Latest / AWAKEN with Dylan Ayaloo: Inner Work, Healing, Yoga & Meditation / [EP53] Why You Keep Waking Up at 3am (And What Your Body Is Actually Trying to Tell You)

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[EP53] Why You Keep Waking Up at 3am (And What Your Body Is Actually Trying to Tell You) · AWAKEN with Dylan Ayaloo: Inner Work, Healing, Yoga & Meditation

• 0:00
  3 a.m. awake. Why sleep isn't fixing you.
• 0:03
  It's 3.17 a.m. She's wide awake or he's wide awake.
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  The room is dark. Her partner's breathing evenly beside her.
• 0:12
  The boiler clicks in the corner somewhere and the brain is going.
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  And it's just going.
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  The email she needs to send, the conversation she had at lunch that didn't quite land,
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  the thing her mom said three weeks ago that she still can't let go of,
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  a list and just cycling through the list and so she reaches for her phone and
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  no she won't do that and she flips the pillow she tries to slow her breathing she can't backward
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  from her hundreds it's 3 43 a.m she hasn't moved an inch but her heart is beating like she's been
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  running and if you know this if you've lived this for months for years then maybe this message is
• 0:57
  for you. Because what I'm about to tell you is not what others might have told you about sleep
• 1:02
  or what every other sleep video might tell you. It's a thing that perhaps no one has actually
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  broached yet. So before I say anything, let me save you some time. I know what maybe you've
• 1:15
  already tried. So you might have tried no screens after 9pm, magnesium, glycinate, blue light
• 1:22
  glasses, melatonin, lavender, sleep stories, meditation apps, the 478 breath, keeping the
• 1:30
  bedroom cool, keeping the bedroom dark, blackout curtains, a weighted blanket, journaling before
• 1:36
  bed so you empty the brain, not eating after 7 p.m., eating a small carb snack before bed,
• 1:44
  cutting caffeine, cutting alcohol, supplements with L-thionine, ashwagandha, valerian.
• 1:51
  You read the Matthew Walker. You've listened to Andrew Huberman. You've tried the cold shower
• 1:56
  before bed and the hot bath before bed because different people are swallowed by different ones.
• 2:04
  And here you are, 3 a.m. wide awake. So I'm not going to give you another tip because what you
• 2:11
  have isn't perhaps a sleep hygiene problem. In this next few minutes, in this video, I'm going
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  to show you three things. One, why sleep hygiene isn't fixing you and what's actually happening in
• 2:24
  your body at 3 a.m. Two, why the exhaustion doesn't lift. Even when you do sleep eight hours,
• 2:31
  the reason has a name and most people have never heard it. And three, one thing you can do tonight
• 2:38
  before bed that changes the conversation that your body is having with itself. And it's not a hack or
• 2:44
  a supplement. It's something much smaller, but also real. So sleep isn't the problem. Here's the
• 2:52
  thing nobody told you perhaps. Sleep is not a behavior. You can't enforce it. You can't optimize
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  your way into it. Sleep is a state. A state your body drops into when it believes it is safe to
• 3:05
  power down. When your body doesn't believe it is safe, it doesn't matter how dark your room is,
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  it doesn't matter that your phone is in the other room, your body will keep one eye open, literally,
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  and your brainstem will keep scanning for threats. And at the tiniest signals, like the boiler
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  clicking on a thought, a shift in your partner's breathing, it pulls you out of sleep. And that's
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  what 3am is. It's not insomnia, most likely. It's your nervous system doing the job that it thinks
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  you need it to do. Perhaps you don't have a sleep problem. You most likely have a safety problem.
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  And your body loves you. It's trying to protect you from something. And we have to figure out
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  from what. So the two modes. There's a concept by Dr. Dan Siegel, a psychiatrist at UCLA,
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  that I want to share with you.
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  He calls it the window of tolerance.
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  Picture a window.
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  Up above the window, hyper arousal.
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  The racing heart, racing thoughts, vigilance.
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  You can't switch off.
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  Can't sit still, can't sleep.
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  That's the state you're in at 3 a.m.
