7th January - Day 7
I spend a lot of time with clients focusing on sleep. It’s one of those topics that intersects the very dry and Apollonian aspects of change—namely, the nuts and bolts of wellness—with possibly one of the deepest and most dionysian elements of the human experience. Sleep is a bizarre and mysterious thing.
Evolution is a conservative process, meaning important elements are conserved over time. It's fair to ascribe the relative importance of something to how strongly it is conserved as animals evolve. On the surface, sleep makes no sense—animals like humans are frozen still on a nightly basis, static prey for anyone to come along and eat. Sleep must be of gargantuan importance for it to be conserved and compensated for, even in the face of such a risk. It is that important. Without it, we die—not figuratively. We go mad and then we die.
So, it’s no wonder that in our globalised, brightly lit, 24-hour-a-day, hyper-stimulated environment that sleep is top of mind for many people seeking to live their best lives.
Artists and Sleep Disruption
Disruptions to sleep architecture are a very common thread in the artist’s journey. Artists and creatives are often expected to keep odd hours, denounce sleep, and work through the night. This cavalier, parody-of-itself approach to sleep is quickly losing its grip on the public imagination. I don’t think there’s any real correlation between sleep patterns and creativity. You can be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at your writing desk at 5 a.m. and churn out pages of shit, or you could be eating biscuits in the middle of the night and turn a phrase that makes you whistle at yourself in admiration.
It isn’t about the pattern but the quantity and consistency of the pattern, and how well it fits you.
Personally, I’ve realised I need restorative sleep during a specific window of time. This is your chronotype. (A chronotype is an individual's natural inclination for sleep and wake patterns, determining whether they are more alert and productive in the morning, evening, or somewhere in between). A useful question to ask yourself is this:
If I were alone on a desert island, with no responsibilities or obligations, what time on average would I naturally wake up and fall asleep?
This is your natural sleep cycle.
For me, it took moving from Ireland to Australia to realise that my family’s default pattern—stay up late, get up late—was not remotely my chronotype. When I moved to Perth, a very morning-oriented city (where coffee shops open at 5:30 or 6 a.m., and restaurant kitchens often shut by 8), I initially fought it but eventually adapted to the local rhythm. And into my natural pattern I fell.
If I get silence, coolness, and darkness between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., consistently, I become a different person.
The Restorative Power of Sleep
The restorative element of sleep is so important. While there’s plenty of online content where wellness influencers obsess over every last detail of sleep hygiene—and this is valuable information—I think the absolute, hands-down most important element of sleep is its ability to restore us to the deepest sense of ourselves.
From a materialist lens, this means stabilising mental and physical health. But I would go further: from a metaphysical perspective, sleep actively restores us. It forces us inward to engage in a type of unconscious, active imagination, lest our psyches disintegrate. Sleep is the enforced reintegration of the human spirit. In our quickening, maddening world, the imperative for a good night’s sleep only grows stronger.
Good quality sleep is fantastic for everyone, but it’s essential for creatives. Sleep is where you consolidate and redraft your ideas. There’s an editor who loves you, who knows your work intimately, and who resides inside your head. This entity sharpens your technical skills, memorises the lines of your play, and fills the story holes in your second act before the sun rises.
The sleepless, junkie artist coasts by on audacity, raw talent, and momentum, but is usually an insufferable asshole to be around. The well-slept artist creates better things and isn’t a car crash of a person.
Sleep Advice
Get more sleep. Get as much of it as you can. If you’re single or in a couple without kids, sleep in. Lie in. Skip the drinks and go to bed sometimes. Buy expensive sheets—the best bedwear you can afford. Make your bed feel like heaven. You should feel like you’re slipping into the best MDMA trip of your life.
Go home early from the party. Have sex, kiss, turn off the lights, and get eight solid hours of beautiful sleep.
Then call around to your friend’s house—the one with small kids—and wordlessly show them your sleep score on your app. They’ll throw plates at you. They’ll tell you that you have a face they’ll never tire of punching. But they’re too sleep-deprived to chase you. You’ll dance rings around them.
(We have a week-old infant—does it show?)
Sleep in Therapeutic Contexts
Joking aside, therapists or coaches who’ve worked in quality residential settings have a clear sense of where they fall in the pecking order of importance when it comes to wellness offerings that move the needle.
