February 2009
Sleep and Love: Some Surprising Similarities
Have you ever thought about the curious relationship between sleep and love? Most people would likely agree that both are desirable, though often elusive states.
Both sleep and love enhance health in surprisingly similar ways. By eliciting a parasympathetic nervous system response, love encourages feelings of deep relaxation. This is associated with a thorough sense of receptivity and letting go. Sleep and love both call for a kind of sweet surrender. We fall in love. And, we fall asleep.
One obvious difference between sleep and love is that you don’t need a partner for the former. Or, do you? Most mammals tend not to sleep alone. As children, many of us simply couldn’t sleep without our teddy bear or a similar social surrogate. Some specialists believe people sleep better when they sleep together. Despite the appearance that sleep is a lone venture, I believe that like love, it is a vital social experience.
Good sleepers and true lovers are big dreamers. Both sleep and love alter our ordinary consciousness by ushering us into a mysterious and sometimes delirious dream world. (Love, for example, is known to be characterized by auditory hallucinations as evidenced in Maurice Chevalier’s classic, “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise.”) Ultimately, both sleep and love are portals to a mysterious altered state of consciousness.
Though love and sleep share some essential features, most of us disregard sleep’s mystery, social aspects, and call to surrender. Instead, sleep gets reduced to neurochemistry and the sleepless are seduced with sleeping pills. Who would dare suggest that we could reduce love to neurochemistry? Well, the same pharmaceutical forces that peddle sleeping pills are also pushing ‘love’ pills.
The sales of both erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs and sleeping pills have skyrocketed through strikingly similar trajectories over recent years. I don’t mean to suggest that such medications are never appropriate. But, given that most ED concerns like most sleep problems are primarily psychological in nature, it is disturbing that millions of people routinely rely on medications to both ‘get it up’ and then ‘get themselves down.’
The belief that drugs can be used to manage deeply personal experiences like love and sleep limits our relationship with these experiences. Practice becoming more mindful of the mystery, social connectedness and surrender that characterize both of these exquisite states. In doing so, I believe we can come to fall in love with sleep and learn to sleep with love. Maybe they carry us to the very same place.