Fast Asleep, Wide Awake: Discover the secrets of restorative sleep and vibrant energy. Dr Ramlakhan Nerina
find that you start receiving more and more ‘data’ from your intelligent body. And you’ll begin to find that you are more able to understand exactly what this data is guiding you to do.
Beware of resistance and protest – you may read something and think, ‘This is something I’ve never done and could never do.’ Strangely, this might be the very thing that you do need to do.
Imagine yourself in a vision of what you want to create – see yourself getting into bed and melting gratefully, without resistance, into a deep, nourishing sleep. See yourself waking in the morning, again with gratitude for the sleep you’ve had. See yourself moving with energy to meet your day with open heart and mind.
Chapter 2
‘All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The FAWA formula isn’t something I learnt from a textbook or studied at university. Sure, I’ve studied for degrees and read a lot of books, but what I’m going to share in the following chapters comes from an inside-out approach that brings together several strands: academic studies, professional research and observations from my work. Much of my work is intuitive, perhaps because I have also been my own patient, and often I have found myself knowing something and then, with great relief, and sometimes years later, find the scientific evidence and data to validate what I have always known.
However, it was a lecture on homeostasis – maintaining internal balance and constancy – that finally woke me up to my life’s work. At the time I wasn’t quite sure why this particular lecture was worth listening to, but later, as I struggled to maintain a sense of balance in my own life, it all became clear.
At the time I was studying for a Doctorate in Physiology but, I guess like many students, I struggled to get out of bed in the morning and was more intent on having a good time. Even back then, I knew it was possible to sleep with your eyes open.
This time, I didn’t fall asleep. Instead I was entranced by the lecturer’s words as he spoke about how every biological process in the body – temperature, appetite, cellular fluid balance, breathing, heartbeat and the sleep–wake cycle – oscillates around a set point, following a sinusoidal up and down rhythm, as shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: The natural rhythm of physiological processes
The more I studied (and paid attention), the more I became fascinated by how intricately and intelligently the body works to create balance, even in rapidly changing external conditions.
A few years down the line, I found myself in a City of London health-screening clinic measuring the physiology and wellbeing of lawyers, bankers and other corporate employees, and this was when things started to change for me and the FAWA formula was born.
Righting the Balance
I loved helping people to understand what was going on with their sleep patterns and energy levels, showing them how the world was impacting them and what they could do to stay in balance, offering reassurance and hope. I was particularly interested to notice that what I measured in the lab didn’t quite match what l learnt in my academic training; there was a mismatch between the theory and the practice.
My measurements seemed to indicate that people attending the clinic were overusing their fight-or-flight system or sympathetic nervous system (SNS). In other words, living as though they were in perpetual survival mode. Breathing patterns and respiratory measures, electrocardiogram traces, blood tests and even body fat levels (called ‘trunkal thickening’ to diplomatically describe a thickening waistline in response to stress) all provided data about how life in the speedy City was creating imbalance in the human physiology.
This was at a time when technology was increasing at an exponential rate as the Internet, mobile phones and email had just exploded on to the scene. Everything and everyone was accelerating. Our physiology was being stretched to its limits and I was seeing this in real time in the measurements I was taking in my lab.
Helping my clients to learn to keep up, adapt, and stay healthy and sane while going at this pace, I was fascinated to measure the changes in their physiological data when they came back to see me three months later. When they took my advice and used the FAWA formula, I saw how it made a measurable difference – even though they were just making relatively small changes. A grateful CEO asked me to develop a programme for his team that could be delivered in their corporate offices to teach his staff what he had learnt in clinic. I called this workshop ‘Managing the Pace’ and within a year I had feedback from over 1,000 employees who had attended it.
It seems to be the small changes that make all the difference to our lives.
Since then I have shared the same formula in corporate auditoriums speaking to hundreds of people hungry for solutions to their sleep problems and exhaustion. As technology advanced, I found myself working virtually and globally across time zones and continents, sometimes sitting in my office at home and helping people around the world to get better sleep and to break out of the fatigue cycle.
Among my ‘well’ clients I also worked in a psychiatric clinic, helping those suffering with a host of mental illnesses including anxiety, depression, addictions, eating disorders, work-related stress and burnout, and my sleep and energy programmes soon became the most rewarding area of my work. Not only because I was helping people to find a way out of the most seemingly desperate of circumstances but also, perhaps, because I had once been a patient at that very same clinic years ago.
Waking Up
The seed of the FAWA formula comes from my personal journey.
The truth is that even while doing well academically and professionally, my personal life was shambolic. I was racked with fear and drove myself hard, all the time feeling that I really wasn’t good enough and worrying that I’d be found out. Sleep was a big issue and I was plagued by insomnia, lying in bed at night tortured by my own thoughts. In fact, it was this crazy sleep pattern that inspired the title of my first book, Tired But Wired.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have energy – but it was the wrong kind of energy: buzzing, hyper, anxious and restless, on edge and running in survival mode. At university, my friends thought I was the life and soul of the party, not realising that often my ‘gaiety’ was a big act, masking fear and insecurity, that would later plummet into depression and exhaustion when on my own.
I had a sense that things weren’t right but felt powerless to change anything. Why was I this way? My childhood hadn’t been easy or stable at the best of times, so perhaps this was partly responsible for my restlessness and inability to settle to sleep. I know it caused my mother great heartache – she even took me to a doctor when I was six months old because I wouldn’t sleep. But my earliest memories are of being a bit odd, not quite fitting in, sensing so much but not being able to articulate how I was feeling – and fear, which seemed to pervade my life.
A life-changing moment came in 1998 when, in a state of despair, I travelled to Australia for six months. I didn’t really have a plan but knew I had to get away from everything – a clinical label that I didn’t believe, a marriage that wasn’t working, therapy that didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere, medication that wasn’t making any difference. Here everything slowed down and my view of life changed. Suddenly everything became very clear to me. I could see that the choices I’d been making had kept me stuck and created dis-ease in my mind and body. In this brief moment I also found something within me – a refuge and stillness – and from this place I was able to see life differently and make profoundly different choices. I can only describe this as coming home, or touching God. Whatever it was, I surrendered and let go, and from that moment my life changed.
Deepening