The Rhythm of Sleep, Dreaming, and Waking: An Interview with Dr. Rubin Naiman

Dr. Rubin Naiman is a very interesting sleep doctor. He teaches at the University of Arizona Integrative Wellness Center, sees private clients through his company, Circadian Health Associates, and has created sleep centers at Canyon Ranch Spa and Miraval Resort. I interviewed him at his home in Tucson. You can listen to the interview here, or scroll down to read the transcript.

You may also be interested in my earlier post about using meditation to sleep less.

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I’m Dr. Asatar Bair, president of the IAM University of the Heart. I’m here with Dr. Rubin Naiman who’s the author of several books; today we’ll be discussing his book called Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening mostly because that’s the only one that I’ve read. So, Dr. Naiman if you could tell me little bit about what you see as the spiritual dimensions of sleeping and dreaming.

Zeitgeber is a German term: zeit in german means “time”, and geber is a “giver”. It’s a time giver and it essentially tells out psychology and biology when it is. We have these consentual measures of time, we’re both wearing time pieces. So in out world it’s about 2:15 pm if you step back and think about it it’s kind of funny because if you’re looking at the planet a a whole it’s always every time somewhere on the planet. Because of a twenty-four hour day it’s 9 am somewhere on the planet whether or not they designate it (it’s early morning it’s mid morning it’s late morning). So, somebody is watching the globe from above  and you know if they’re asked what time it is on earth it’s every time. It’s always every time.  Of course from our personal experience we’re plopped in different spots. So a zeitgeber tells us what time it is, they’re cues.

Time used to be structured almost exclusively by nature until the invent of the industrial revolution and what time was dependent on when the sun rose and when the sun set which depended on in part on the season and where we are on the planet latitude. So a zeitgeber would tell the body what time it is. The most potent zeitgeber is the experience of light and dark. The brain reads this wether or not we’re  conscious of it we might be pre-occupied as the sun starts to set but if we’re exposed to dimming light the brain will get uh-huh night time. It begins to convert serotonin to melatonin which tells the brain it’s dark out. The opposite is true in the morning the exposure to light will increase the production of seratonin and other neural hormones.

So, zeitgebers are also social. You can get social information when you’re hanging with people. I think yawning plays a role in this, it probably allows a small group of people..a tribe, if you will… to entrain. So, if you’re talking and someone does a yawn it is quite contagious in some very interesting ways. So, maybe it keeps the group moving together in time. So we get sleepy together and maybe we get energized together at the opposite extreme. Zeitgebers also depend on temperature; it tends to be warmer during the day and cooler at night so when the temperature is warmer we get this experience of daytime waking versus cooler night. The point of this  is that the definition of time was under the control of nature until we started industrialization. (I’m not knocking industrialization, I like iPhones too!) So those are zeitgeber.

You know we tend to run by our own clock, but the opposite has happened. I think people were much more tuned into themselves before culture became so dominant. Today we’re dis-entrained from nature in general unless you live out on a farm somewhere or intentionally do it. We are re-entrained with culture and these are staccato signals; it moves pretty fast. Morning has less to with when the sun comes up and night has less to do with when the sun goes down has more to do with what’s on TV what day of the week it is when you’re expected at work when your family comes home if the kids are in school or not. All these socio-culture factors define when it is. It’s no longer defined by our personal relationship with nature it’s defined by our place in culture. I think many spiritual teachers nowadays are trying to remind us to go inward I think about Eckhart Tolle’s work. Most of us have leaned so far out of our own being we’re out of touch with self, with our own biology and you might say even with our own heart rhythm. People are not in touch that and with our own internal, circadian, rhythms around waking, sleeping, day and night and even smaller, if you are familiar with ultradian rhythms…

I think it’s fascinating because you’re talking about rhythm in a very macro sense and we tend to look at it in a more micro sense in terms of our breathing and our heartbeat. That’s our method: eight beats in and eight beats out. I think there’s a real interesting fit between your book and what we do in terms of just this study of rhythm and how does that shape our lives and so I was fascinated by your discussion of how the culture tends to produce sort of a disrhythmia in people.

