I can’t sleep, and when I can’t sleep, I start to worry.
Some of you have heard me talk about my restless leg challenges in the past. And they were, to a great degree, in the past, until recently. If you’ve never had them, picture a few dozen snakes crawling around inside your legs, and the only way to quiet them is to move. So you move. And then you do it again. And it feels awful. They happen for me at night, hence the not sleeping.
I’ve had it for decades, but about eight years ago it got particularly bad. I saw a doctor, got a medication, and it was almost a miracle cure. Over the years I’ve had to keep nudging the dose up as the symptoms break through, which is a fun little arms race to be in with your own legs. But it’s largely worked. Until now. And I don’t think more medication is the answer this time.
Not sleeping is a problem. It definitely makes me feel crappy. Makes me less effective at work. Makes me tired. But like many things in life, equally as bad as not sleeping is the stories that I start to tell myself about what not sleeping means.
I have an uncanny ability to take something bad and make it far worse by the way I respond to it.
I’ve joked that if you boil all of my work down to one line, it would be about how not to make things worse. Which is a hell of a marketing slogan.
But it’s true. We will hit ourselves in the head with a hammer to try to get rid of a headache. And once you see that clearly, you start to understand why simply not cracking your own skull is worth something.
So today I want to walk through a simple equation from my book that makes this clear.
It comes from the meditation teacher Shinzen Young, who was a guest on the show years ago. When I first heard him describe it, it was one of those ideas that changed how I see things.
It goes like this: suffering = pain x resistance.
Think of suffering as the total amount of ugh in any given situation: the combined mental, physical, and emotional weight of the thing.
Pain is the underlying condition. In this case, it’s the restless legs. The discomfort. The lost sleep. The tiredness I feel the next day.
Resistance is everything else, all the mental and emotional patterns we stack on top of the core experience. It’s THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING. WHY ME? It’s my brain at 3 a.m. saying this is bad, this is really bad, spinning out about Alzheimer’s and how I’ll possibly keep doing my job if I can’t sleep.
Imagine pain and resistance each sit on a scale of 1 to 10. Say my pain, the actual sensation, is at a 4. And my resistance is at a 5. That’s 4 × 5 = 20 units of suffering.
But if I can bring my resistance down from a 5 to a 3? Now it’s 4 × 3 = 12. I’ve cut my suffering by almost half, and I never changed the thing causing it. Which is great news, because most of the time, we can’t.
Now, over the next couple of weeks, I want to explore the different forms this resistance takes and how to turn it down. But not today.
Try this: Today, all I want you to do is notice. The next time something difficult shows up: a bad night, a hard conversation, a piece of news that lands wrong. See if you can catch the moment your mind starts stacking stories on top of it. You don’t have to stop it. Just watch yourself do it.
See the resistance. We’ll get to turning it down soon enough.
Reflect on this: What’s something hard in your life right now where the pain is real, but a lot of the suffering is coming from the stories you’re telling yourself about it?
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