Why Sleep Is the Ultimate Act of Self-Respect

Why Sleep Gets Dismissed

0:21 SPEAKER_00: This great story teaches us something about being human.

0:25 SPEAKER_00: I'm Charles Parris, and this is Work Stress Anxiety.

0:29 SPEAKER_00: Together, let's borrow a little wisdom from a story to help us navigate a very emotional world.

0:39 SPEAKER_01: You know, we spend thousands of pounds trying to improve our health.

0:46 SPEAKER_01: We buy supplements, we buy fitness watches, we buy fancy mattresses, we buy blue blue light glasses, we have magnesium sprays.

1:04 SPEAKER_01: We do all these kinds of things.

1:08 SPEAKER_01: Um we buy, I know people who've bought white noise machines, and yet many of us still treat one of the most powerful forms of healing our bodies possess as a complete inconvenience.

1:35 SPEAKER_01: What am I talking about?

1:37 SPEAKER_01: Sleep, not something you know, and I've I have always found that just so fascinating.

1:46 SPEAKER_01: Anyway, welcome, hello, welcome to work stress, anxiety.

1:52 SPEAKER_01: I'm Cheryl Paris, and whether you're listening on the school run during your commute, walking the dog or lying, away because your brain has decided tonight will be an excellent time to replay every conversation you've had for the last what 15 years.

2:10 SPEAKER_01: I'm very pleased that you're here.

2:13 SPEAKER_01: Thank you to everyone who continues to listen and recommend the podcast and quietly share it with someone who needs it.

2:21 SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.

2:23 SPEAKER_01: Today I want to welcome a new listener from Saint Paolo.

2:28 SPEAKER_01: So, welcome.

2:30 SPEAKER_01: Today we're talking about something we all know really matters, but few of us treat with the respect it deserves sleep.

2:43 SPEAKER_01: I want to introduce you to Ella.

2:46 SPEAKER_01: Ella is 41, she's a counsellor, she spends all her day helping other people make try to make sense of their emotions and outside work.

Meet Ella And The Night Shift

2:59 SPEAKER_01: She she writes beautiful poetry, she loves scuba diving because it's one of the few things where life finally becomes quiet for her.

3:11 SPEAKER_01: She enjoys ice skiing as well, which is quite ironic, really.

3:17 SPEAKER_01: But she can balance beautifully on the ice, but somehow she struggles to find balance in her own evenings.

3:26 SPEAKER_01: You know, every every night starts off with good intentions.

3:30 SPEAKER_01: She says to herself, I'm going to have an early night, and then she gets an email or a Teams notification, or I'll just put one more load of washing on, and then she does a quick scroll.

3:45 SPEAKER_01: She might watch one more TV program, you know, one more thing for before tomorrow.

3:52 SPEAKER_01: You know, it's got to get done.

3:54 SPEAKER_01: Funny how one more thing really travels alone before she knows it, it's nearly midnight.

4:01 SPEAKER_01: And here we go, the night shift starts.

4:04 SPEAKER_01: The light goes out, her body is desperate now for sleep.

4:10 SPEAKER_01: Her brain has completely different ideas, though.

4:14 SPEAKER_01: It says to her, Did you send that email?

4:17 SPEAKER_01: Or what about tomorrow, Ella?

4:19 SPEAKER_01: Should I have said something different?

4:22 SPEAKER_01: You know, what if?

4:24 SPEAKER_01: Or maybe, or perhaps.

4:27 SPEAKER_01: It's like someone has started the night shift in her head for her.

4:32 SPEAKER_01: And do you know what makes me smile?

4:36 SPEAKER_01: Not because it's funny, which is why I have no idea why I'm laughing.

4:42 SPEAKER_01: It's because it's just so human of us.

4:45 SPEAKER_01: Ella isn't that unusual.

4:49 SPEAKER_01: She's just like most of us, she's a high-achieving woman who has become incredibly good at looking after everyone and everything else, you know, everyone else's well-being, but quietly negotiating away her own well-being.