Well the rhythm in culture, I think is based primarily on, maybe we might say economics, on productivity and activity that’s what it’s about. It’s how can we be most active. In fact, most of the questions that I get as a sleep specialist, from the ordinary media/press, are questions about how we can use sleep to be better at waking. So sleep becomes a servant, a step-child, of waking. All the scientific research questions will be asked how sleep can make me more productive, smarter, improve my memory, improve my immunity; how it can make me a better person; how dreaming can make me psychologically healthier, more insightful waking person. I think those are valid questions they’re just incomplete, the other part of it is but what is in the dream and what is in sleep and is there something I can do to make that part of me healthier.

You have a really interesting kind of discussion too about, with lots of different tips, for people to help restore their rhythm, from lowering the lights to being outside more, and gradually awakening and all these things and so the one that really struck my attention was to pay attention to your breathing. How does that help your overall sense of rhythm?

Attending to the breath… You probably know more about this than I do; the breath is so strongly linked with spirituality. In Hebrew, ruach is the breath and the spirit. In English the root of the word respiration, respire, means spirit. It’s the one physiological function, breathing, that can completely be under unconscious control – I can not think about it my body breathes. Or, totally conscious control. So, it also become a link between body and mind in that sense.

We would say between the conscious and the unconscious, which is also a major theme that you touch on.

Yeah, the body is unconscious, I don’t know if I talk much about that.

You should read this book it’s quite good!

I’ve never read it. I’ve read parts of it over and over and over again but I don’t think I’ve ever read from… I’ll tell you at one point the only motivation , it’s changed over time, is because I wanted to read it. If somebody else stepped in and said you don’t know how to write this damned thing I would’ve said, “you do it I have to agree”.

One of the other things that really struck my attention in the book was about the hypnogogic transition. Can you explain what that is? It seem like people fear that and if you could comment on that a little bit.

I think that I mentioned that Hypnos is pictured on the front cover of the book, with his mother Nyx, is a brother and in some greek myths a step-brother but very close kin to Thanatos the god of death. The Dalai Lama talks a lot about the kinship between sleeping and dying. In fact he says the psycho-spiritual experience of falling asleep is virtually identical to that of dying. So, it’s an incredible practice of surrendering and letting go. The hypnogogic: hypnos is the god of sleep and -gogic is moving toward. It’s an exquisite  experience this transition from waking to sleep and again we’ve been taught to think of it mechanically. I just throw a switch and it goes from light to dark, I go from waking to sleeping. A lot of people experience it that way because we’ve become insensitive, even callused, toward shifts in our consciousness. The standard is, like, being awake and everything is sort of defined around that and that’s what we look at. Consciousness begins to shift, in fact, we begin to fall asleep when it starts to get dark and maybe we go from 95% to 92% wakefulness, you know sleepiness begins to increase. It reaches a certain critical mass and we define it as asleep. When you look closely at the studies on sleep onset and scientists aren’t liking to admit this but about 1/3 of the people who appear to be asleep in terms of objective polysomnography and EEG measures when you talk to them they’re awake. In fact, they’ll report being awake deep into what we designate as official sleep. About 1/3 seem to fall asleep when we think they should be asleep by objective measure and about 1/3 before they really have the right objectively to report they’re asleep. So there is very little confluence. This hypnogogic state is really interesting because it looks at this portal, and it’s not a doorway so much as it is a bridge between waking and sleeping. Often when we examine the borderlands between the states of being we learn a tremendous about both and we learn here that sleeping and waking are not opposite, mutually exclusive states. I think this is a huge misperception on the part of the public and of science, that we can actually be awake and asleep at the same time, in fact, more and more I’ve come to believe that what we call sleep is tantamount to serenity; what we would consider deep states of relaxation, of inner peace, satori moments of touching into an enlightened state. I think sleep is the lazy persons quide to enlightenment. When we fall asleep if we’re willing to completely let go I think we go to a place where accomplished practitioners take years and years and years to get to, by grace.

