How matched are your partner’s and your sleeping patterns? (See video below!) Sleep psychologist Michael Breus sorts people into four chronotypes: 🦁 Lion: up early, sharpest before lunch, fading by 9pm. 🐻 Bear: follows the sun. Most people are bears. Good in the late morning, slumpy after lunch. 🐺 Wolf: slow mornings, comes alive in the evening, happy to be up at 1am. 🐬 Dolphin: a light sleeper who wakes easily and often feels tired and wired. Named after dolphins, which sleep with half their brain awake. It’s a loose shorthand, and your body clock can shift with age, light and stress. It’s still a handy way to understand why one of you is chatty at 7am and the other one isn’t. Which one are you, and which one is your partner(s)? Tell me 👇

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.

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

I LOVE hearing about other peoples dreams. Especially because I am trained in Lucid dreaming facilitation, and I use dreams as an entry point into my own unconscious almost on a daily basis. I am a nerd for dream interpretation of all kinds. So this biweekly Dream Circle is envisioned as a space where dreamers of all kinds, including those that barely remember any dreams at all, are welcome to convene, share their dreams, and get their dreams interpreted with the help of the community. I would love to have you there. It’s tonight at 5 pm UK time. The link to the video call is in the Calendar tab. Come on time, but stay as long as you like, no need to stay for the full hour. And if you’re not able to join tonight, feel free to drop your dream in the comments and I would be happy to offer an “ if this were my dream” interpretation. Até já!