5:10 SPEAKER_01: And that's what makes me laugh.

5:13 SPEAKER_01: It's the contradiction you can't ignore.

5:16 SPEAKER_01: We all want less stress, we all want less um anxiety, we all want more patience, better concentration, more emotional resilience.

5:29 SPEAKER_01: Hey, Cheryl, what about some clearer thinking?

5:33 SPEAKER_01: And yet, and yet, we treat the very thing that God gave us that helps build those qualities as something that is optional.

5:47 SPEAKER_01: To me, it's a bit like buying a beautiful plant and then being surprised it dies because we watered it seemingly a little bit at our inconvenience.

6:03 SPEAKER_01: But here's the beautiful thing of it.

6:05 SPEAKER_01: It kind of reminds me of one of my favourite childhood characters, Bagpus.

6:16 SPEAKER_01: Now Bagpus never apologized for sleeping.

Bagpuss And The Wisdom Of Rest

6:22 SPEAKER_01: He never looked guilty, he always stayed polished.

6:31 SPEAKER_01: He didn't stay awake for one more toy to prove that he was committed.

6:40 SPEAKER_01: Did you, Bagpus?

6:42 SPEAKER_01: Oh no, no, no.

6:44 SPEAKER_01: When work was finished, Bagpus rested.

6:48 SPEAKER_01: He rested, yeah?

6:50 SPEAKER_01: When he was needed, he woke up fully with a nice big yawn and then went his way to work in the shop.

7:00 SPEAKER_01: And then when work was done, he rested again.

7:04 SPEAKER_01: You know, there was something wonderfully sensible about that.

7:09 SPEAKER_01: Somewhere along the line, we decided.

7:15 SPEAKER_01: I don't know, permanent exhaustion was admirable.

7:20 SPEAKER_01: People almost competed.

7:22 SPEAKER_01: Oh, I only had four hours sleep last night.

7:25 SPEAKER_01: I answered emails until midnight.

7:28 SPEAKER_01: I've been awake since 5 a.m.

7:30 SPEAKER_01: Well, guess what?

7:32 SPEAKER_01: Congratulations! Your nervous system isn't handing out medals, mate.

7:39 SPEAKER_01: Okay?

7:40 SPEAKER_01: It's been quietly asking when you're planning to let it recover.

7:48 SPEAKER_01: Here's something I've often wondered.

7:52 SPEAKER_01: You know, when we're ill, almost no one argues about sleep.

7:58 SPEAKER_01: We happily cancel plans, we climb into beds, we trust our bodies know what it needs.

8:07 SPEAKER_01: But somehow, when it's only that we're stressed, we suddenly stop listening, you know, we push through, stay up later, do one more thing, answer one more email.

8:21 SPEAKER_01: And why do we trust sleep when we're physically unwell, but treat it as an inconvenience when our nervous system is crying, screaming out for exactly the same thing?

8:38 SPEAKER_01: I don't understand it.

8:40 SPEAKER_01: That's why I'd like to explore it with you next.

8:44 SPEAKER_01: Because to me, sleep isn't something your body does when there's nothing else to do.

8:51 SPEAKER_01: Sleep is one of the most important things, I think, that our bodies do.

9:00 SPEAKER_01: One of the biggest, I think, one of the biggest misconceptions about sleep is that a lot of people think nothing happens.

9:11 SPEAKER_01: We talk about it as though nothing is happening, you know, you just go to sleep, right?

What Your Body Does In Sleep

9:21 SPEAKER_01: Um really?

9:24 SPEAKER_01: Um, we'll get this.

9:27 SPEAKER_01: Your body's busy with pairing tissue, it's trying to balance your hormones, it's taking time to strengthen your immune system.

9:38 SPEAKER_01: One of the most brilliant things it does is it takes all the events of the day and it slots them away in your memory, it starts regulating your emotions, and then it does this amazing thing, it resets your brain for tomorrow.