Now we’re jumping ahead to some of my more advanced questions but I have no choice because you’ve provided me with such a great segue. You know this quote from the Dalai Lama you refer to about sleep being the best meditation and the discussion of different spiritual traditions and how they view these transitions, and how they give spiritual practices to examine these transitions, and become aware of what is happening, and who is falling asleep, who is dreaming; this is a really fascinating thing. When I think of meditation within our school, we see meditation as not so much an activity as a state of being, with two main characteristics: the loss of awareness of the self, or the ego, which just disappears, and second, a feeling of the unlimited, which you may experience as eternity, infinity, which is unbounded space, or perfection. So this is what happens in sleep: we lose ourselves and we experience the unlimited, and perhaps the tragedy in terms of spiritual development is that we can’t remember that and we can’t make use of it in our waking state.

Yeah.  I think that’s very true.  A couple of things, one is I think most of us don’t have waking-world frames of reference for that kind of subtle beauty. If we practice accessing while we’re consciously developing…  It’s interesting the number of fascinating studies now, a lot of mindfulness practices found that – they’ve studied practitioners who’ve had a minimum of 10,000 hours of meditative practice and they find a high preponderance of gamma waves in the brain.  I don’t know if you’re familiar with brainwave structures, but we go from the gamma waves… So, the deepest, it’s very high frequency – high amplitude, low frequency wave called delta waves.  And so, when the brain basically, all the billions little parts of working in unison, you know, you’re getting a “rrrrr”, a very high amplitude, low frequency.  It’s all coherent and synchronized and there is a sense of incredible piece with that.  Then, you go up from delta to theta which is very relaxing.  Some meditators can access that.  From theta to alpha which most of us had heard about.  The alpha really is most people can access alpha when they turn on TV set.  It’s not that hard to do, but it’s relaxed compared to beta which is the next step up and it’s a higher frequency vibration.  Different parts of the brain are doing their thing.  And, then you got to brainwave measures that go way beyond beta, typical waking, and to gamma and it’s – what’s interesting is it appears that in deep states of consciousness, there is both the presence of delta and gamma.  So, you’re incredibly, deeply relaxed or a better term, serene, but you’ll also highly into higher consciousness at the same time.  There is an awareness.  One of the things we see with lots of insomniacs is they’re not just excessively sleepy.  I’m sorry.  They’re not just sleep-deprived.  They’re wake excess.  They have too much waking.  It’s really interesting.  And, I tend to look at all this stuff as natural processes that have gone awry.  I’m not into pathologizing it.  So, I think a lot of insomniacs actually develop, or they’re developing a higher end of the consciousness, but they lose sight of the ground if you will, that deep relaxation.  What was your question?

I just sort of throwing out the similarity, giving my reaction.  There is just this beautiful line that I wanted to mention on page 95 where you say, “Deep sleep is a nightly homecoming, a gracious call to serenity.”  And I want to just mention that the book is full of those wonderful poetic descriptions of sleep and waking too for that matter where you just get a sense that the way that you approach it is from such a big place, and so that’s a real- and you know, as we’re talking about how most sleep doctors are, I’m getting a sense of how unusual you are then because the book is also full of stories about your patients and the different things that, the different ways that they approach sleep and so that’s a fascinating thing as well.

You know, I just did an interview for… I’m just going to be chaptering a book in South Asia in a large organization there, a very lengthy interview and at the end, I was sort of punching and but they had sent me back for edits and towards the end, I was talking about falling in love with sleep, which, you know, I guess I heard myself say that.  And you know, so many people don’t have a conscious, loving relationship with sleep.  They’re in love with waking and they see sleep as the opposite.  It’s a necessary evil to support waking.  And you know, good sleepers – it’s just true for me, but I’ve heard this from many, many other people.  People who’d say, “I love sleep.”  And they don’t look at as bedtime drowsy or as, you know, sort of an angry mom insisting that they get some rest despite the fact that they have better things to do.  I have that.  I love waking up in the morning.  I love morning.  I love going to sleep at night.  You begin to taste and feel and get that it’s not just the absence of the waking.  There is something else.  There is nothing in this, you know.

But, from a waking perspective, there is something there of great value and it’s like a lover.  It’s like going to bed with a wonderful lover, you know, in one sense, you know, in the Rumi sense. But you were talking about the hypnagogic state.  Rumi has a beautiful poem which I’ve used to structure the chapter about the hypnopompic state, the transition from sleeping dreams to waking called, “Don’t Go Back to Sleep”, you know, where he is recognizing what we call waking consciousness as a kind of sleep and when we’re waking up, we think we’re letting go a really less essential sleep and dream consciousness, but you know, his advise is don’t go back to sleep.  Hold on to that.

