Good Night

Introduction: Let's Go to Bed

Why is a good night’s rest so elusive for so many?
     Problems with sleep often arise from some form of stress. Most of us experience stress on a daily basis in some area of our lives: work, family, relationships, health, bills, and more. But our evolving lifestyles have increased our daily dose of stress to sometimes unmanageable levels. Many of us are working more than ever and spending more time indoors, where we stare at screens and scroll through various news and social media platforms for hours on end. It’s no wonder so many of us struggle with sleep!
     Sleeplessness is rarely an isolated issue, though. If you’re having a hard time going to bed and staying asleep, your body and mind are likely experiencing other issues, including indigestion, anxiety, and aches and pains. This is your body’s way of saying, “Help! I’m overstressed and need a break!” But the only way to fully recharge and rebuild energy is to sleep. If you’re incapable of achieving deep, restful sleep, the sleep-stress cycle continues until you either burn out or check out.
     The good news is that there are plenty of things you can do to get more rest, especially if you adopt a holistic approach to solving your sleep issues. This book provides plenty of tips and tricks to achieve deep and restful sleep, which will give you more energy to face the day, focus, process information, and manage your stress. We know that combing through the massive amounts of sleep research available today is already enough to make you tired, so we’ve done that hard work for you. You don’t need to be a practitioner of Ayurveda to follow our tips—we think you’ll find that much of our advice is intuitive, logical, and easy to apply. However, it helps to understand that we see sleep as a time to connect to a universal power source, which allows you to mentally process all the experiences of your day and live with a fresh and open mind. That universal power source allows you to be attuned not only to yourself but to the rest of the world.
     We recommend that you spend at least a week absorbing the information in this book, following the journal prompts, and tracking your sleep without making any adjustments. After that, we recommend implementing whichever of our practices, rituals, and techniques make sense for you and tracking your progress in the twenty-one day tracker at the end of this book. This will give you insight into how your sleep is impacted by your lifestyle choices and stress levels so you can make adjustments along the way and afterward.
     A final note: throughout this book, we will refer to five elements—earth, water, fire, wind, and space. In Ayurveda, these elements carry specific inherent qualities:

* Qualities of earth: heaviness and slowness
* Qualities of water: flowing and softness
* Qualities of fire: heat and transformation
* Qualities of wind: movement and dryness
* Qualities of space: subtleness and lightness

Without further ado, let’s get into bed.