Read the Transcript:

Hello and welcome to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura.

Today, we're going to discuss an important topic that I know many of us have struggled with at some time or another – perhaps you’re struggling with it now. And that is better sleep and recovery from stress – and, how to leverage your Human Design to improve them.

We can’t understate the importance of sleep. So many things that happen when we sleep. Our liver detoxifies itself and gets rid of toxins and excess hormones, our brain forms memories, our muscles repair and grow, just to name a few. And when we don’t sleep, those things don’t happen.

As has been well-documented on this show, I’ve had a long, challenging and complicated relationship with sleep and body awareness, which has been directly tied to my resilience and my ability to handle, manage and recover from stress.

These sleep challenges are ultimately what led me to Human Design.

After taking melatonin, magnesium, diffusing lavender essential oils, and other commonly recommended sleep aids, including prescriptions, over the course of 20-some odd years, I finally – finally – go to the point of realizing that there’s something deeper going on that I need to address that’s preventing me from resting, sleeping and doing both those things well.

This realization started just about five years ago, leading up to the pandemic. Then, when the pandemic hit, I finally came to the realization that I needed to look deeper into what was preventing me from resting and from sleeping well.

So, you know that Seinfeld episode where Kramer talks about his natural internal alarm clock? That's what I have – no matter what time I go to bed or how tired I am, I will always wake up super early – no alarm clock needed.

I got really obsessed with sleep during the years I was training for marathons because I ran in the mornings, and for me to wake up feeling rested, refreshed, and rejuvenated, I had to get a good night's sleep.

Because my natural alarm clock went off automatically at 5 am (on a good day), I reversed engineered what time that meant I needed to be asleep. If my goal was to get seven to eight hours of sleep, then I needed to be asleep, lights out between 9-10 pm, at the latest.

That meant that I had to start the process of winding down and letting my body know that it would soon be time for sleep around 8 pm. Well, during the summer, it’s still light out at that time, so there were challenges with this. But I tried hard to be faithful about sticking to this as realistically as possible – in fact, I still do.

But despite it all, I still wasn’t getting a lot of sleep, and what sleep I was getting wasn’t always quality sleep.

So, I took a step back to look at the big picture and ask, “What is preventing me from sleeping well? What is going on here?” I had to dig deeper, peel back more layers and eventually acknowledged that there were issues that supplements and essential oils weren’t going to fix.

This is what ultimately led me to Human Design.

As I've previously shared, Human Design was first introduced to me in 2018, but it wasn't the right time – I wasn’t ready for it yet.

But fast-forward two years, as I was going through this realization that there were deeper things that I needed to address, that’s when Human Design came back into my radar. And it was during the pandemic when the whole world shut down and we were only left with our thoughts.

In a sense, I was gifted that time and space, but also kind of forced to face those things.

And Human Design was a conduit that really helped me do that. It gave me language and context to understand myself better and build my self-awareness so I could identify and acknowledge those things about myself that I needed to address.

It also gave me the permission to accept parts of myself that I always knew were there but never allowed myself to explore because of how the world had conditioned me. So, in a way, my challenges with sleep and stress recovery are what ultimately brought me to Human Design.

A bit of a tangent there so let’s get back to the topic at hand. If all of these physiological processes happen when we sleep, how does it impact our energy?

We know that a challenging day or a particularly hard workout can leave us exhausted. Logically speaking, it would make sense if translated into a solid night’s sleep. But speaking from personal experience, that’s not always the case because I spent years running 40+ miles a week while also cross-training and I had more nights of poor sleep than restful ones.

But think about the nights that we can’t sleep because our emotions are array, or we have pent-up energy, we’re anxious and have too much going on in our minds. You know what those things are signs of? Not living in alignment with our energetic selves. It’s signs of inefficient use of energy meaning that because we’re out of alignment with our energetic selves, we’ve utilizing more energy than necessary and it takes its toll and causes tension, agitation and disrupts everything – including our ability to sleep, rest, and recover.

So, going back to my challenge with sleep, I was doing all the sensical things that one would do when needing sleep support, but they weren’t working. And that mindset clicks of having to go deeper led me to examine how disconnected I was to myself and a lack of awareness and acceptance of who I am and how I intrinsically operated. And that’s where Human Design came in.

Each Human Design Type has its own way of optimizing sleep.

Generators and Manifesting Generators have their Sacral Centers defined, meaning they not only have a lot of lifeforce energy – the energy that sustains life, but they also generate it. So, it’s important for them to use all of that Sacral energy every single day – get it all out, so they can go to sleep at the end of the day physically spent.

Unused energy can look like tossing and turning all night long. Being restless, unsettled because they still have that buzzing energy in them waiting to be expelled.

Now, the common belief is that Projectors need a lot of rest, but the truth is, the non-Sacrals – the Types who have the Sacral Undefined – Projectors, Manifestors and Reflectors all need to prioritize rest. Because with the Sacral undefined, the lifeforce energy comes and goes – its not consistently available for them to “borrow”, absorb and amplify.

So, its critical for non-Sacrals – Projectors, Manifestors and Reflectors to carve out space and establish boundaries to protect your rest time. And I really want to emphasize the importance of this for Reflectors. With completely open designs, you’re extra sensitive to being influenced by external energy.