And sort of ease the transition into waking. That’s a quite a beautiful chapter.

I’m working on another book called “Radical Sleep” tentatively and there’s a lot more emphasis on one of the things I close with in this book which I called Braid Theory.  If you came a few minutes earlier, you would’ve met my granddaughter who often has her hair braided and I was thinking about this some years ago when I was fumbling in trying to, you know, segregate the braids and realize they’re all here. They’re woven together.  And I think one of the ways we’re looking at sleeping, dreaming and waking is that they are woven together, that at any one moment, this braid is on top, we’re awake now, we’re asleep, we’re dreaming, but to the whole of consciousness requires that we stop segregating our sense of waking and sleeping and dreaming.  There are non-industrial cultures where people have appeared from what my anthropology friends told me that the different relationship where you could find an elder sitting in the woods in the jungle up against the tree in the middle of the day with eyes half closed and half open.  And, when I ask my friends, “Was he awake or asleep?”  That was an irrelevant question.

And there’s one culture she is telling me that when, you know, if you’re walking down the street here, walking down at 4^th Avenue and you see a friend at a café on the sidewalk, you might sit down and join him for a cup of coffee or tea.  In that culture when they witness somebody on a mat sleeping, they’ll quietly go over and get down next to them and sleep with them.  They’ll really sleep with them.  Oh, you’re sleeping.  I’ll join you for a cup of sleep.  So, there’s a different relationship, a different value that’s integrated into waking life.

When we see somebody sleeping here, unless they’re, you know, a little kid or, I mean we think they’re drunk or they’re sick.  They’re too old to be awake and pity them.

As an economist, I talk a lot about debts and deficits and you’ve introduced me to a whole new kind of deficit which is like a sleep deficit and then, you know, which I actually had heard of before, but one that I was totally new to me which is a dream deficit.  And you know, I get the sense from reading the book that you have this like really big concern about the amount of dreaming that seems to be dropping in our, you know, high speed culture and so maybe you could just explain that a little.

I think we’re also dream deprived and again, it’s not something that my colleagues seem at all interested in.  You’ll not infrequently see on sleep studies, we’ll get a study back that says, “REM sleep 2%”, when we expect 20% to 25% and it’s not even treated, you know, it’s the result of this and the result of that.  A lot of sleep deprivation is actually dream deprivation.  If you’re losing sleep in the latter part of the night, you’re more likely losing dream time.  That’s when we get most of it.  And when you step back and look at the culture and you look at substance and medication use, we know alcohol suppresses dreaming.  Most of us can tolerate a glass of wine with dinner. It suppresses melatonin.  So many commonly used medications suppress dreaming.

Can you mention a few of them?

As we age in our world, we experience an increase in the anti-cholinergic burden.  Anti-cholinergic medications are basically medications that intentionally or unintentionally suppress choline.  Choline is a major molecule involved in dreaming.  And actually, it is involved in – I would say – the expansion of consciousness.  It’s watery in a sense, in a metaphoric sense.  So, commonly used medications?  Over-the-counter sleeping pills, Unisom, Nytol, Tylenol, all the PMs.  Tylenol PM, Excedrin PM are anti-cholinergic.  Almost all allergy medication is anti-cholinergic.  Whereas people get older, a lot of heart medications, heart rhythm medications are anti-cholinergic.  High blood pressure medications are anti-cholinergic.  Urinary incontinence medications, virtually all anti-depressants ever with very few exceptions are anti-cholinergic.  So, we take huge amounts of medicine as a collective and suppress our dreams.  When you suppress dreams, they start to bounce back and you get a lot of weirdness going on – lots and lots of weirdness.  So, I think it’s really important to dream, really, really important.

You mention a connection between dreaming your inner world, your inner life, and diseases like depression and cancer.  That was a really fascinating discussion just to make concrete.  Well, we know, as spiritual seekers, let’s say that we know that there are certain risks of not exploring the inner world, but you know, to think that that might include something like depression or cancer is, you know that’s quite a link.

How could it not?