9:59 SPEAKER_01: Frankly, I think it's one of its busiest times where your body is doing everything it needs to work properly.

10:11 SPEAKER_01: You know, I just think it's strange, isn't it?

10:16 SPEAKER_01: We admire people who stay at work after hours, we admire the person who answers emails when they're on holiday, even though their wife has told them auntie time to stop.

10:30 SPEAKER_01: We admire the person who says, I'll sleep when I'm dead.

10:37 SPEAKER_01: Really old slogan, I know.

10:39 SPEAKER_01: Uh, because lack of sleep, I think, tends to make the second part actually arrive sooner.

10:50 SPEAKER_01: Because I just think somewhere we've confused self-neglect with commitment, and one of the things life has taught me is that thinking about what happens when you're ill, thinking about what your body is asking for.

11:13 SPEAKER_01: What is your body asking for when you're ill?

11:17 SPEAKER_01: Rest, sleep, yeah, quiet.

11:22 SPEAKER_01: Nobody says when you're ill, pull yourself together and answer a few more emails.

11:28 SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe they do.

11:30 SPEAKER_01: Because instinctively we know when someone's ill, recovery happens during rest.

11:41 SPEAKER_01: Yet when stress is making us ill, interestingly, we've we think to ourselves, well, somehow recovery can wait, you know, and that's what I find so fascinating.

11:58 SPEAKER_01: That contradiction in us.

12:01 SPEAKER_01: We desperately want less work anxiety, we desperately want less social anxiety, we want clearer thinking, better concentration, more patience, better emotional regularity, and then we do that crazy thing, we voluntarily cut short one of the very processes that help produce all of those things.

12:32 SPEAKER_01: It's a bit like unplugging, I don't know, unplugging your fridge every night and then wondering why the milk keeps going off.

12:41 SPEAKER_01: It's just it's just crazy to me.

12:44 SPEAKER_01: Why am I such an advocate of sleep?

12:47 SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll tell you why.

12:49 SPEAKER_01: I've learnt the hard way, which is one of the reasons why my bedroom is a sanctuary.

12:56 SPEAKER_01: I made sure, I remember we uh when I moved in here, I spent an absolute fortune in John Lewis because I wanted to make sure I got the best mattress, mattress topper, amazing sheets, the best pillows.

13:15 SPEAKER_01: Because I love my bed, I love it, and here's what I find reassuring: just like me, your body already knows how to recover from stress, it knows before you've downloaded another app, before you listen to another podcast, before you take another supplement.

13:38 SPEAKER_01: Your body has been practicing recovery your entire life.

13:43 SPEAKER_01: The difficulty isn't that your body has forgotten.

13:48 SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of it is that we've actually stopped listening to our bodies.

13:56 SPEAKER_01: I've always believed one of the most remarkable things about sleep is that it's where your mind and your body stop pulling in different directions.

14:15 SPEAKER_01: It's one of the reasons why I became a hypnotherapist working together, just like in sleep, they begin to work together.

14:26 SPEAKER_01: That's one of the reasons sleep becomes so important when we're recovering from illness or sickness.

14:33 SPEAKER_01: It's almost as though your body quietly says, if you stop getting in my way for just a few hours, I'll get on repairing.

14:45 SPEAKER_01: What do you think?

14:47 SPEAKER_01: And there's something beautifully humbling, I think, about that.

14:52 SPEAKER_01: The older I get, the less impression I uh well, the less impressed I say I am by people who boast about surviving on four hours like Maggie Thatcher.

15:07 SPEAKER_01: I'm more impressed.

15:10 SPEAKER_01: I tell you this truly, I'm more impressed, I'm more interested in the person who protects their recovery.

15:20 SPEAKER_01: Because I know they're thinking, they're not thinking about today or tomorrow.

15:26 SPEAKER_01: That person's thinking long term, man.

