TRANSCRIPT
I want to talk about what I consider to be one of the main weapons in the fight for good mental health: sleep. I think I decided to talk about sleep today because sleep is really on my mind these last few days. I just came back from spending a few months in China, and I’ve been back in the United States for four or five days. I am going through terrible jetlag. The time difference between where I was in China and here in New York City is 12 hours, which is the worst for jetlag. They say to get over jetlag, for every time zone difference of an hour, it takes about a day. Well, I’m not even halfway through this, and my sleep has been so weird. So I’m wondering how this video is going to go. I’m waking up in the middle of the night often. I have thoughts in my mind. It’s three o’clock in the morning, and I feel like it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, and it’s not going away quickly. So it’s really given me a good chance in the middle of the night, a lot of times, to think about this whole issue of sleep and how really important it is for mental health.
I find myself nowadays, when I’m in jetlag, when I’m not getting enough sleep, going through my day, all these strange emotions are coming up. I feel out of control. I notice things coming out of my mouth that I wouldn’t normally say. I find myself cursing more. I find myself getting angry more easily, feeling hurt, feeling defensive. I can’t control my thoughts. They jump off, they spin off. I’m much more tangential. And I noticed, for instance, this morning, after having a pretty good night of sleep—probably because I didn’t have one the night before—that my thoughts are more clear. I can organize myself better.
Now, a lot of the films I’ve made are on the subject of psychosis or what they call schizophrenia, altered states, things like that. And people in our world often say, “Oh, you know that psychosis thing? That’s so different from us. That’s really abnormal. That’s people who are really very different. That’s different from regular people.” But what I think is, if you want to talk about the subject of sleep, you can pretty much take anybody, deprive them of sleep for four or five days or a week, or even a couple of days longer than that, and you’re gonna have anyone lose their mind. Everyone’s gonna start to unravel. People will start to hear voices. They can start to see things. They can start to taste things that don’t exist, smell things that don’t exist. They can start having really bizarre ideas. There are thoughts they won’t be able to control. All sorts of emotions are gonna come up. Old trauma starts to surface, you know, in really often very ugly ways. So basically, anybody, from what I’ve seen, who doesn’t sleep for five days—and I don’t care how healthy they are—they are going to start experiencing what that thing is called psychosis.
Now, there is a flip side of that. I think of that, what is it called with the Native American ritual when they would do—oh gosh, what is it? Spirit—oh god, I can’t remember the word. See, this is what happens to me when I don’t sleep. I lose word recall. Also, it’s really quite interesting. I was making a list the other day of some important things in my life, important people in my life from the past eight years. I couldn’t remember names because I hadn’t slept enough. It was literally like the part of my brain that I needed to access to do this work, it was just not accessible.
So anyways, I’ll just work to a little workaround. I believe it’s Native American warriors, I think from some of the Plains Indian tribes, when they wanted to have like awakenings and they wanted to have what they considered to be more spiritual connection or vision quests—see, I found the word—they would go off, let’s say, into a mountain and be alone in a place completely isolated and not sleep for a couple of days and just stand up, maybe dance, think, but not sleep. And the not sleeping would really induce very altered states where they could have visions. And that is pretty normal, I think, for people on that. So even for just two days. So that’s where I’m imagining: don’t sleep for five days, we’ll get loopy.
So what does sleep do? I think the main thing that sleep does is it lets our brains relax. I think it lets our bodies relax too, because I’ve noticed also if I consistently sleep poorly or sleep inconsistently for a matter of weeks, I’m going to get sick. My body’s defenses start to break down. But I also think there is that brain and body connection, that mind and body connection. Because if I don’t take care of my emotional health, if I don’t take care of my mental health, my body’s problems are very soon to follow.
And so what happens when the mind relaxes? Well, for me, when my mind relaxes enough and I go into sleep, I start dreaming right away. And what I see dreaming is, is our deeper self. Some deep unconscious part of us is desperately trying to heal. It’s trying to work out our ancient problems. It’s trying to work out our modern problems. It’s trying to work out our conflicts, and it needs that level of relaxation to be able to put all the pieces together. And in a way, it’s a beautiful thing about the human mind. Sometimes we don’t even have to do anything. We just need to let go, not take any action at all, and deep inside ourselves, the actions are gonna be taken. Interestingly, that is from ancient Chinese philosophy, the attitude I believe it’s called in Chinese wu wei from the Daodejing from Lao Tzu, who says there’s action and there’s non-action, and there’s a real value in non-action. And to me, in a way, the ultimate non-action as a person is to sleep.