Depression in particular, there is a very, very strong data on that. I have been doing a lot of research and writing about that.  It’s a huge issue.  The irony with depression is that anti-depressants further suppress dreaming and the belief that they work is very questionable.  I mean, they do something but they’re essentially stimulant medications.  All the newer ones, the SSRIs, are stimulant medications and we’re cultured that, that’s so over values, energy and speed that when we get this kind renewed rush of energy, we appraise it as a – I’m okay now.  However, there were results that meet the impossible list of demands my life presents to me everyday.  They are not really anti-depressants.  There is no data that show that a decrease in serotonin can cause depression or that an increase in serotonin will eliminate depression.  There are symptom-suppressive.  I need more than an aspirin will typically eliminate the cause of the headache.  It eliminates maybe the tension that causes it but it’s not going to eliminate the stress.  Anyhow, it’s a tough area.  Nobody wants to hear that.  You know, I think people who are depressed are basically people who are sleepy.  I may mention the single strongest predictor of clinical depression is a year of off-and-on insomnia which also means you are not sleeping but it means you are not dreaming, you know.

You have a lot of some, some interesting discussion to.  I like your term about the interpreting dreams and you use this term, the dictionary approach to interpreting dreams versus a more of a gestalt kind of approach that you recommend and something that maybe just explain that.

I was saying earlier that we tend to look at sleep in terms of waking.  We also tend to look at dreaming in terms of waking.  Most dream interpretation takes the image or the experience of the dream, and it’s like pulling the fish out in the water.  We’re taking the dream out of its natural home in dreaming, and we pull it into the waking world and we say what is it mean here when I look at through a waking frame of mind?  And so, you know, if you’re 30, and you reduce flower to sex or a candle to sex, right?  It’s all, it’s all f*cking sex.  Depending on the orientation, you might reduce it because that’s the metaphoric association we have in the waking world, and it reduces the dream.  The downside is that it makes you still look more comfortable.  Aha, I know what that means!  The presumption is it has no meaning in and on itself.  So, you know, Freud said that dreaming is a world relatively unconscious.  It will take you to your own conscious.  I think his big mistake was not realizing it was the actual territory.  That that is what a dream, that’s dreamland, and in that world in that where we spend in consciousness, that’s probably where infants and young kids live.  When we alter consciousness, we go into dream like spaces.  We have no regard or no place within the awakening world, you know, we expect awakening consciousness to be pretty rigid and defined.  So, it’s not just stop losing our dreams from substances and medications and disinterest, but it’s also dismissal of dream consciousness, and it takes the frame off of consciousness.  It takes the rigid academic frame, and it’s not about losing your mind, but it is about the willingness to abstract.  And I think it’s one of the reasons that there seems to be this paradox that some normal people seem to be growing interest in the spirituality and at the same time fewer people seem to be really opening their hearts to it.  It becomes academic.  It becomes another book they read, another technique they can try for a couple of weeks, lots of shallow wells.  So, I think our relationship with the dream is a relationship with our own expanded consciousness, you know.  We take the vise off of our heads, and it’s disconcerting to our people.  I came up in the ‘60s and actually had an encounter with Timothy Leary in [IB] and ended up…up until I was 19, experimenting the psychedelics, and I don’t regret it, although I think I pushed it a little too hard but, you know, many of us have the experience…we had “Aha!” experience.  In our hearts, we knew that there was more to life than, you know, fitting everything into little boxes and following this path that the culture had set up for us.  And suddenly it was an explosion, and the frame came off, and we went, “Oh, yeah!”  There was a sense of remembrance.  Not that I recommend that path because it’s violent in some respect, but the positive part was it reminded us that there was so much more, and I think dreams attempt to do that very kindly every night.  It saddens me tremendously that there is such, such disconnection from the dream, such disconnection.

Just think of the kind of psychedelic experience as you could have if you just dream, right?

Yeah.

No drugs necessary.

