Try this if stress kept you awake last night | Charlie Morley

How can we even dream of making changes to the third of our life we spend asleep when we don't know anything about it?

He is the man I consider to be the leading instructor in the world in the unique field of lucid dreaming. But today we're not going to talk about lucid dreaming. We're going to talk about ideas from Charlie's new book, Wake up to five Practices to Transform Trauma and Stress for Peaceful Sleep. Charlie Morley, welcome to the mindvalley podcast.

Trauma is trauma, whether from a military war zone or a familial war zone. There are so many people who are dealing with high levels of stress or even trauma from their childhood, from their past, from their familial upbringing which is affecting their sleep. And these practices, yes, they are military grade practices, they have worked for serving military and veterans and personnel, but they are absolutely applicable for everybody in everyday life. Because to be honest, whose stress levels haven't been elevated in the last 18 months? We've been in a global pandemic. The rates of sleeplessness and anxiety around sleep have skyrocketed. Levels of anxiety and depression have gone through the roof too. And we know there's a direct link there. It's very unlikely for working with anxiety and depression that you don't also have some problematic sleep and vice versa. Sleep is the golden chain that ties health together. If you can sort your sleep, health comes naturally. Become your own sleep tracker. Learn how sleep works, learn the different stages of sleep, but crucially, learn how stress and trauma affect each stage of sleep individually. And as I always say, and I think I say this in the mindvalley quest, fear and fascination cannot exist in the mind at the same time. So if you can move from a state of oh my God, I'm so scared, why am I having these flashbacks to? Fascinating. It's just like he said in the book. I'm having a little bit of a stress flashback here as I'm falling asleep. We move out of fear and out of fear response. We can then fall asleep. There's something in the middle called rest. There's a bridge there. But many of us go from full wakefulness. I'm doing my emails, I'm checking Instagram, I'm sorting out everything. And then we try and go to sleep. We miss that bridge of rest. Know that good sleep begins not half an hour before bed. Good sleep begins during the day. And it's all based on something called parasympathetic drive. This is like the neurological basis of how deep rest leads to good sleep.

So Charlie, this is fascinating. Would taking a nap count as that.

Napping has different benefits for almost all of the population? Napping is good for you. Make sure your nap is under 90 minutes and make sure your nap ends crucially six hours before your intended bedtime. So if you intend to go to bed at midnight, make sure your nap finishes at six. That's due to something called sleep pressure, which is the build up of a certain hormone in the brain that basically makes you feel tired. Takes about five or six hours for that to build up. So if you have a full on nap and go to sleep, takes a while to build that up. Even if you only got three or four hours sleep, if you can get a cheeky one hour nap the next day, you can boost your levels of mental acuity, basically your brain function to the same as an eight hour nap. That is amazing.

Wow, I did not know that. If you are fascinated by what we discussed today, check out Wake up to Sleep. And if you want to learn more about lucid dreaming, go to mindvalley.com forward/lucid mindvalley.com Lucid to learn about Charlie's program. Thank you.