Ep. 80 Not knowing, curiosity and sleep

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis welcoming you to podcast number 80, the last in our series for the summer of 2025. We talked in the last podcast about different ways of knowing, and I invited you to contemplate whether you tend to draw your own conclusions more from the spoken or written word. That could mean from hearsay, the sayings handed down from generation to generation in riding arenas, from theoretical principles that get reasoned either from the top down, the very big to the very small, or from the bottom up, the very small to the very big. Or do you put more credence in the information you get from your senses and perhaps your imagination? Now, I don't really know why this is. Perhaps it's my background in science or perhaps this led me to get interested in science. But I am a model maker and a systems thinker. Within my riding, I love to link a feeling that I get one day. So that's embodied knowing with language, with words that describe it. And that I think can have meaning to everyday riders and to hold that within an overall theory that has underlying principles. And in our case, this theory is really about bodies and how bodies work and about psyches and learning and emotion. These linkages allow people to bring out the best in both brain hemispheres, the knowing and the feeling, the words and the body. I think this has enriched my life so much and helped so many riders to not just bring out the best in both brain hemispheres, but bring out the best in them and their horses in ways that I think can enrich their life too, beyond riding. So I love when I've had a breakthrough in my riding to go to the anatomy books and look up what did I actually do? Making a model that matches the practice and having this understanding. Perhaps this is a quirk of my brain, but having that understanding of the what, the how, the why, the small, the overview makes me much more able to validate that feeling, keep finding it, keep learning from it, keep growing it. And of course, when I teach it, that makes it more. If I don't do that, it's more likely to be a lucky accident that happened one day that I don't necessarily reproduce and really pick up on and really learn from. Having talked about knowing, I want to make a case for the power of not knowing, for staying curious, for questioning, for comparing what you hear and what you feel, being open to new discovery and new ideas. In the last podcast, I said when they don't know, they don't know. They think that they know. These people would have a vague internal map of Riding that's not well filled in, but that's fine, it's enough. They don't know what more there could be. The converse is when they know, they don't know, they don't think they know. Or we could say they don't think they know everything and they have more idea of what there might be to know. So this is the beginner's mind that has no expectations of how it should be and is really open and in the moment. And when this becomes a way of lifelong learning where riding over a lifetime becomes a journey and an exploration, that's just magic. And I have huge regard for the elite riders I know for whom that is the case, because keeping this kind of open minded exploration in the immense pressure of elite competition is so impressive. I honour those riders as well as everybody on that kind of open learning journey. Now, the ultimate of not knowing, you could say, happens when we're asleep. A good night's sleep can yield a 20% improvement on a skill learnt the previous day. That's just amazing, isn't it? Few people know this or really think about it. And sleep cleans out our brain. When that doesn't happen, well, we don't sleep well and we're groggy the next morning. That improvement in learning doesn't happen, but it's so valuable when it does. So there's been a lot said and written about sleep in recent years and it's no longer considered a badge of honour to get away with five hours a night. That's now considered a way to probably get Alzheimer's disease in your older age and not be as productive and friendly and pleasant as you could be. Now, eight hours of practice of anything is a lot. So if you spend your night sleeping in a position, let's say being fetal, where you draw your knees up towards your chest and you probably reach your head forward, that's a lot of practice of that position. And of course you're likely to get on a horse, find it difficult to get your thigh at a lower angle with your knee low enough down on the saddle, even though I'm saying just 45 degrees, which is higher up than most people would think you're going to find that difficult. And you might tend to bring your head forward and crouch forward. So changing your sleeping position can really help your riding. And there are a lot of sleeping positions that really don't help it. So if you do sleep in a rather fetal position, can you open your angles a bit to put your body in something closer to an ear, shoulder, Hip heel line with your thighs at about a riding angle and you're going to wake up fetal again and just spread yourself out a bit and be patient with yourself. Over time, I and many other people have shown that sleeping position can be changed easier than you might think. When you sleep on your side like this, I recommend having one knee very slightly lower than the other with your legs resting against each other. So if your knees are the same height, the bony knobble on the inside of your thigh, they're against each other and that's not so comfortable as sliding one knee down a little bit. And then the curves in your calf and your ankle and your knee fit together rather nicely. For most people, having their left knee slightly above their right would be the most therapeutic