15:29 SPEAKER_01: They're not trying to win today by borrowing uh energy from tomorrow.

15:36 SPEAKER_01: That person, they're invested in tomorrow and the day after that, before it is even arrived.

15:45 SPEAKER_01: And to me, that is what true wisdom is.

15:49 SPEAKER_01: True wisdom, not weakness.

15:52 SPEAKER_01: You know, this is why I keep thinking about Bagpus, because he never treats rest as wasted time.

16:03 SPEAKER_01: The shop wasn't broken because everything had gone quiet.

16:08 SPEAKER_01: The quiet was part of how the magic worked in Bagpus.

16:14 SPEAKER_01: Then when it was time to wake, everything came alive.

16:19 SPEAKER_01: The Professor, Madeleine, Gabriel, the whole shop worked together.

16:27 SPEAKER_01: Maybe, maybe we're not so different.

16:31 SPEAKER_01: Maybe, perhaps our minds need that quiet too.

16:38 SPEAKER_01: So perhaps we've been asking the wrong question.

16:42 SPEAKER_01: Instead of asking, how little sleep can I get away with?

16:46 SPEAKER_01: Yeah, maybe we should ask what kind of life becomes possible when I consistently respect my mind and my body and the need for recovery.

17:04 SPEAKER_01: I understand they're completely different questions because one is about survival and the other to me is about living well, right?

17:15 SPEAKER_01: Here's a sentence I'd love for you to carry.

17:19 SPEAKER_01: Sleep isn't an interruption to your life, it's one of the ways your life quietly repairs itself.

17:28 SPEAKER_01: So, if that's true, how do we stop treating sleep like an inconvenience without turning bedtime into yet another impossible wellness routine that we then feel guilty about?

17:44 SPEAKER_01: For me, and here's something I keep coming back to over and over again.

17:52 SPEAKER_01: This was never really about sleep.

17:55 SPEAKER_01: Sleep just happened to be the most obvious answer.

17:59 SPEAKER_01: It's actually about something that's much, much bigger.

18:08 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps this is just me.

18:13 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps it's about how much respect do we show ourselves when nobody else is watching.

Sleep As Self Respect In Private

18:25 SPEAKER_01: You know, I find it fascinating because it's remarkably easy to say I met her, but it's much harder to behave as though you believe it.

18:38 SPEAKER_01: So tonight, before you do anything else, I'd like you to ask yourself one simple question.

18:48 SPEAKER_01: Not what time should I go to bed, but ask yourself what would someone who genuine genuinely respected themselves do next?

19:00 SPEAKER_01: Yes, I appreciate that's a very quick, very different question.

19:05 SPEAKER_01: Because one question asks you about your bedtime, and the other asks you about who you are, your identity.

19:15 SPEAKER_01: Because to me, self-respect isn't loud, it's not like those motivational posters that you see everywhere.

19:25 SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's not pretending that you've got everything together.

19:32 SPEAKER_01: To me, sometimes self-reflect is simply recognizing that your body has been carrying you all day, all day, and deciding it deserves recovery instead of another hour's worth of emails, and to me, that's not weakness, that's gratitude, true gratitude in action.

19:58 SPEAKER_01: You know, bag plus kind of has it right, I think, because that's why I keep coming back to Bag Plus in this episode.

20:07 SPEAKER_01: Because as children, we accepted his rhythm without questioning it.

20:13 SPEAKER_01: We watched the program and we saw how he worked.

20:17 SPEAKER_01: You know, when work arrived, he woke up, he gave it his full attention, the toys were mended, problems were solved, the shot came alive.

20:28 SPEAKER_01: When work was finished, he rested.

20:33 SPEAKER_01: He didn't feel guilty about it.

20:36 SPEAKER_01: No apologies, no sense that he should be doing just one more thing.

20:44 SPEAKER_01: Somewhere, I think, between childhood and adulthood, we replaced bagpus.