What happens when we go deep in our relationship with dream consciousness, it shows up in waking, you know, it does.  It’s sort of like we put on the wide-angle lens, and we begin to notice the things with periphery of our consciousness.  In a dream, things appear to be important that we deem totally meaningless in blinking life.  And the sound of a bird in the distance, during the interview, somehow in a dream, it’s noticed, you know, or the fact that the candles look so red.  Things like that become noticed, in a dream. Sometimes, things are just distinct up here, you know, in a third eye, and we keep it so tightly shut in both ends.  So, when that opens up, it re-enchants life in a big way.  I think it deepens relationships, you know, we become concerned with not only, you know, what can this person do for me right now but, you know, just being with, you know, who is his closest connection with this experience.  The thing about dreaming is unfortunately it’s free.  It’s not that sexy for people, you know, everybody is looking for some reasons with a high tech solution, and it’s in our hearts.  The dream is in our hearts just every night.

I like your broad-minded approach to looking at dreams and one of the things that struck me is that we get a lot of what you might call dreams when you meditate; there is a lot of similarity there. As you’re talking about witnessing your process of going to sleep – you mention this at different points, as a practice and the different times that I have done that in my life, and one of the things that I have certainly noticed is this lifting of the rational mind.  The rational mind holds such a great balance usually, and the way that I noticed it lifting is that I’m thinking about something, and one thought leads to another and then I’ll just notice that I’m using categories in a completely different way  - like Wednesday becomes yellow or weighs 3 pounds or something .  Then, all of the sudden, and this will make perfect sense, you know.  And then all of a sudden I will realize that and say, “Oh! That is hilarious!”  You have to kind of step back from it to notice what is happening.

There is a film, a really unusual film that came in this past year called, “Doctor Parnassus’ Imaginarium.” It is on video or DVD I think.  And I found it incredible, variable than tell about what happens when you are trying to live a dream in this world, and the collision, and the conflict, and the magnificence, and the terror that comes up you know, about living in dream in this world.

I thought it was interesting to how you discussed something called “sleep state misperception”, and that was really interesting.  My mother has sleep apnea, and so she went into a sleep clinic and had all of the equipment hooked up and whatever and then told us all about it afterwards.  And she said one of the funny things that she learned was that you know, she said, “Well, I’m not going to go to sleep at all with all of these rigmarole on.  And then, she said, “Well, then they told me later.  Now, you actually went to sleep and you slept, you know it took you 15 minutes to fall asleep and whatever.”  But she was totally convinced that she had not slept at all, and so you have a bunch of these different stories about how people, you know just the mismatch between our perception of where we are and what the EEG says or you know what the technician says or whatever and… So, that is an interesting thing.

Right.  I think many people developed co-consciousness in sleep and as scientist, we don’t allow that.  We just decide that, there is no scientific basis for saying this, but we Will Dement, the great grandfather of sleep research in Stanford said, very famously, “It is impossible to have conscious awareness of not dream in sleep.”  You can’t be asleep and aware at the same time, which contradicts spiritual teachings that go back thousands and thousands of years, that you can develop awareness.  And I think a lot of people do.  I see more with women and I’m not sure why.  They are reluctant to talk about it although some come in and they believe they have insomnia.  You run them through a sleep lab and they don’t.  They actually sleep better than the sleep doctor.  The funny thing is that if you actually give the medication, they will stop complaining that they don’t sleep, but if you look at there sleep objectively, its worse than it was when they were not on medication.

And so, it is because they are knocked out, they are chemically knocked out at that point, and it knocks out their co-consciousness.  The problem with a lot of that is the belief that they can’t be asleep and awake at the same time, creates anxiety if we become aware at sleep. So, if I’m aware it is like, “Oh shit! I’m awake”, that means I have insomnia, right?

And what do I have to do the next day. And you know I’m going to be tired.

But, that spins out with anxiety, but if you can teach people to be aware and enjoy the spaciousness of it, to look at it as a meditative experience, I think it is often fine.

One of the things I was also kind of interested in terms of different techniques, we focus a lot on a rhythmic breath that is even on the inhale and the exhale.  And we do that in order to balance a person spiritually, because our teaching is that life is about giving and receiving, and we balance those in terms of length and intensity and the way we do that is by using the heartbeat.  And I’m interested… We also have other practices that involve holding, but our basic kind of one is this rhythmic breath, and so you, on page 70, you talked about using this 4-7-8 breath and that is where you breath in for a count of 4, hold for a count of 7, and then breath out for a count of 8 making this whooshing noise.  And I’m wondering why that particular breathing rhythm.