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  Below the window, hyper arousal.
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  The numb, foggy, collapsed, flat,
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  Netflix for six hours and feel nothing.
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  Inside the window, regulated, present.
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  You can feel, you can focus, indigest, and you can sleep.
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  For most people I work with, they are barely ever inside the window.
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  They are flipping between hyper and hypo, racing all day, crashing at night, tired but
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  wired, and that is the life.
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  And here's what Siegel's work makes clear.
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  Sleep lives inside the window.
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  You cannot will yourself into sleep from hyper arousal.
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  you cannot white knuckle it your body has to come back into the window first and when it doesn't
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  know how when it's been outside of the window for months or years or decades it doesn't remember
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  the way home so you go to bed in hyper arousal you live there eventually exhaustion drops you
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  into hypo arousal isn't the same thing as sleep shallow fragmented no repair you wake up at 3 a.m
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  spiking and you're back in hyper arousal. You go to bed, you don't rest, you rest horizontal for
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  eight hours with your body still outside the window. And then you wonder why you woke up tired,
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  why 3am is not random. Let me tell you about the cortisol awakening response because 3am is not
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  random. Cortisol is your main stress hormone. In a regulated nervous system, cortisol follows a
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  across 24 hours. It's lowest around midnight to 2 a.m. Your body is in deep rest and repair.
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  And then it starts rising around 3 to 4 a.m., climbing towards its peak roughly around 7 to 8
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  a.m., which is what naturally wakes you. That's a regulated pattern. Now, here's what happens in
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  a dysregulated system. Cortisol isn't low at 2 a.m. It's already climbing. By 3 a.m., it spikes.
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  is what wakes you. The email, the conversation, the list, those aren't waking you. That's what
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  your mind does after your cortisol already pulled you up. You didn't wake up because you were
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  thinking, you were thinking because you woke up. Your hormone pulled you out of sleep. Your mind
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  rushes in to explain why. This is Clough and colleagues, 2010, Stress and Health. They measured
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  cortisol in chronic stress populations versus regulated arm controls. The 3am spike shows up
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  again and again in people carrying unresolved stress load. It's not willpower, it's not discipline,
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  it's not you've got to stop overthinking. Your endocrine system is doing exactly what it's been
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  trained to do. It's retrain and retraining it is possible and we'll get to that. The voice of
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  silence all day. Carl Jung has a line, the unconscious speaks when the conscious mind rest.
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  All day, you manage, you handle, you are performing, putting on a performance that is you,
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  right? Like you push down the thing that you don't have time to feel and then you lie down
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  and then the mind gets quiet and the thing you push down rises up. Jung said, what you deny
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  submits. What you accept transforms. 3 a.m. is not always, but often, the voice you've silenced
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  all day. Finally, getting a hearing. The body has been keeping a list and at 3 a.m. with nothing to
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  distract it, it reads a list out loud. So don't fight it. Don't shame yourself for it. Don't beat
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  yourself down. Start to learn how to listen. You slept, but your body didn't. Now, not every person
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  listening to this is a 3am waker. Some of you sleep through 8 hours, 10 hours even, and you
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  still wake up exhausted. And here's what's happening perhaps. Sleep has architecture,
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  four stages, cycling through every 90 minutes. Light sleep, deeper NREM sleep, deep slow wave
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  sleep, which is where the physical repair happens, where your body processes cortisol, where your
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  glymphatic system clears waste from your brain and REM where memory consolidation and emotional
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  processing happens. When your nervous system is dysregulated, the architecture gets flattened.
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  You spend less time in slow wave sleep. You get frequent micro arousal, tiny wake-ups you don't
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  even remember. Your REM is shallow and fragmented. You were technically asleep for eight hours.
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  you got maybe two hours of the sleep that actually restores you.
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  Matthew Walker's research on this is the clearest.
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  Why we sleep 2017.
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  And Mikan Nedergaard at the University of Rochester,
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  her 2013 discovery that the brain's glymphatic system
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  literally washes metabolic waste out of neurons during deep sleep
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  and barely functions when sleep is fragmented.