But for many people, I think people, especially who have a lot of traumas, who have been violated in all sorts of different ways, and those violations took away their control, took away their sense of safety in the world, took away their sense that they were an empowered person—they were disempowered by their trauma. They lost control because of their traumas. It can be very hard to sleep. It can be very hard to lie down in the darkness, in quiet at night, in a bed, and just completely let go. It actually, in some ways for people, can replicate the situations in which they were traumatized, in which they lost control. And so to sleep, to really let yourself go into sleep, is to lose control, and it can be very scary.
I experienced that sometimes myself. Often, if the next day I have something really important to do or something where there’s a lot of pressure on me, something where I really have to perform, something where if it goes wrong it can create a lot of problems, or if I have a lot of responsibility for other people especially, or for a situation the next day, I can get anxious. And I can start to think about it, and I can start to feel like, “Oh my god, I need to control every aspect of what I’m going to do the next day, and I need to make sure that it’s going to work out in my mind, and I need to be prepared.” And because of that, I find it very hard to let go and do the exact opposite of take control. I need to just let go and sleep. And sometimes it’s very hard for me to fall asleep. And sometimes it can take me half the night to fall asleep. And when I do finally fall asleep, sometimes I don’t sleep well. I can find myself waking up and then just thinking again and thinking and thinking and thinking.
So what I’ve done is I have just for myself developed a lot of different techniques to often just distract myself or to give myself calming mental exercises that help me go to sleep. I think everybody’s different, but for me, this is what works for me, and it does help me go to sleep. So it’s very rare in my life that I miss an entire night of sleep. It happens probably less than once every few years. But there are some nights, even when I don’t have jetlag, that yeah, I do end up…
Getting two, three, four hours of sleep, and I feel all exhausted the next day. I can usually make it through a day without having a nap if I’m completely exhausted, but I really wonder how do people do it who consistently get two, three hours of sleep a night? I do talk to people, and they say they sleep horribly night after night after night, and they’re able to function. But one thing that I see is often that people look exhausted. Like, even right now, I think I have bags under my eyes.
So I’m gonna touch on a subject of sleep medications. I know a lot of people who do take sleep medications, and I’ve tried different sleep medications in my life. For me, I find sleep medications something very, very important in general to avoid. I consider them overall much more dangerous than helpful. And where do I get that experience from? My first experience is my mother. When I was a kid, she was a regular user of sleep medications. I don’t even know the half of what she took, but one thing I know she took on a pretty regular basis was Benadryl. It’s considered a very mild sleep medication. It’s an antihistamine that makes people drowsy as a side effect.
When I was a teenager, I was going through a lot of anxiety, taking the SATs and getting ready for college and feeling like I had to take a lot of exams that were gonna define the value of the rest of my life. I felt so much pressure on myself, and I found myself staying awake half the night. It was the first time in my life I’d ever had insomnia, and it was very stressful for me. So my mom’s like, “Here, take this pill,” and she gave me a Benadryl out of her prescription. So I took one, and the first time I took it, I went to sleep fairly quickly, and I was like, “Oh my God, it’s magic!”
Well, then what happened is I woke up the next day. I functioned throughout the next day. I was happy about it. That night, I went back to bed, and I had more important stuff to do the next day, and I started getting anxious again. I started thinking, “Oh God, I’m not gonna be able to sleep again.” And then I noticed, where did my brain go? Right to that pill. I need that pill again. And then I got scared. Then I thought, “Oh.” I’d never experienced on a personal level the concept of addiction before, but right then, at that moment, I’m like, “This is psychological addiction.”
Because previously, when I was trying to fall asleep, I had the anxiety of, “Oh, what’s gonna happen to me if I don’t fall asleep? What are gonna be the consequences in my life?” Now I had all those thoughts, plus I had the thought of, “Oh, that pill is gonna help me. Only that pill’s gonna help me.” And suddenly that pill became front and center in my life, and I was like, “I want it! I want it!” So I took it again. I asked my mom, “Can I have another one of those pills?” She gave me another one, and then it happened again where I was able to go to sleep.
And then I was like, the next night, I was like anxious again, and I was like, “I want that pill.” And I’m like, “No.” Some part of me was like, “Daniel, you have to be able to sleep without a pill. Sleep is a natural thing. I’ve been sleeping my whole life. Suddenly I’m anxious, and I need a pill.” And I was just like, something intuitively in me was like, “This is really bad.” But even though I knew that, that pill was still in my mind, and I fought it. A lot of times, it wasn’t like every night I was anxious, but a lot of times, I was maybe a few times a week, and I would always think of that pill. And sometimes I did take it again.
