Most of us would have at some stage watched in awe a sleeping infant, marvelling in appreciation and wonder at the depth of their surrender and the delicate quality of their breath, a profound reflection of how our nightly sleep can truly be.
And yet our society and our children are in crisis when it comes to the ability to drop into a deeply nurturing and vitalising sleep consistently each night.
At a recent Health and Wellbeing of Young People Conference (1), sleep clinician Dr Chris Seeton presented that 70% of teenagers suffer from sleep deprivation. In my own class on any one day, up to 20% of children share that they feel tired. Increasing numbers of adults cannot sleep without the support of pharmaceuticals to drop off, while even more of us self-medicate with natural and / or herbal supplements.
What occurs in the intervening years from the deep repose of infancy to the sleep deprived teenage and adult years? What can we do in our own local communities to arrest this downward trend and build a foundation and mindset within our primary aged children that nurtures and places premium value on our nightly cycle?
Dr Seeton presented that both mood and learning ability are affected by poor sleep quality and often false labels of anxiety and learning difficulty disorders are attached to children, when all they are suffering from is sleep deprivation or poor sleep quality. This awareness alone is enough for we educators and parents to open up a discussion on what needs to be addressed here.
But does even this go far enough? Is it possible that we need to look at our own attitudes and mindset around sleep in order to locate the root cause of this trend?
There have been times in all of our lives when we have awoken from our repose, feeling profoundly tender and cared for, perhaps without fully understanding how this has occurred. We may all have experienced insightful dreams, which revealed a resolution or our next step forward in life – as well as a few funny, amusing ones, too!
Many of us will have received advice or warnings in dreams.
So, the simple magic of meeting each day feeling deeply rested and having enjoyed supportive dreams are two baseline reasons for us to consider valuing this nightly cycle that so crucially nurtures the true quality of each of our days.
And yet societal attitudes towards sleep are often steeped in the avoidance of it, a lack of appreciation for what it confers and a view that it is nothing more than unproductive downtime from the busy-ness of life where ‘all the real action takes place.’
Could the starting point for us to address the downward trend in our children’s sleep reside in all of us looking at our own – possibly unconscious – mindset and from there building a foundation of true balance, where repose and activity hold equal value?
In nature day follows night and night follows day. This alone lends credibility to the fact that we also require a similar balance of motion and repose to bring back the magic of natural health and sleep in our own lives and the lives of our children.
(1) Teen Sleep – Dr Chris Seeton: 09.11.2018
Accessed online 10.12.2020