Hacking Your Bodies Energy Cycle -- Sleeping While You Are Awake

Sleeping while you are awake is a discovery I made a few years ago. What I realized, is that the rest and rejuvenation that we gain from sleep is largely based on our breath pattern. If you can bring your breath pattern into the pattern of sleep, you very quickly start to get benefits.

In our waking lives we seldom need all of the energy that our bodies are producing. You can see this in restless leg syndrome, fidgeting children, or the person next to you at work incessantly tapping their pencil on their desk.
These symptoms of our bodies over using energy are the obvious ones, but definitely not the big ones. The brain uses 20% of the body’s energy, and the incessant chattering of multiple voices rattling off about nothing in the background of your thought process are eating up this resource at an astounding rate.

If you pay close attention you will start to notice that every process in your body seems to be connected to the rhythm of your breath. Slow down your breath and your thoughts slow down, your heart slows down, you can almost feel your cellular processing relaxing and moving at a more efficient pace.

Our minds and our bodies were designed over millions of years for survival. This meant that if we were in a stress inducing environment, we were likely in potential danger, and had to be ready to react at a moments notice. Now, in our modern world, are lives are very stressful, but for the most part they are not dangerous. We don’t have to be ready to run from tigers. This gives us the privilege of being able to slow down. Slowing our breath to sleep rhythms, even if just for a few moments during the day can have remarkable effects on how much energy we need, how much we have left, and how much sleep we ultimately require.