Hello to everyone who joined over the last couple of weeks. I’ve seen your names coming in and I’m glad you’re here, @Kostas Xeras @Jirin Vacl @Fabian Figura @Daniel W @Nora Hill @Joe Keohan @Tom Harvey @Inês Batista @Fabrice Brumier @Ailsa Barrie @Mireille Kaldalian @Vanessa Smith @Navyansh Bajaj @Tracy Russell @Kailey Bruyere @Jani Nurminen If we haven’t crossed paths yet, I’m Maša. I’m a sleep coach living on the Portuguese coast, and I work with the body side of sleep: somatic work and nervous system regulation alongside Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, and Integrative Sleep Therpay. Eight years in, and sleep is still my favourite thing to geek out about. I also know a lot of you prefer to read and not post. That’s fine. Sleep can feel private, and nobody here needs to share their whole story to belong. So here’s an easy one so that we meet (a question for everyone in the community, whether you are new or not!). If your sleep lately were a movie, which one would it be? 🎞️📽️

People used to pay a stranger to shoot peas at their bedroom window every morning. Her name was Mary Smith, and in 1930s East London she walked the streets before dawn firing dried peas at bedroom windows until the person inside got up. She was a knocker-upper. Yes, that’s the name 😁 Before alarm clocks were cheap and reliable, British factory workers paid someone to come and wake them. Turn up late to the mill and you were fined. So people paid a stranger to pull them out of sleep on time. I came across this while reading about the history of sleep and I keep thinking about it. The job disappeared decades ago. The idea behind it stuck around. Most of us still wake to something outside ourselves deciding when the night is over. And a lot of the people I work with have gone one step further. The knocker-upper now lives in their head. "If I'm not asleep by 11, tomorrow's ruined." "I need my 8 hours or I won't be able to function." Checking the sleep score before they've opened their eyes properly. Sleep becomes one more thing to perform well at. The problem is that sleep doesn't respond to effort. It happens when the body feels safe enough to let go, and pressure tells the nervous system to stay alert. So you lie there working hard at sleeping while your body keeps watch. A big part of my work with clients is helping the body learn that the night belongs to it again. If your nights feel like a shift you keep failing, start with a Sleep Strategy Session. In one call we look at what's keeping your body on guard at night and map out what would help it let go. The link and details are here: https://your.restfulsleep.eu/method

There's a man in Tokyo who has been booked about 4,000 times to do nothing. His name is Shoji Morimoto. He used to work at a publishing company where his bosses kept telling him he wasn't contributing enough. Eventually he started to wonder whether doing nothing might be worth something to someone. In 2018 he advertised himself on Twitter as a "rental person who does nothing." The requests came in. People wanted someone to eat a meal with, someone to wave them off at a train station, someone to sit next to during a hard moment they didn't want to face alone. He keeps them company and answers simply, without offering advice or trying to entertain anyone. I keep thinking about this story in relation to sleep. A lot of the people I work with lie awake alone at 3am with a mind that won't settle. They've tried the apps and the supplements. What I often find underneath is a body that doesn't feel safe enough to let go. We evolved to sleep near other people. Another person breathing in the room once meant someone else was keeping watch. When we feel alone, part of the nervous system stays on alert, and sleep gets lighter and more broken. Research on loneliness has found this pattern again and again. In my 1:1 sessions, some of the most useful moments are when I'm not fixing anything at all. Someone talks while I listen, and after a while their breathing slows down. Morimoto built a whole livelihood around being there without an agenda. Most of us could offer that to someone this week.

What do you normally reach for to cope with the effects of a bad night's sleep? I personally tended to reach for coffee, and had the habit of catastrophizing what my next day will feel/look like. In reality, once I fought the urge to mask my exhaustion with caffeine, let my body simply do its thing and find its natural way to homeostasis, and I didn't pile onto my own misery with anticipatory anxiety...sleep tended to more easily come back to normal. But it takes some time to get to this place of returning to good sleep with relative ease. You can get there much more quickly by starting to track your sleep behaviours, and I teach you how to do that for free in the Sleep Diagnostic Journey in the Classroom. (Don't forget that anyone can apply to get a free Sleep Review after 7 days of tracking their data and/or you can bring that data and your questions to the weekly free Q&A session - happening tomorrow) So, what are you go-to things to cope with a bad night? Newcomers, @Navyansh Bajaj @Bri Duarte @Estefania Mantilla @Crystal Ervin @Dani Rabinovich @Karmen Ovnicek @Tracy Russell @Jani Nurminen , how about you?

It sometimes seems to me that people enter Night School, and then immediately get hit by a bus because very few brave ones dare to speak and leave their trace with posts or comments 😁 But by posting about your struggles and wins with sleep, you not only get direct support from me on those posts, but you also help other members who might be having similar issues, and I actually get to meet you! WIN 🤝 WIN 🤝 WIN So go make your first post! About what? Here are some ideas: What currently frustrates you about your sleep? What are some things you have tried to help with sleep that have actually made an impact? When you fly in your dreams, how do you usually take off the ground? I want to meet you! (And pssst, there will be an opportunity to do so in another way soon, as I am preparing for you a free webinar)