How I'm using sleep as productive time
The sky at dusk.
Did you know…
Sea otters hold hands when they sleep so they don’t drift away from each other.
Being awake for 16 hours straight decreases your performance as much as if your blood alcohol level were 0.05% (the legal limit is 0.08%).
Humans are the only mammals that willingly delay sleep.
(source)
I’m sharing these facts to pique your interest. Because when I started my sleep reset this month, I thought to myself, this is going to be a snoozefest.
But as I moved through the self-reflection exercises, I thought about the huge span of 7–8 hours when I’m asleep and have no conscious idea of what's going on. I thought about how neat it is that I get a chance to have a mini reset every night when I go to bed. I thought about the different types of dreams I have:
Sometimes I go to bed feeling anxious and this manifests as a horrific nightmare.
Sometimes I read a book before bed and I’ll have an epic dream that feels like I watched a 2-hour movie.
Sometimes I go to bed with a problem on my mind and I wake up with a fresh insight.
Sometimes I wake up laughing at something hilarious — I can’t pinpoint a cause for this one but I’ll happily take more hilarity in my dreams please!
The topic of sleep is very opaque to me, but my curiosity wasn’t ready to write this off as just another mystery of life. What if I was more intentional about my thoughts and emotions before going to bed? Would this influence my dreams and brain activity overnight? Could this change the way I feel when I wake up?
I googled “the benefits of dreaming” and came across this article. And things started clicking for me. I decided to embark on a new experiment where I try to use sleep as productive time.
[To my fellow lovers of rest, I feel the need to clarify. Toxic productivity is a real thing, but this isn’t about using sleep as a way to grind harder during the day. I’m very happy with how I spend my waking hours. Honestly, I don’t do much. I have a lot of time to rest, time to think, and time to take an afternoon nap. My definition of productivity is more about using my time to work on the things that I want to work on... when I want to work on them.]
So I’m going to try to use sleep more productively in two specific areas:
To process things I want to let go of.
To come up with creative solutions.
The goal? To try to increase the likelihood that I’ll feel pretty good when I wake up.
If this is something you’re interested in, I recorded a video with all the details of what I’m going to try moving forward.
Here’s a summary in case you don’t want to watch the video:
Before I go to bed, I’m going to think about how my day went and how I want to feel tomorrow.
This quick reflection will help me decide what I’d like to try to work on overnight (i.e., is there something I want to release or is there a problem I’d like to find a creative solution for?)
If I want to let go of something, I’m going to do a loving kindness meditation as I’m falling asleep.
If I want to find a creative solution, I’m going to hold the problem gently in my mind as I’m falling asleep.
If I’m having trouble falling asleep in either of the above scenarios, I’ll do a 5-minute brain dump in the form of stream-of-consciousness journaling.
In the morning, I’ll jot down as much of my dreams as I can remember to see if there are any insights embedded in my unconscious. And since I’m not someone who usually remembers my dreams, I’m hoping to improve my dream recall and potentially train myself to have lucid dreams.
Ultimately, I think this experiment will help me learn to let go of things I can’t control. Of course, I have some influence over the inputs — or what I do before I go to bed — but I have no idea what will happen when I fall asleep. I can't control my dreams. I can’t control how I feel when I wake up. The results will be vague, anecdotal, inconsistent. And there’s no measurable criteria for success. In short, the parameters of this experiment are so undefined that it scares me. Yet, it also intrigues me.
I’ve been in this experiment for around a week and here’s what I’ve noticed so far:
Instead of pressing snooze, I've been waking up as soon as my alarm sounds because I'm eager to jot down my dreams before I forget.
I seem to be remembering my dreams more frequently and with greater ease.
There seems to be a correlation between what I do during the day (what thoughts are on my mind when I go to bed and what I pay attention to throughout the day) and my dreams that night. The one night I wasn't intentional with my thoughts before bed (I forgot and read a chapter of a dystopian novel instead), I had a nightmare.
I think there's something here, but as with all things, it's going to take time to determine whether this is a practice that works for me. In the meantime, I'm excited to continue this experiment.
This month’s reflective questions
What comes to mind when you encounter the word productivity? How has your relationship with productivity changed over time? How has your relationship with sleep changed over time? How might these relationships continue to change?
Wishing you restorative sleep,