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  And that's the piece almost nobody talks about.
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  You're not just tired, your brain hasn't cleaned.
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  You slept, but your body didn't.
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  And your body never left work.
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  I want you to notice something right now,
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  wherever you are.
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  Your jaw, check your jaw.
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  Is there a tone in the masseter,
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  the muscle at the back of the jaw, below your ear?
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  Most of you will feel it as soon as you name it.
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  a background clench you weren't perhaps aware of? Your breath, what is happening? Is your belly
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  rising or is it all up in the upper chest and shoulders? Upper chest breathing is sympathetic
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  breathing. It's shallow, it's fast, it's what your body does when it's getting ready to do something.
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  Your ribs, if you put your hands on the side ribs and you take a normal breath, do they expand
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  sideways or does it stay locked? Most people listening to this, their ribs don't move at all.
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  Breathe into a shallow bend at the top of the chest because the rest of the body is held.
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  And this is what you take to bid.
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  A clenched jaw, shallow breath, locked ribs, a held belly.
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  They are measurable physical signs that your body is still on duty and you expect it to fall asleep.
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  Your body never left work.
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  What the research says.
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  Four names to know.
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  Dan Siegel, psychiatrist at UCLA, the neurobiologist who gave us the window of tolerance.
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  His life's work, the mind is not just in the head.
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  It's relational, embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information across your whole system.
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  Disregulation is the norm in modern life.
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  Integration, the word he uses, is the work.
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  The Developing Mind, 1999.
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  Bessa van der Kolk, psychiatrist, author of the book, The Body Keeps Core, 2014.
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  Trauma and chronic stress doesn't live in your memories.
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  They live in your nervous system.
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  You can talk about them for 20 years in therapy and your body will still be in sympathetic
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  because your body needs somatic, body-based intervention, not cognitive.
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  His trauma center studies on yoga and PTSD are the hidden gems.
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  outperform cognitive body therapy for his population. And that's real. Peter Levin
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  developed somatic experiencing, waking the tiger 1997. Unresolved survival energy gets trapped in
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  the body. The zebra that escapes the lion shakes violently for a minute and is fine. Humans
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  override that shaking and we get back to work. And that energy stays underground for decades.
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  Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neuroendocrinologist, I'll say it better if I say it slowly,
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  called his book on the same phenomenon, why zebras don't get ulcers.
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  The zebra runs and then rests.
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  We don't.
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  Gabo Mate, physician, author, When the Body Says No, 2003.
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  His decades of clinical work with chronic illness patients led him to a blunt conclusion.
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  Autoimmune disease, what we call chronic fatigue, what we call unexplained insomnia, is often the body saying what the person cannot.
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  The suppression of authentic emotion has measurable biological cost.
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  Your body won't lie for you forever.
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  The 3 a.m. wake up is that trapped energy, finding its moment to speak.
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  The unrefreshing sleep is that trapped energy, stopping you from dropping into deep repair.
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  These four are foundation of everything happening in the nervous system and body-based research
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  right now.
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  And none of them are talking about sleep hygiene, the antidote to exhaustion.
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  The poet David White tells a story.
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  He was exhausted, burnt out, doing meaningful work, but running on empty.
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  He went to see an old friend, a Benedictine monk called Brother David Steindl Rust.
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  He sat down and said, Brother David, I'm tired.
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  The monk waited and then he said,
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  the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest.
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  The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.
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  Think about that for a second.
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  Because if you tried for months,
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  if more rest isn't fixing it,
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  the monk is telling you why.
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  You're not exhausted because you don't sleep enough perhaps,
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  you're exhausted because you are split.
