Dear Advy,
I can’t turn off my brain at night to get any form of restful sleep. Lately I feel like I am a walking zombie around the office. I’m not sure how everyone else in my firm is doing it. They are all pulling the same hours as me, but they all seem to be fine. I just want to put my head on my pillow at night and not be bombarded with the endless cycle of what needs to be accomplished the next day. Grateful for your suggestions
Sincerely,
Zombie Lawyer
Dear ZL,
I was up all night trying to think of what kind of advice to give you!
The U.S. National Institutes of Health publication Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation: An Unmet Public Health Problem states:
“…[C]onsequences of sleep conditions …take a toll on nearly every key indicator of public health: mortality, morbidity, performance, accidents and injuries, functioning and quality of life, family well-being, and health care utilization. Some of these consequences, such as automobile crashes, occur acutely within hours (or minutes) of the sleep disorder, and thus are relatively easy to link to sleep problems. Others—for example, obesity and hypertension—develop more insidiously over months and years of chronic sleep problems. After decades of research, the case can be confidently made that sleep loss and sleep disorders have profound and widespread effects on human health.”
The Phase 1 Report of the national well-being study (page 64) identified good sleep habits as a factor that helped protect legal professionals from the stressors of practice and helped in the prevention of burn-out, depression and psychological stress. Good sleep is good medicine, so if you think it’s important to make sure you get it, you’re not dreaming. Good for you for writing in about it.
Before I get into giving you sleep advice, allow me to give you some advice about something else your letter raises. You’re comparing your own subjective experience with sleep difficulties with your peers’ outward appearance. They seem to have everything under control, so what’s wrong with you? The answer: Nothing! Are you having challenges sleeping? Sure. You’re setting yourself up for misery, though, when you compare yourself to the – probably – misleading image others around you project of being “fine”. Odds are others around you are struggling too. Maybe their struggles aren’t affecting their sleep (or maybe they are) but your peers are almost certainly struggling with something. Just as you do your best to project the most positive image possible when you’re at work, they are doing the same. You are judging yourself against an impossible, artificial standard.
I mention that because lawyers are trained to be competitive. Competing with your colleagues for the best billings, the most impressive achievements, the longest hours in the office and any number of other things you could name can be problematic all by itself. Competing with them for who seems to be healthiest or happiest just makes your life impossibly hard. Try going for a walk with a colleague or going for coffee or really anything else that might allow you to get to know them better than the thin façade of perfection they’re working so hard to project. You may find that you’re not the outlier you believe you are. Your local lawyers’ assistance program probably has programs and resources available to you to help you connect with peers and mentors outside your firm who can also help you put the apparent perfection you’re trying to match into some perspective. You don’t say how many years at the bar you are, but you may find that you can gain some of that perspective as you gain more experience in the profession.
One surprising piece of advice sleep specialists will give you is this: Don’t stress about not getting your full 8 (or whatever) hours of sleep. You can function for a day with inadequate sleep. It becomes a problem only when lack of sleep becomes the norm, not the exception. Absent ongoing problems with sleep hygiene, a newborn baby, or some medical or medication-related problems, a poor sleep one night will result in a good sleep the next night. How does not worrying about lack of sleep help you get adequate sleep over the long run? Often what keeps you awake at night is worry that you should be asleep already. Fixating on your lack of sleep can itself become a cause of poor sleep.
Let’s zoom in on some specific issues that may be harming your sleep before zooming out to look at the bigger picture of what is bothering you.
I used the expression “sleep hygiene” above. That may be an unfamiliar term for some. We tend to think of the process of going to sleep as something that begins when your head lands on the pillow. In fact, getting ready to sleep begins long before you go into the bedroom. Your body responds to many tiny fluctuations in the external environment and processes going on inside your body. Your body responds to light by waking up and responds to increasing darkness by going to sleep. When you expose yourself to light – particularly the blue-based light that our screen devices emit – your body responds as it would naturally do in the morning by waking up. Try turning off your screen devices well before bedtime. If you tend to keep your phone by your bedside, put your phone (and laptop, and pad etc.) in another room to reduce your temptation to respond to its latest sound or flashing image and thereby expose your body to artificial morning light and the stimulation of what you may read or see there.
Now here’s another word I just used that might seem less than familiar: bedtime. You may not have thought of there being such a thing as a fixed time to go to bed since the days when you got a bedtime story to go with it. Remember how great it felt when your parents finally let you go to bed whenever you wanted to? Well, the price of that freedom was often bad sleep. Having a fixed time to go to bed, along with a fixed routine to get yourself ready for bed (for example closing the screens, brushing your teeth, letting a pet out for one last run around the backyard, reading a book) is very helpful to your body to bring itself into a mode where sleep is possible.