position. It's also often recommended, I confess I don't do this, that you have a cushion between your inside thighs because if you lie on one side much more than the other, your top leg is actually drawn in towards the midline because your knees are closer together than the bones at the top inside thighs where you've got bulky thigh muscles. So putting a pillow between your legs, especially lower down by your knees and your calves could be a way to go. But I actually rather like the one calf a little lower down than the other. The least body friendly sleeping position is sleeping on your front. Now, I don't think many people do this, but if you do, it's going to accentuate the hollow in your back. And your guts are attached into the front of your spine and you have a weight hanging from the middle of your back over time that's quite likely to give you back pain. You're also going to have to choose to put your head to one side and you're likely to always choose the same side. And one day you might just wake up and discover your head doesn't really go to the other direction. So I do know two riders who sleep this way who are both really skilled riders. One is young enough that I wouldn't expect her to have any problems yet, and the other one is still doing okay. But when we talked this through, it made her think a little bit and she did have to go, yes, my head really doesn't turn that way, does it? And I would recommend to anybody who sleeps on their front that you find another option. If you sleep on your back, best to have a pillow beneath your knees so they're slightly bent. That means the middle of your back is going to come down onto the mattress rather than you being slightly hollow backed. Also, the pillows that you have are really important. Now, I sleep in a lot of different beds when I'm traveling, and I find pillows are the biggest stumbling block. I can deal with almost any mattress and I'm quite small, so often p pillows are too big for me. And if you have too high a pillow when you're sleeping on your back, your chin is going to go down to your chest and again your head is going to go forward. If you're sleeping on your side and the pillow is too high, you're going to have to tilt your head up a little towards the ceiling, and that puts a crick in your neck. So you really just want a pillow to fill in the distance between your shoulder on the mattress and the side of your neck that is down. For me, that's two rather soft, not very deep pillows. And you can get pillows that are shaped with a little sort of half moon where your neck would go. I've yet to found one that's small enough for my body, but for bigger people than me, that might support your neck and your head in a really nice alignment. So for the extreme of a not helpful sleeping position, let me tell you a story of a teenager I taught a couple of years ago who came on a course of mine and was staying in a local hotel with her mum, who I knew well. And they were sleeping in a double bed. And this teenager clearly had a major asymmetry. She was falling off one side of the saddle and beginning to drag the saddle with her. And over the first couple of days that I saw her, I just didn't enter that. It was such a big Pandora's box and I wanted to get her body more organized on the planes of up, down and back front before we tackled side, side. And when we started to tackle side, side, I said to her, what's your sleeping position? And she looked very vaguely at me and I think she really didn't know. And her mum said, oh, I can tell you exactly. Is she sleeping on the left side of the bed with her right knee bent and out to the side? In fact, she's digging it into my back and her left leg is hanging out of the bed. So that's a major difference between her left and her right leg. And you probably can easily understand that she would fall off the left of the saddle with that amount of practice of having two such different thighs. Now, the teenager herself was bemused and amazed to discover that connection between how she slept and how she rode. And we really tried to get the knee of the straight leg up and More reach into the leg that was permanently out to the side. It needed to come more on the saddle and further kneel down it more and for it to become more weight bearing. And she made some really good changes that were really just the first few layers of an onion that if she keeps riding, she'll be peeling for the rest of her life. But the connection between sleeping and riding was helpful for her to see, and I hope she really did go home and to begin to change her sleeping position, which actually can be less hard than you think. If you get fetal, you just open your ankles out a bit. If you have two very different sides lying on your back, you endeavour to equalise them. So not many people are as extreme as this girl. But lying on your back in bed, try this exercise, reach in to one leg so that foot goes lower down than the other, then reach into the other leg. And as you do that, it'll probably be really clear to you that that the leg you chose instinctively is your preferred leg to reach into. And when you reach into the other leg, it feels weird and it doesn't reach as far reach again into the leg you don't reach into so naturally. And at the same time draw the opposite foot up towards your pelvis and your pelvis a little bit up towards your shoulder. So you shorten yourself on that side, your perpetually long side, whilst elongating the your perpetually short side, you're going to feel really weird. It could be good to do this lying on a mat or lying on your bed and get someone to take a photograph of reaching into your preferred leg and reaching into the opposite leg and aiming to equalise yourself. I think you might find that what feels normal