But after a while, I’m like, “No, no, no, no.” And that, I think, probably for a good twenty-five years, I went without taking any sleep medication. But I’ve done, in the last eight years, a lot of flying to Europe, to Asia, to Australia, other places for work, for fun, for travel, for curiosity. And I’m very tall, I’m six foot four, centimeters 193 centimeters. And what I find on airlines, especially if I’m gonna fly in the economy, which I basically always do, I don’t fit in those seats. And when I have overnight flights, I don’t sleep well. It’s unpleasant.
And I realized, oh, at some point, somehow, somebody gave me a Valium, and I took it, and I slept for the entire night that I flew overnight, and it actually really helped. And I thought, “Oh my God!” So I went to my doctor, I get a few pills a year. He’s like, “Do you want more?” I’m like, “No, I don’t want more. I only want them when I do overnight flights, far distances.” The other thing I find quite interesting about jet lag is that it’s a modern problem. I don’t think a hundred years ago it really could have existed because people weren’t changing time zones that fast.
Only in the era of jet planes, from when we’re flying at five hundred miles an hour for hours and hours and hours, do we change multiple time zones in a very short period of time, and our whole schedule gets thrown off. I don’t think people or animals or anything was meant to switch this many time zones this quickly. So it really is an alien thing to have this thing called jet lag. Is this a good time to take sleep medication? Which brings up another question for me. Hmm, melatonin. A lot of people have suggested melatonin. Me, I consider melatonin, like all the sleep drugs, it’s a little bit milder, but it is a sleep aid, and it is a drug.
Okay, our bodies naturally produce it, but I also think there’s a danger in it because, like all these things, we can get acclimated to it, we can get addicted to it, we can want it. And I think if we take it away, it can be hard to sleep. So for me now, a couple of times in the last five days, I have taken a melatonin. I’m like, “You know, I think sometimes these very unnatural solutions, like taking sleep aid pills, maybe can work at a time where there’s an unnatural problem like jet lag.” But do I want to take melatonin in my regular life? No, not at all. I don’t want to take anything.
But the other thing is, I know a lot of people who take sleep medications every night. They take them regularly, and they take much heavier ones than melatonin. They take ones more along the lines of Valium, different benzodiazepines. They take Ambien, even antipsychotics that have the side effect of just knocking them out and helping them sleep. The problem is, physiologically, when they stop taking them, it can be terrible. They can just go through weeks or months of sleeplessness and other side effects. It can really ruin people’s lives. I’ve seen it many times. I’ve seen people who, like, don’t sleep, and they become psychotic as a result of just stopping sleep medication.
So what can we do to sleep better? For me, a very, very important thing is I find that the conscious part of me has a job, has a responsibility to set up my life so that I can sleep well. To make sure that I have a quiet place to sleep, to make sure that I have safety. Often, the best thing that helps is if I have a door to close, that I have privacy. If there’s going for whatever reason to be light in my room, because sometimes I sleep in places where it’s not totally dark, that I always make sure I have one of those things that I put over my eyes against memory recall. Can’t remember the word for it, but something that covers my eyes so that no light gets in. I also like having earplugs. I carry lots and lots of earplugs because it really helps.
Now, I know people who have been very traumatized that don’t want to cut off the light. They want to make sure they’re always aware and vigilant of what’s going on. I know a lot of people also that have been very traumatized that don’t want to put in earplugs. They don’t want to feel like, “Oh my God, I can’t hear if somebody’s…”
Coming in my room, and I totally get that. But still, for me, I find, and I think this is true for everybody, we have to find a way to take responsibility for our sleep schedule. For me, I want to make sure that I’m home at a certain time. Okay, I’m flexible. I’m not perfect. Sometimes I come home later. Sometimes it’s not perfect. But I really want to be as strong as I can to defend my right and my responsibility to sleep well.
To make sure that I’m in a quiet place also for several hours before I go to bed, I want to start relaxing. I don’t want conflict. I know that if I have a stressful conversation, even an hour or two hours before I go to bed, it’s on my mind. I start thinking about it. I’ll start looping on it. I’ll start trying to resolve it as I’m falling asleep. For me, no, I want to be relaxed when I’m in bed.
I want to be in a place also where I’m not too hot, but I’m not too cold, where I have water near my bed so I can take a sip. I also like to be near a bathroom so if I need to get up in the middle of the night and use the bathroom, I can do that pretty easily. Another thing is I like to live with people with whom I feel relaxed because I know I really pick up the energy of people that I’m around.
