Why Should I Take Sleep Seriously?
Updated: 2 days ago
You know the person who's proud of sleeping five hours. You've met them. They mention it before you ask, usually next to the word grind, and it's a very tiring ambition to listen to.
I don't want to make fun of them too much. For a long time most of us believed sleep was the part of the day you could cut. You can't make more time, and sleep looks like eight hours of nothing happening.
My own version went the other way. On a June afternoon in 2020 I didn't wake until a friend knocked on the door with a bowl of ice. I got up for lunch, then went straight back to bed, telling myself a small nap would help the digestion. It was not a small nap. I had slept about eight hours the night before, ten to six, so I couldn't blame the hours. I owed people money, a good client was waiting, and I lay under a fan writing a very honest paragraph about being tired. In my journal I called it the wrong hours. I had been back three days and still hadn't fixed my routine. What I lacked was a day with any shape.
Tiredness is often a routine problem dressed up as a sleep problem, and that's why sleep needs proper attention. The number of hours is only part of it.
Yoga takes it seriously, and so do the Upanishads it grew out of. In this tradition, sleep is the thing everything else leans on. Everything we've talked about this week works better if you've slept.
The Gita asks for balance in sleep.
We've already seen the verse from chapter six, but it's worth reading again with sleep in mind. Krishna says yoga isn't for someone who eats too much or doesn't eat at all, or for someone who sleeps too much or stays awake too much (6.16). Then he puts it the other way round: for the person who is moderate in food, recreation, work, sleep and waking, yoga ends sorrow (6.17).
The verse asks for balance. Too little sleep and your mind frays. Too much, and the Gita is just as frank here, you start to slide into tamas (heaviness, inertia). In chapter fourteen, tamas is described as born of ignorance and binding a person through carelessness, laziness and sleep (14.8). So aim for whatever amount leaves you clear-headed.
What happens when you're fast asleep?
The Mandukya Upanishad is the shortest of the principal Upanishads, and it makes a bold claim. A person lives in three states: waking, dreaming and deep sleep. And behind all three there is a fourth, called turiya, which is awareness itself.
Its description of deep sleep (verse 5) is lovely. When the sleeper wants nothing and sees no dream, it says, that is deep sleep. In that state the person is whole, made of awareness and bliss, and enjoying it.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad has a good picture for this. A falcon flies about the sky until it tires, then folds its wings and drops down to its nest. In the same way, it says, a person goes to the state where there is no desire and no dream (4.3.19).
Every night, with no training at all, you put down your name, your job, your worries and your plans, and rest as something simpler. The Upanishad sees this as a nightly hint of who you are underneath all your roles. You can skip the philosophy and still take the practical point: the world gets along fine without you for eight hours, and you come back better for it.
Even Patanjali counts sleep
In the Yoga Sutras, the mind has five kinds of movement, and sleep is one of them (1.10). Patanjali defines it as the movement of the mind that rests on the sense of absence. The old commentary by Vyasa adds a small proof: when you wake you can say I slept well, my mind was clear, and you can only remember what the mind registered. So even in deep sleep, the mind was there.
Patanjali also gives a practice based on it. One of the supports he lists for steadying the mind is to rest the attention on the knowledge that comes from dream and deep sleep (1.38). That sutra is the seed of what later became yoga nidra, a guided practice of conscious relaxation, taught widely in the 20th century by Swami Satyananda Saraswati. It won't replace sleep.
Ayurveda puts sleep next to food.
Ayurveda (India's traditional system of medicine) says the same in its own words. The Charaka Samhita names three supports of life: food, sleep and a well-ordered way of living. Good sleep, it says, brings happiness, a well-built body, strength and clarity. Poor sleep brings the opposite.
So sleep is as basic as food. Nobody brags about eating one meal a week. Somehow we brag about sleeping five hours.
The hour before bed sets up the night
Most of us go to bed as if we're stepping off a cliff. We work, scroll, watch something, then fall into bed with our mind still racing. The mind needs a slope down.
Here's a short wind-down. Keep it the same every night, so your body learns the signal:
Screens off 30 minutes before bed. Scrolling is the surest way to keep your mind awake.
Dim the lights. Lamps instead of the ceiling light. Your body takes its cue from the room.
Empty the head onto paper. Write tomorrow's top three tasks and anything going round in your head. It closes the open loops from earlier this week.
Eat dinner early and light. Two to three hours before bed, if you can manage it. More on this tomorrow.
Three minutes of slow breath, or a forward fold. Make the out-breath longer than the in-breath. Lie with your legs up the wall if you like.
Go to bed at the same time. A regular bedtime does more than a perfect one.
What about waking early?
The yoga tradition prizes the early hours, the brahma muhurta, roughly the hour and a half before sunrise. Ashram life is built around it, and many people find that hour the easiest time to settle down and think.
Swami Sivananda's Autobiography has a scene that could be about any of us. Young aspirants, he says, used to sleep on in the winter cold until six or seven, and he reminded them not to waste the brahma muhurta, because the mind concentrates almost without effort at that hour. His method for getting them up was dinner. He arranged their night meals before sunset, and he observed that only those who load the stomach heavily at night find it hard to rise early. So an early morning starts the evening before.
For me, the time on the clock matters less than the routine. If you want to wake earlier, go to bed earlier first, fifteen minutes at a time. Getting up at 4.30 on four hours' sleep is the same five-hour pride with better branding.
Swami Vishnudevananda says something similar about quantity. In Meditation and Mantras he calls sleep an overindulged habit of long standing, and agrees that the amount needed can be cut down through regular practice. But he adds two conditions: it must happen slowly, and the brain still needs its rest, because if it is denied, you will be too tired to work or to meditate. Sivananda's own timetable for whole-time aspirants, in Mind: Its Mysteries and Control, allows five to six hours. Needing less sleep comes after years of practice, if it comes at all.
Here is tonight's experiment.
Pick a bedtime that gives you seven hours, count back thirty minutes and set an alarm for then. When it goes off, leave your phone in another room. Do the wind-down above, or any three steps from it. Keep it up for a week and compare your 4 pm energy score with last week's.
One more thing from Practical Lessons in Yoga. Sivananda asks every aspirant to keep a spiritual diary, and three of its questions are about sleep: when did you get up, how many hours did you sleep, and when did you go to bed. Add those three lines to the 4 pm energy note from earlier this week. In seven days you'll have your own data, which is better than anyone's advice, including mine.
And set your alarm kindly. In Inspiring Talks of Gurudev Sivananda, Swami Venkatesananda records Sivananda waking the ashramites each morning with a soft, rising OM, and adds a note: a sleeper should be woken softly, without a shock, so that the life force can return to the limbs gradually. An alarm that starts soft and gets louder does the same job.
Then check in with yourself in the morning. Ask whether you feel a little more rested. A monk's smile at breakfast is optional.
Tomorrow: food, and what the mind does with it.
Where to read more
The Sivananda-tradition books behind today's piece:
Autobiography of Swami Sivananda (on the brahma muhurta and collective sadhana)
Meditation and Mantras, Swami Vishnudevananda (laziness, sleep and moderation)
Mind: Its Mysteries and Control, Swami Sivananda (the three states of consciousness; the daily routine)
Practical Lessons in Yoga, Swami Sivananda (the spiritual diary)
Inspiring Talks of Gurudev Sivananda, chronicled by Swami Venkatesananda
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