Waking at Night

I have noticed since the disaster of the American election that my fear levels have gone up. It’s as if I am subliminally walking around with my shoulders hunched waiting for the blow. I can still laugh and enjoy things but the background threat does not really go away - or if it does, it readily comes back especially if I think about anything connected to it. And the night is the worst time. I slightly dread going to bed for fear of my own mind should/when I wake in the night. You know, that time at four in the morning when you wake with your heart pumping and a mind full of paranoia and anxiety and wonder how you will ever get to sleep.

In our small sangha last week one of our members had just discovered the biology of all this and was both amazed by its universality - we all work the same way - and relieved that there are ways to work with it. Basically how to turn off our innate being under threat mechanism. I’m sure you remember this stuff. My metaphor for it is that it is as if we have a person within our brain who is perched on top of a watch tower. Their job is to look out for danger and also opportunity but they are much more weighted on the danger side. When something new emerges from the forest that surrounds their watchtower and comes towards them over the clearing they are instantly alert. And to help them identify the possible threat, they reach behind them and grab a memory, that like a piece of coloured glass, they can look through. However, the problem with this is that while the glass/memory may help identify what is happening, it also colours it with the past. What the person sees may not be what is actually there. And the reactions that follow - triggering the whole adrenaline soaked fight, freeze or flee mechanism - may not actually be necessary. It’s that thing again of being frightened basically of ourselves and the importance of the mantra, ‘feels real not necessarily true’.

So what to do? Well we all know talking sensibly to ourselves is pointless. The rational bit of our brain seems to turn off the moment we are frightened. What does seem to help is the physical stuff. How do you turn off the threat system and return to the basic mode that is all about contentedly hanging out? There are lots of ways of doing this and the way I chose last night was the classic breath in 4 and breath out 8. Long, slow breathing that I let sink down into my belly. Sometimes I combine it with what I think is called ‘yoga breathing’ - as I breath in I do it in three stages: breath in from the belly up to the bottom of my ribs and then relax for a moment without breathing out, breath in again up to my upper chest, relax, finish the breathing in and then breath fully out. This actually works but as always, the trick is not to allow the mind to return to dark thoughts because this just turns the threat system on again. If it’s particularly difficult in the mad bits of my mind I will also insert a hold of four: breath in 4, hold 4, breath out 8. What with all the counting and keeping myself on task what almost always happens is that at some point I fall asleep. However, another trick is not to do it with the intention of getting to sleep - somehow the desperate wanting has the opposite effect.

There are loads of ways of finding a calm mind. It’s what our basic practice of mindfulness of our breath is all about. It’s the foundation of all our other practices, particularly our ‘doing nothing’ meditations. Perhaps the most difficult thing of all is simply recognising that we need to do it. Somehow Mr or Mrs paranoid on the watchtower can get so mesmerised that they forget that they do not have to see everything through coloured glass, that it is possible to see things just as they are.

NW. 19 November 2024