20:55 SPEAKER_01: We stopped measuring ourselves by the quality of our work, and we started measuring ourselves by the number of hours we could stay awake doing stuff, and we became it's almost like we began to admire exhaustion as though burnout was somehow proof that we cared enough about our work and our lives.

21:25 SPEAKER_01: To me, it's a peculiar way to judge life, but one of the things I loved about Bagpus was that when he woke up, the whole shop came alive.

21:39 SPEAKER_01: The professor started thinking, Madeline appeared, Gabriel joined in.

21:45 SPEAKER_01: Everyone worked together.

21:47 SPEAKER_01: I've often wondered whether our nervous system is a little bit like that.

21:53 SPEAKER_01: You know, after proper rest, our patience returns, our judgment improves, our creativity reappears, our emotions stop shouting over one another.

22:09 SPEAKER_01: The light comes back on inside the shop.

22:15 SPEAKER_01: So perhaps you can stop blaming yourself quite.

22:21 SPEAKER_01: So much.

22:22 SPEAKER_01: Because I know you're not lazy because you need sleep.

22:27 SPEAKER_01: I know that you're not weak because you're tired.

22:31 SPEAKER_01: You're certainly not failing because your body keeps asking you for a little bit more time to recover.

22:39 SPEAKER_01: It would be far stranger if it didn't.

22:43 SPEAKER_01: Your body isn't interrupting your success.

22:47 SPEAKER_01: It's trying to make your success, the success that you crave, sustainable.

22:54 SPEAKER_01: So here's my invitation to you.

22:58 SPEAKER_01: It's an invitation, not a challenge, a little experiment.

23:03 SPEAKER_01: For the next seven evenings.

23:07 SPEAKER_01: Pull it in your diary.

23:09 SPEAKER_01: Create a small landing strip before bed.

23:14 SPEAKER_01: Five minutes, no perfection required here, no elaborate routine, just five quiet minutes where you deliberately tell your nervous system the day is over now.

A Five Minute Landing Strip

23:29 SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's making tomorrow's list.

23:33 SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's reading a few pages from a book.

23:37 SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's simply sitting quietly with a cup of tea.

23:41 SPEAKER_01: You're not trying to force sleep, you're preparing for recovery.

23:49 SPEAKER_01: There's one sentence that I'd like for you to remember, and that's this.

23:55 SPEAKER_01: The way that you prepare for sleep says a great deal about the respect you have for the person you'll be tomorrow.

24:09 SPEAKER_01: Because tomorrow's version of you is quietly depending on the choices that you make tonight.

24:18 SPEAKER_01: You know, we spend our lives trying to become more resilient, more patient, more creative, even more emotionally balanced.

24:28 SPEAKER_01: And perhaps the answer isn't doing more.

24:32 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps sometimes it's about getting out of our own way, getting out of our body and mind's way, and letting it do what it has evolved to do over these generations.

24:50 SPEAKER_01: Recover.

24:52 SPEAKER_01: So tonight, instead of treating sleep as an inconvenience, treat it as one of the most kindest conversations that you can have with your future self.

25:04 SPEAKER_01: And if you find yourself tempted to answer one more email, I want you to pitch a bagpus.

25:13 SPEAKER_01: And remember, the work is done, the shop is quiet, the light is low, nothing important is being lost.

25:26 SPEAKER_01: Everything important is quietly being restored.

25:31 SPEAKER_01: Until the next time, remember, every step you take, no matter how small, is a step towards a brighter, more balanced future.

25:44 SPEAKER_01: Trust in your journey and remember, progress is progress no matter the pace.

Closing Thoughts And Reminder

25:54 SPEAKER_00: Bye for now.

25:57 SPEAKER_01: I hope today's episode gave you something useful to carry into your week.

26:02 SPEAKER_01: Now finish your coffee, take a breath, and remember progress is progress no matter the pace.

26:10 SPEAKER_01: Until next time, bye for now.