each day, to process our experiences, to make sense out of our lives, to pray and to rest. Tending to our sleep is foundational for our health and wellbeing, and it can be a practice bigger than machine like operations.
