WELLNESS: The paradoxes of sleep: Why we battle to sleep, and how we could change

Anyone who has tried sleeping, which I hope is most of you, will know what a perfectly unusual (usual) experience it is. After a long day of work, emails and stress, we adopt the gentle repose of a corpse and wait for the ability to do it all again to wash over us. And then, as if by magic, we wake up with just this capacity.

Yet, some of us will be intimately aware that sleep is not such an easy process. Indeed, in our culture of optimisation, smart watches and 100 supplements, the natural passivity of sleep has become an active endeavour (scored out of 100, no less).

This brings us to our first contradiction: *the paradox of intention. *

Anyone who has tried to sleep will know that is it like trying to will yourself into a parallel reality and finding yourself very stubbornly stuck in the life you have. The more we *try *to sleep, the less sleep we can obtain. 

Viktor E Frankl captured this poetically: “Sleep [is like] a dove which has landed near one’s hand and stays there as long as one does not pay any attention to it. Unfortunately for us, sleep is not a flightless bird.”

Closely intertwined with this is the control paradox – a wider bane within our current thinking.

The more control we try to exert, and insist that we have, over the happenings of our lives, the more we see how little is within our actual control. We avoid screens and drink chamomile tea, all while still wrestling with the underlying paradox of intention as we stew in our beds.

Then comes the addition paradox – the Americanism of the mind. We add and add on everything we can to our bedtime routines: lotions, pills, white noise – all with the hope that the next new, shiny addition is the one that brings our salvation.

Yet, more is seldom more.

We press in the wrong directions, hoping that more effort will make more rest; as if rest is not the absence of effort. This is not to say that sleep aids are not useful – far from it.

But what matters more is our primary orientation to sleep and rest. We put the cart before the horse and then crack the whip, wondering why we get nowhere.

We barely notice that this is what we are doing. Truly, our perceptions around sleep are notoriously paradoxical. We can see just how exhausted a friend or colleague is, and tell them the benefits of rest; the importance of downtime. All the while, we ourselves are dead on our feet and trudging on headless to our own advice.

And perhaps the most bitter of our sleep paradoxes is the fatigue paradox.

When we are at our most exhausted, we do not make the kinds of decisions that are in the best interests of our slumbering selves.

We binge-eat, doomscroll in bed, overcaffeinate and cram in entertainment into our quiet hours so that we feel like we have claimed something back against the vicious day.

Yet, sometimes the best thing we can give ourselves during the miasma of absolute fatigue is not more. Less effort, less compensation, less attempt to control, less holding on tight until our fingernails turn white.

We can begin again by relaxing; opening the hand that demands dominion and perfection.

And into this open palm we might find something we had forgotten about: a softly nesting dove. DM

Dr David Backwell is a medical doctor working in sleep medicine, based in Cape Town.