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  Half of you in the room,
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  half of you somewhere else,
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  and half of you present,
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  half of you just putting on this performance called you. The nervous system cannot rest inside
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  a split. It can only rest inside wholeness and that's the door. So here's one thing you can do
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  tonight. Here's a practice, one thing that you can do. Tonight before bed, you can stand in your
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  bathroom or in your bedroom for about 30 seconds, plank your feet, put your hands, put one hand on
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  the chest, one hand on the belly and close your eyes and say to your own body out loud,
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  if you can, or quietly if you have to, we are done. It's safe to put it down and not just say
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  those words, but feel the emotion, the energy of that through every cell in your body and notice
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  what happens. So this is not quite a meditation, but it kind of is. And it's not a breathwork
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  session in particular way. You're simply just telling your body what the mind has forgotten to
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  tell it for years, that the day is over and your body doesn't know the day is over. It's been running
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  the clock, scanning, holding, checking. Nobody told it to stop. Your nervous system cannot read your
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  calendar. It needs an explicit cue. Voice, touch, ground contact, three things the vagus nerve
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  of responds to.
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  So do this for seven nights and don't expect anything, but just do it and see what happens.
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  And the seventh night, notice what your body has started to anticipate.
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  Notice the jaw and how it releases.
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  Notice if you still wake up at 3.30 instead of three and little steps of progress.
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  And that can be a great start.
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  So nothing ever goes away until it's taught you.
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  Pema Chodron writes,
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  Now, that 30-second practice I just gave you is a door and a good one, but it's not a room.
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  The real work is what actually shifts your body from carrying it for 10, 20, 30 years.
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  It's a deeper one than just one exercise.
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  And this is why we do the things that we do.
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  We meditate, not just to empty our minds, to teach our nervous system what stillness feels like over and over until stillness becomes the place your body knows how to get back to.
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  we do yoga in our body of work, not just for flexibility, although that's cool,
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  but because the body is holding survival energy, it never got to release. The zebra runs from the
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  lion and then at the edge, at the grass, shakes violently for a full minute and then goes back to
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  grazing. That shaking is the nervous system discharging. Humans don't do that. We get up
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  from the trauma, the meeting, the conversation, we get back to work.
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  The energy stays.
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  The jaw holds it.
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  The ribs hold it.
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  The belly hold it.
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  Yoga, the way we practice it, done with breath and done with someone who understands what
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  you're doing, is how we reclaim that, let's call it zebra energy.
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  Van der Kolk ran the study on this.
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  Yoga outperformed talk therapy for his trauma patients.
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  By the way, I'm pro-therapy, right?
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  But I'm just sharing his research.
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  And we also do the story work.
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  And that's not therapy, even though some people might think it looks like it.
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  Something adjacent to it.
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  Story work is a practice of noticing the narrative your mind has been running for decades.
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  You know, I have to be perfect.
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  I have to hold it all together.
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  I can't let anyone see.
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  If I stop, it all falls apart.
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  And seeing how that narrative is embodied, not just believed, lived in the body,
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  in the breath, in the 3 a.m. waking up.
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  You can't rewrite the story while the body's still enacting it.
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  So we work at the body level, at the narrative level,
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  and the mind loosens its grip on the story.
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  The body loosens its grip on the pattern.
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  And a new story, a new future becomes possible.
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  That is embodiment work.
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  That is what we do in our body of work and in a circle.
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  And that is what the 7-Day Inner Work Challenge is a taste of.
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  People stay in this work for years because the nervous system learns slowly and the
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  body needs repetition.
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  One door every night for the rest of your life, perhaps.
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  So if this landed, if you've been living on night shift and you felt something in
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  your body while I was talking and the seven day inner work challenge is where
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  I'd invite you to start.
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  It's free.
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  It's seven days of this, exactly this work, the meditation, the body, the story,
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  one practice a day, 10, 15, 20 minutes a day.
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  And the link is the description
• 19:13
  or you can just go to my website, dylanilu.com.
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  So in closing, you're not broken.
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  Your sleep is not broken.
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  Your body's not broken.
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  Your body is doing exactly what it was trained to do.
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  It learned something along the way
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  that it was not safe to rest.
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  And it's been faithfully following that instruction
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  ever since.
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  You can give it new instruction
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  listening to it by asking what it's been holding by meeting it on the mat in the breath in the
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  silence and for as long as it takes your 3am body is not your enemy is the body asking for a
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  conversation it's been denied and this is where that conversation begins