So if I’m around people who are going through a lot of stress, a lot of conflict, if there’s yelling and screaming and arguing and discomfort and sadness, I pick that up, and I don’t sleep as well. I also know that during the day it helps if I do things that are almost like sleep but not sleep. For instance, like just be alone, relaxing, playing music, meditating, not taking any responsibility.
Now, I know a lot of people like taking naps. Me, I’m not a nap person. I mean, I actually, I love taking naps, and that’s part of the problem. If I take a nap, though, I’ll end up sleeping for an hour, let’s say 3:00 to 4:00 in the afternoon, and then I won’t be able to go to sleep at night. So for me, I like to be awake the whole day, and I like to sleep the whole night.
Now, I also recognize that everybody is different. So when I say our conscious self has a responsibility to make sure that we prepare our lives so that we can sleep well at night, that is each person’s individual job to figure out how they can sleep well.
I also think for me personally, it’s very helpful that if I do have conflicts, to work them out earlier in the day, to think about my day, to get my day set up so that my conflicts are more resolved, so that I can have a more open view toward the day, and I’m less stressed during the day. And also, if I have resolved a lot of my conflicts earlier in the day, I tend to have fewer conflicts during the day so that my afternoon is more relaxed, my evening is very relaxed, and my sleep is good.
One thing that I do that I find very helpful is that when I wake up every morning, I journal. I write down my dreams a lot. Not every night, I don’t write down my dreams, and sometimes I don’t remember my dreams too well. And I know people who don’t remember their dreams at all. I find that kind of sad. And when I don’t remember my dreams at all, it’s usually a sign that I’m a bit out of touch with myself. When I’m more connected with myself, I remember my dreams.
So I write down my dreams, try to figure out what they mean. Also, what I like to do in my consistent pattern is I write how my previous day went, what my conflicts were, and any conflicts that are on my mind right now. And often, after a good night of sleep, when I write down my conflicts, a lot of times I see solutions. I see mistakes that I made. I say, “Ooh, what did I do that contributed to this problem?” And if I can figure out what I did to contribute to the problems in my life, that gives me the power to change my behavior, to not contribute to that problem. And often, I can have fewer problems.
Now, one last thing I want to talk about sleep is what about people who oversleep? Remember reading in the DSM when I first became a therapist about one of the symptoms of major depression is hypersomnia. People who sleep a ton. And I’ve met a lot of people since becoming a therapist and also friends of mine who were more depressed who end up sleeping 15, 16 hours a day. I’ve met people who sleep more than that on a regular basis. And what is that?
I think mostly when people are sleeping that much, often their sleep isn’t great sleep. It’s not like restful, healthy sleep. And I think a lot of times it’s just disengaging from life. It’s avoiding life. It’s avoiding conflicts. It’s avoiding human interactions. It’s avoiding taking responsibility. It’s trying to deal with their depression by dissociating from, splitting off from their depression, splitting off from their feelings of pain, splitting off from their feelings of suffering by just zoning out, being out of touch, just sleeping as much as possible.
And I think for people in that situation, when they are awake, I think it’s time to work really hard to take the conscious responsibility, however they have to do it. I know for many people it’s extremely difficult to get up in the morning, to get on a sleep schedule, to fight to wake up in the morning. And beyond that, sleep schedule at night, to try to go to sleep.
And I think one big problem that people have, and I’ve fallen into this too, which is why I speak about it, is that if I do get to bed very late one night, let’s say I can’t fall asleep at 10 o’clock at night, and I end up falling asleep at 4 o’clock in the morning, and then I wake up the next day and have to function the next night, I, or the next day, I’m exhausted.
Well, the next day for me, what I have to do, and I really work hard to do it, even though I’m exhausted, to just power through it. Don’t take a nap, and then make it through the whole day, and then try to go to bed at the same time the next night that I would have gone to bed had I been healthier. So basically, go to bed at 10 o’clock. Don’t stay up late.
And I think what happens with a lot of people is when they end up staying up until 4 o’clock in the morning, they let themselves sleep really, really late. So they end up sleeping until noon or 1 o’clock in the afternoon. And then the next night, when do they go to bed? Not at 10 o’clock at night because they’re not tired. Then they end up going to bed at 4 in the morning again, and then they end up sleeping until noon. That is something really important to avoid.
Because I think also when people do that, when they end up getting on a schedule where they’re going to bed early in the morning, 4 o’clock in the morning, 5 o’clock in the morning, and they’re waking up in the middle of the day when the sun’s been out for already 6, 7 hours, what happens is they end up getting out of sync with humanity. They also end up getting out of sync with the cycles of the sun. And being in sync with the cycles of the sun is another thing for me, and I’ve seen for many, many people that’s very, very important for getting a good night of sleep.