As I was getting ready for bed last night and tucking myself in, I remembered the phrase, ‘Sleep like a baby’ and realised that in use today it is derided and mocked; people often retort with comments like, ‘Babies don’t sleep through the night’, ‘Babies wake up a lot’, ‘Babies are light sleepers’ etc.
And what came to me as I was settling to sleep last night was that we are overriding and missing the point. When a baby sleeps there is a quality to that sleep that is absolutely exquisite. A body willing to fully surrender and let go to the essential-for-our-well-being activity of sleep. And ‘activity of sleep’ is used here purposefully to avoid the notion that we can collapse into bed and sleep will come and do its thing; the fact that we have a responsibility to maximise what sleep offers, not to fall out of our day and into it, but to revere and honour what takes place when we sleep and therefore the importance of it for all of our wellness.
Doing shift work is a brilliant way to build an aware and enriching relationship with sleep.
I have had the opportunity to learn on the go how important my approach to sleep is and have bust through many myths and much-repeated opinions about what sleep health is. The notions of a certain number of hours, unbroken sleep being essential and rules about when to sleep, for example, not being the be all and end all.
My work life requires a super flexible approach to sleep and I am mastering the ability to maximise opportunities to sleep as and when they arise. Twenty minutes here may be exactly what is needed to stay on and fresh for whatever the next few hours present. Shift work has released me from the binds of control and that things have to be a certain way.
My experience of working night shifts has taught me so much and having been caught in some should and should nots around sleep, it is exquisitely liberating to realise that sleep is a purposeful activity to maximise when it happens and take great preparatory care of, during my awake hours. Night shifts are both brutal and brilliant, it is not natural for our bodies to be up all night, but it is absolutely brilliant and a joy-filled honour to have the opportunity to serve and, the application of purpose in any and every situation is vitalising.
So is it that we need a certain amount of sleep, at a certain time or is it that ‘sleeping like a baby’, aka fully surrendered in the knowing that all is well and we are always in the embrace of the universe, will mean that we are refreshed and ready for whatever the day (or night shift 😉) has in store?
And rather than adopting the commonly repeated should and should nots, what about returning to a listening relationship with our bodies and letting them guide us as to what is needed.
I love those moments when I am about to do something because it has ‘always been done that way’ and I stop to consider what it actually feels like in the body; realising frequently that my body is always a wiser ally than my mind.