You mention that one of the things that keeps you up at night is “the endless cycle of what needs to be accomplished the next day.” Keep a pad of paper and a pen by your bedside. If you think of something that you truly need to remember tomorrow, write it down. Aside from occasionally having a great idea for the next day and needing to make sure you recall it when needed, thinking about what needs to be accomplished tomorrow accomplishes nothing. When thoughts come into your mind, ask “Is there anything I can do about this right now?” Most of the time – other than the exception I’ve just mentioned - the answer is no.
Now comes a caveat: When it comes to important things like sleep, reasoning – i.e., the conscious thoughts you process from moment to moment – has severe limitations. Sleep, like many basic bodily needs, is governed by parts of your brain and body that operate on a much deeper level than those passing thoughts do. The proportion of your brain – along with the parts of your body you could think of as your extended brain like your endocrine system - that are devoted to just managing your body’s equilibrium is far greater than the portion of your brain devoted to active, conscious thought. (L. Barrett) Many experts have used the metaphor of a rider on an elephant. The part of your mind that thinks thoughts you could put into words is like a tiny person riding on top of a big powerful elephant. “Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does. “ (L. Barrett)
That sounds pretty pessimistic, right? However, the metaphor is more helpful than you might imagine. There are many people who successfully ride elephants every day. Even more commonly, people ride horses all over the world each day. How do we comparatively puny human beings pull off the feat of directing where large and powerful animals will go?
The key is to take care of the animal’s needs and to develop trust and understanding through practice. Any rider that expects a hungry horse to walk by a field of tasty grass is going to be disappointed. A rider on a thirsty elephant will probably end up going for an unexpected swim. Both rider and horse/elephant need to learn how to communicate effectively and to trust that the rider will make sure the animal’s needs will be met.
Whoa whoa! No, I’m not recommending sleeping with an elephant. That would be dangerous, impractical and probably smelly. I’m recommending that you recognize that the part of you that resists sleep (or wants to fall asleep at inopportune times) is bigger and more powerful than your willpower. You have probably experienced this problem when you try to will yourself to go to sleep. It doesn’t work. Getting a better sleep means taking care of your body’s basic needs and like the elephant in that metaphor, your body needs to see that you’re taking care of it in the long run. That includes the sleep hygiene mentioned above but it also means eating healthy foods, getting exercise, drinking enough water and all the other things you know are part of a healthy lifestyle. That needs to be something you do consistently, so that as you’re trying to nod off to sleep your body doesn’t suddenly rouse itself because you didn’t drink enough water, or go to the bathroom, or avoid caffeine for the last several hours etc.
I also mentioned how rider and horse/elephant need to communicate in a way that develops trust. Not only does a rider talk to the animal but both rider and the ridden give each other countless subtle signals through their bodies. The rider may stroke a horse’s nape to reassure the horse. An elephant may stiffen when the ground under it seems to be unstable, such as at a riverbank. In the same way, you need to talk to the part of you that wants to wake up at night even though it makes no sense to do that, and you need to listen carefully to what your body is telling you.
The fact that you’re waking up thinking of things you need to do the next day suggests that you end your day feeling like you haven’t resolved anything, and you don’t trust yourself to be able to get through the next day unless you worry about it at night. At the end of each day, consider making a note of what you did achieve no matter how small that achievement might seem. If there’s something that you will need to figure out tomorrow, make an appointment with yourself tomorrow to figure it out. You’d be amazed at how effective it can be when you start worrying at 1:00 am to remind yourself that actually you’ve got a spot on your calendar blocked off to do exactly what is keeping you awake. You may find some other helpful tips in a recent letter about improving focus at work.
Those specific tips aside, you will learn a lot about the proper care and feeding of You if you listen and pay attention to the signals your body is giving you. Much of the time, what’s underlying the specific thoughts of “things you need to do” is needs your mind and body have but that don’t fit neatly into the category of something to worry about. Your worry may be due to your blood sugar level, or high levels of cortisol in your system because of your day’s stressors, or even just an unarticulated sense of unease with whether what you do during your day is meaningful to you. Your mind and body tell your rational mind stories about what you should have on your mind even though the underlying cause has little to do with that story. One neurologist refers to this tendency to make concrete stories out of transitory bodily states as the mind’s “pervasive aboutness.” Do you get irrationally short-tempered at 3:00 every afternoon? Maybe your blood sugar is low, and you could benefit from a snack. Do you feel stiff and sore after too many hours at your desk? Try going for a short walk.
Become a “You Whisperer” by listening non-judgmentally to what your body is trying to tell you about what is going on inside you and learning what helps You be happier, healthier and – at the right times - sleepier.
Be well,
Advy