When I worked in residential rehab, we would often let clients spend a few weeks just catching up on sleep in their villas—often after years of deeply fragmented sleep architecture. Their bed was the therapist. Carl Jung himself couldn’t have come close to matching the transformative power of several back-to-back nights of good sleep. This isn’t hyperbole—ask anyone else who has worked in similar contexts.
Mainstream and conventional mental health professionals—without throwing rocks at them—may pay lip service to this idea. But even in the cultural push towards better sleep, I think they radically underestimate its importance in the emotional calibration of their clients.
Because, and here’s the rub: sleep is free and accessible. This makes it uncomfortable for some professionals to acknowledge just how important it is to their client’s overall wellbeing—often far more so than therapy or prescriptions.
If your medications have sleep issues as a side effect, bring this up with your doctor. Creative or otherwise, it may very well be robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Today’s poem. I have two people to thank—from very different worlds.
One is someone I previously interviewed for my podcast: William Sieghart, the author of The Poetry Pharmacy. We talked about sleep issues and—I don’t know why—after I recorded the podcast, the first lines of this poem came to me:
Sometimes you’ll wake at half past three,
the caffeine and the bon amis still too far away.
It sat in my head for a year or so until I heard a podcast with the sleep scientist Matthew Walker. He was asked about what to do in a scenario not unlike the first line of my poem—i.e. what do you do when you wake up and simply can’t get back to sleep?
I’d heard him in previous interviews hammer home a list of tried-and-true behavioural hacks, but in this particular interview, it was evident he had received a lot of pushback from disgruntled people who’d tried everything and were still wide awake in the wee hours.
Matthew used the lovely phrase “resplendent rest” and emphasised how simply resting in such situations is perhaps the best you can do.
I liked this approach because too often, celebrity scientists will don their galaxy brains and try to materially explain away every little piece of pushback, digging their heels into the tools and tactics they’ve been peddling for a long time. But there was a hint of artful surrender to his process.
Sometimes you will wake up, in distress and existential angst, and you will not be able to get up and run away from it—not even Jocko Willink is out of bed yet. At such times, it’s a fantasy to think you’ll get back to sleep, but instead, you must learn to rest.
One question I’m fond of asking those who have the undiagnosed PTSD profile is simply to interrupt them—not to be rude, but because a pattern interrupt will often yield a truer answer. I ask:
“Do you know how to rest?”
Immediately, they say no. Their eyes are still and frightened but honest, and we have a moment. Then the work is laid out before us.
Learning to rest is restorative and a useful relationship to develop. In the poem I anthropomorphize her as sleep’s sweet sister.
Learning to rest is a skill, and it is therefore learnable.
So many blocked creatives don’t know how to create, or how to rest, because they’re terrified of what happens when they stand still—when they sit still. It takes them a while to realise that they are stillness. the stilness of the night is a great place to practice this - when you have few other good options but to accept that for the next few hours, you will be supine.
No one is winning any prizes for resting, but it is a rare skill of incalculable importance. Learning how to rest, and how to sleep well, are two of the softest, least showy allies for your creative output. You don’t need to understand how they will support you or undergird you—much the same way as an eagle isn’t going to get a PhD in the aerodynamics of how it hovers effortlessly on a thermal over a cornfield. It just does it.
So on those mornings, when the caffeine and the flat white and the banana bread and the morning swim are still too far away, don’t stew in your own existential soup. Don’t doomscroll. But don’t run away from yourself either. Lie on your back like an otter and know no one expects anything of you for hours. What a gift horse. Don’t look it in the mouth.
And every now and again, as you stare up like a child at the faraway ceiling - between two worlds, you will indeed drift off—and be roused by the alarm going off at the much more reasonable hour. A different person.
At Ease
Sometimes you’ll wake at half past three,
the caffeine and the bon-amis,
still too far away.
That awful drill sergeant.
Drilling.
Driving knees onto biceps,
eclipsing solar plexus with his full heft.
Oh sleep!
that dark maiden,
away now - under his insistence
that you think his thoughts with such persistence,
and fill the void with not-enoughing
or it’s jackboot on Jugular and he’s not bluffing
(this time).
No use to hook foot against mattress and drive up.
He has you that way.
So sink down to where he cannot follow,
scapulas through mattress
leave him with his sodden fatigues.
For sleep’s sweet sister (you forgot her)
is found as bobbing, mother otter
on back,
on black, waveless ocean.
Rest - resplendent rest
still hours before commotion.
Niall Campbell