I think there is no contradiction between that and your philosophy actually.  It is just a slightly different perspective.  It is a Pranayama breath.  It is based on a Yogic technique.  That is what we use in our program a lot.  It is simple and there is actually, there is a group of people who practice what we call Buteyko.  Basically, the Buteyko people essentially believe we over breathe.

We’ve just been discussing this recently on our blog.

I have a larger notion that we over consume.  We overeat.  There is no question about that in our world.  People consume a lot of food and it’s poor quality of food, so we overeat.  You know, the media is very fond of referring to us human beings as consumers.  You know, it is one of the most common that… and I guess in economy too.

Or economics.  I think it’s a very apt designation because I think we can find ourselves in terms of consumption, so we overeat.  The Buteyko people make a good argument that we over breathe.  It’s easy to make the argument that we over consume information.  A lot of bloggers have been writing about this the last few years.  We’re exposed to an incredible – somebody said that they estimated that in an average month, we consume more information than people did a hundred years ago in a lifetime, and now, just in terms of the stimulation and the information, the entertainment, the reading and you know it’s a lot.  So, we over breathe, we over consume information, we overeat and in my work I talked about over exposure to light.

It’s FOIL. F – Food is we overeat, O is we over oxygenate, I is over-information and L is we overdo light.  I have a medical theory based on this.  There’s a lot of health concerns today both physical health and mental health have been strongly linked to a process called chronic inflammation.  And so at a metaphor, and somewhat at a medical level, all these over consumption – it’s an over-consumption of energy.  It’s all about energy.  We’re energy greedy.  You know, light is energy, information energizes us, it stimulates us, food energizes us.  Oxygen burns the energy.  So, we’re energy crazy.  We consumed more energy then we release.  So, talk about balance, and of course we – a lot of people over breathe.  They’ll – they’ll suck in more oxygen than they actually need.  We suck in more food, more information.  The 4-7-8 breath – one of ways of looking at that balance is after a long day or part of the day of excessive taking in too much.  Let’s emphasize the release.

And so I think in general, yeah, the balance is what we’re looking for absolutely.  But in a world where there’s been so much emphasis on the inbreath if you will, I don’t know if that’s literal or metaphoric, but the taking in, you know.

That’s the inbreath.

That maybe we need a little extra balance on the letting go.  And from a sleep perspective, if you know, if the scales have been tipped this way, if there’s too much in then we want to do a little extra out to balance it up.

I think control over the breath is one of the most powerful ways we have of dealing with anxiety.  I mean that’s where you discuss this breath in terms of talking about calming anxiety, and you know, if anxiety is often comes from the feeling being out of control – to control the one thing that you can control, your breathing…and that is the fundamental source of your life is a very powerful thing to do.  And so, I commend you for emphasizing that so much in the book, and you know, this is a more of a fine point I think that we are talking about here.  You know that paying attention to your breath and then, you know, if that’s sort of the first step observing and then changing the rhythm.  You know if that’s the second step.  It’s often the case that we don’t just want to observe our state, we want to change it in some way.

Well, the observation is an interesting point.  There was a study that goes back years now, and of course, when someone is anxious, their breathing tends to be irregular.

Which is irregular and they found some very simple studies that if you could teach them whether to observe the breath from a friendly perspective okay, which is nonjudgmental.  Okay, you know, I’m not going to – like I don’t have to change my breath.  My breath is wrong.  There is not – you are just observing from a friendly peaceful, perspective friendly towards self.  It will self-regulate.  You’re breathing on its own will even out.  So, it’s the quality of an observation.  Of course, you might say at that point if you’re doing it from a compassionate, non-judgmental perspective, you’re changing some kind of dysrhythmic attitude towards your own self or your own breath.  Anyhow, but yeah I should come to one of your local classes.  I’m interested in that.

We’d love to have you.

I believe the teacher’s name was Doug Johnson. I used to do some work with him.

Thank you so much for talking to me about sleeping and dreaming. I highly recommend this book, Healing Night: the Science  and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening.  Again I’m here with Dr. Rubin Naiman, and I want to mention his website is drnaiman.com.

My pleasure.