looks pretty asymmetrical. And the contortion you make as you reverse that could actually look way more symmetrical than your feel sense tells you it possibly could. Lying on your side, but not so fetal as you might be tempted to do, is reckoned to be the best place to sleep. If you lie on your right side, research has shown that that that helps your brain clean itself during the night. So within your brain you have what's known as glymph, which is the brain version of lymph. And both of those kind of clean out your body and your brain, especially at night when you feel groggy. The next morning, after a bad night's sleep, you'll be groggy because that cleaning up hasn't happened. And there wouldn't be the kind of upgrade to learning a new skill that you would find after a good night's sleep. Now, I think many people have the idea that they'd love to sleep in the same position all night, but many bodyworkers I know suggest that you are better off changing position and wriggling a little bit. And the ideal is probably sleeping on your right side a bit and your left side a bit. But if the main position is your right side, that's ideal. So this is a fantastic experiment to do. Lying on your side in bed, near the edge of the bed, and notice is the top part of your body in your torso and your pelvis ahead of the bottom side of your body against the mattress, over it or behind it. Now, get yourself onto your other side and notice the same thing. Lying this way is the top of your body with your torso and your pelvis behind, over or ahead of the side that's against the mattress. Now, I think you're likely to find that whichever side you're lying on, you have the same side that lags behind the other one. And put yourself by the edge of the bed with the lagging side towards the ceiling, and then reach your top arm so your fingers or the whole of your hand are over the edge of the mattress and pull that lagging behind side over the bottom side, perhaps with one knee a little lower down than the other. Hold yourself there for a while and then let go with your hand and keep that alignment. You're probably going to notice very quickly that this is hard work. Muscles in your back on that side are working really hard. And for you to square yourself up when you're riding, rather than having this side lagging behind, which is the default option in your body, it's going to have to work hard in a similar way. Now, this exercise works well. It can be done easily. If you sleep on the side of the bed that allows you to reach your hand and do this exercise. So I did it with a woman in a workshop once, lying on a rubber mat, and started talking to her about, well, do you normally lie on your left side or your right side? And she was going, and a friend of hers said, well, where's Dave, her partner? And she went, oh, he's behind me there. So we were doing the exercise as on the most helpful side in the most helpful way. You may need to get to the other side of the bed to make the top of your body being the lagging behind side, or to lie yourself with your feet towards the pillow and your head at the other end. It's worth finding a way, if you can, without causing Marital strife to be able to do that exercise on the edge of the bed. But on the opposite side of the bed, there's an exercise that's worth doing lying on your back. So as you lie on your back with your shorter lagging behind side close to the edge of the mattress, put your lower arm over the edge of the mattress and pull a little bit to pull the that side towards the edge of the bed and fill it out. That's probably going to feel pretty weird. Let go suddenly and I think you'll find your pelvis goes doing away from the edge of the bed into a way that you will now recognize as a longer side and a shorter side and your body bulging towards the longer side. Bring your arm over the edge of the bed again and maybe repeat a few times, just letting your pelvis go and really feel it almost do elastic recoil back to its old place. And then I'm sure you've imagined already what the next bit is. You take your arm over the edge of the mattress and when you let go, you're going to keep your pelvis and your body lined up again. A photograph from somebody showing both of them, both positions could be really helpful for you to validate just how much this is doing for you. Doing the side lying exercise and the on your back exercise is really worth it. They give you two dimensions of the fix for your longer side and your shorter side. And I hope you can do this without getting into marital strife. So do these exercises in or on your bed before you go to sleep. You need something thicker than a yoga mat to be able to put your arm over the edge. But maybe you can find a way lying on your sofa. And I think you'll find you can cash in on some benefits in a shorter time than you think. But translating them into riding will take brain cells and will take muscle power. Changing your sleeping position may well be less of a mission than you think it's going to be. What's really important is to just change your position before you go to sleep. You will wake up contorted in whatever way. Just change it again. Be kind to yourself. Be really patient. Don't let yourself turn this into a big drama of being mean to yourself. But in time, I know lots of people who've changed their sleeping position and are very happy that they did it. As riders in relation to our asymmetry, we're all like the goldfish who would never discover water. We're so in it, it's so part of us. But these exercises help you get to experience it from the outside, as it were. And that makes it possible to notice it and begin to mitigate it. Sleep well. Sleep long. Have fun with your riding. Enjoy your horses. I hope to be with you again next year.