Get Deeper Sleep With Ayurveda
A good night’s sleep is truly the best medicine. I relish those mornings when I wake up and realize that my eyes haven’t opened since my head hit that pillow last night! What a feeling. And this is how sleep should be. We’re supposed to sleep through the night and wake up feeling refreshed. So what’s getting in our way? And why are we tired even if we slept eight hours?
Well, there are several reasons, and modern life is one of them. We are busy beings. Between work and socializing and family and the daily basics like feeding ourselves, we have so much to juggle in one day alone. I personally feel like there aren’t enough hours to keep up with being a human in modern society.
Looking for a solution to this shortage of time, we might trim a few hours out of our sleep schedule to fit in whatever else it is that we “need” to do.
The problem is that there is no sleep “bank”. We can’t add a bunch of hours one night to make up for a few hours lost the night before. It doesn’t work that way. The body needs proper rest each and every night. Sleep is a foundational human need, and it can be argued that sleep is the most important element when it comes to health. We can live for some time without food, even, but a few days without sleep and we will go insane.
This wisdom of sleep comes from ayurveda: ancient India’s system of holistic healing. It considers sleep one of the three pillars, or maintainers, of heath and wellbeing. Without it, our world comes tumbling down. I’m sure that anyone who’s gone through a period of insomnia can relate. Sleep deprivation has a negative impact on not only our body, but also our mind.
Ayurveda takes sleep wisdom much further than merely recommending a certain number of hours a night (which, by the way, depends on the person, but eight is an average). It’s not only how much sleep we get that matters, but when we get that sleep.
And for urban dwellers who stay up late, sleep eight hours, and are at a total loss as to why they still feel so tired when they wake up in the morning, this concept should really ring true.
Ayurveda explains that there are three vital energies called the doshas. These doshas exist all around us in nature, and also in our body, maintaining all bodily functions. When they’re in balance, we experience health. When they go out of balance, we experience disease.
Each of these doshas has two times of day when it becomes dominant in nature — a sort of doshic clock. In the early night, from about 6pm – 10pm, kapha dosha dominates nature and it therefore has an effect on our body, because we are connected to and influenced by nature.
Kapha is heavy, slow, sluggish; kind of like an elephant. We tend to feel kaphalicious in this 6pm – 10pm window — not so motivated, kind of heavy, getting sleepy. This, ayurveda says, is the time to go to bed. Take advantage of that kapha energy and it’s easier to fall and stay asleep.
Come 10pm, there’s a shift. Pitta, which is light, fiery, and a sort of ambitious energy, takes over until 2am. If we stay awake into this pitta window — say 11pm, 12pm, 1am — we experience a second wind. That fiery, ambitious pitta makes us feel awake! Ready to get stuff done!
This might sound like a good thing, but it is not. We should be asleep during this window because it’s when important pitta detoxification takes place, and it’s when we’re meant to receive deep and restful sleep.
Now, come morning, vata dosha takes over. It’s light, airy, and mobile, and dominant between 2am – 6am. If we wake up in this window, we feel light and airy. It’s actually easier to get up and out of bed and moving. If instead we sleep past 6am, we enter into another kapha window (6am – 10am), and that heavy, slow, sluggish, elephant-like energy takes over, making it hard to get going. We tend to feel groggy, lethargic.
This is why, even if we pack in a good eight hours between 12am and 8am, we’ll still wake up feeling tired. We’ve missed an important window for deep and restful sleep, and we’ve increased the kapha in our body by sleeping in late.
And so, the ideal sleep schedule is somewhere between 10pm – 6am.
This might sound frightening to some. But this is the normal time for a human to rest, now proven by modern science as circadian rhythms. The human body is connected to the cycles of light and dark, and is meant to be asleep at night, and awake during the day. It is not normal to be awake at night and asleep during the day.
If we regularly deviate from this normal circadian rhythm, we’re likely to incur any number of ill effects on our body, from hormone disruption to irregular menstrual cycles and digestive issues. In addition, ayurveda explains that staying up late at night causes depletion and degeneration, anxiety and skin diseases. Sleeping in too late in the morning causes weight gain, stagnation and depression.
Sleeping at the right time, on the other hand, is a giver of wellbeing. All day long we exert and effort and deplete ourselves. We need a certain amount of quality time each night to repair and replenish. That is the role of sleep. Sleeping is part of being human, and to honor this aspect of our nature is to harmonize our lives with the nature around us.
And what to do about the shortage of hours in the day to get done all the things that we need to get done? When we follow this healthy sleep rhythm, we end up with more energy. Our mind is fresher, meaning we’re more efficient and can better handle whatever is on our plate. That said, it’s a good practice for us all to rethink how we utilize our energy, and be mindful that we don’t overexert and overextend ourselves. We are only human, and we can only do so much in one day.