Now, how you go about carving our space, prioritizing and establishing boundaries will look different for each person, depending on the individual’s unique design.

Since we talked about the Sacral Center, let’s also talk about two other energy centers – the Root and Solar Plexus centers. I’ve done a number of episodes on these centers which I’ll link to in the show notes that you’ll find at www.livefablife.com/297 for Episode 297.

What’s important to make note of is that the Sacral, Root and Solar Plexus Centers are three of the four motor centers (the fourth being the Heart Center). Motor Centers are where energy is created; whether you have these centers defined or undefined, how yours is designed can give you insight on how stress affects you and how aligning with it can better optimize your sleep.

For example, along with the Head Center, the Root Center is a pressure center. If you have it defined, you work well under pressure. If it’s undefined in your design, then you don't handle pressure well. The Root Center is embodied by the adrenal glands which is where stress hormones are produced and released. Can you see why alignment with this center can be key in how you manage stress?

Now, I also want to point out that you can have the Root Center defined and work well under pressure but have the Sacral Center undefined. So, while you may have been driven and calm under pressure, you don’t have consistent access to the lifeforce energy to sustain it without taking rest breaks.

The Solar Plexus Center is the center of your emotional energy. If your Solar Plexus Center is defined, you experience emotions intensely, often in emotional waves. So, understanding how you experience these ways is key to knowing how to best work with this energy. I covered emotional waves in Episode 295.

And if you have an Undefined Solar Plexus, be cognizant of when you’re absorbing external emotional energy.

But the point I want to make is that we all know how exhausting and depleting it feels to come down from a stressful, emotionally charged situation. And that stress and those emotions can have a direct impact on your quality of sleep and your ability to rest well.

So, it's important to understand the centers in your design, how they’re defined or undefined, so you know how to align with your energy.

For deeper insight, look at the configuration of your energy centers – what are the active gates? If you have a center defined, what other center does it connect to? What channels do you have? Because that will tell you how the energy of the center is meant to be expressed and utilized.

Now, I always try to give you practical tips on what you can do with the information we’ve discussed.

First, if you aren't sleeping well, and/or, if stress is problematic for you, the first step is to acknowledge it. Sometimes we’re going through the motions or aren’t willing to admit its more of a problem than you care to admit. But if these are struggles that are chronic, happening all the time, they must be acknowledged.

And once you acknowledge the problem, prioritize making a plan to address it.

There's a wildly popular Instagram account that I follow called @mytherapistsays. You may follow it too.

If you’re not familiar with it, it posts memes on being tired, stressed, exhausted and making poor life choices as a result of it. And it has a following of millions of people because we can all relate to it! It puts humor to our struggles.

But the reality is, if you don't want to live like that anymore, you need to prioritize it. If you want to sleep better, then you need to make sleep a priority. If you want relief from stress, then prioritize how you manage it, or even better, what can you do to reduce it, however that may look like for you. Because while you can acknowledge it, if you don’t do something about it, things won’t change.

When it comes to sleep, it's important to develop good sleep hygiene. I’m not a parent, but I have friends who are, and just like they’ve had to sleep train their babies, if you are sleep-challenged and haven’t prioritized it, then you need to sleep train yourself.

For me, that looked like understanding that I have a natural alarm clock and wake up at the same time every day, which means that I have to reverse engineer that. If I feel best when I get 7+ hours of sleep a night, then I need to go to bed early enough so that there’s even a possibility for that to happen.

And if my bedtime routine to wind down takes 45-min to an hour, that means I need to start getting ready for bed, honestly, between 8:30 – 9 pm. This is much easier to do during the Fall and Winter, more challenging in the Spring and Summer when the sun hasn’t set yet, but this is one way that I can sleep-train myself to practice better sleep hygiene.

Another practical application is to identify boundaries to set, based on the definitions of your energy centers.

For me, I ask myself, “what can I do to calm my nervous system before bed?” This looks like turning off my devices, including the television. It looks like dimming the lights in my home – no overhead lights blazing. This is how I train my body to follow circadian rhythms. The dimming of lights is a signal to my body that it's time to start winding down and get ready for sleep.

If you’re a Generator or Manifesting Generator with a Defined Sacral Center, you need to physically exert yourself to get all the energy out. This might look like evening workouts so your sleep isn’t disrupted by restlessness from unused energy.

But the bottom line is that all of these things require that you be tuned in to your natural patterns – what’s your current lifestyle and daily habits, how your energy works, and then how to bridge gaps between them.

One thing that's helped me develop awareness around this is my Oura ring. It’s a sleep monitoring device that you wear as a ring. But it does more than just sleep monitoring.

It tracks all of my data, from heart rate to body temperature - all of these things that factor into how my body recovers from stress. This includes recovery from workouts, quality of sleep – not just how long I slept, and recovery from everyday life – meaning, how resilient am I today?

I’ve been using the Oura Ring for four years now, so it knows me. It’s collected a lot of data on me. I wish I’d had this when I was endurance training to help me have body awareness and contextualize when I recovered.

The biggest impact it’s on my sleep is giving me a window of what time bedtime should be every evening. It varies, depending on all the data it collects throughout the day and how I’ve been trending.

Having had this insight for the past four years, I can confidently say that when I sleep – actually not, not just in bed reading a book or scrolling on my iPad – during that recommended window, that is when I get the best sleep.

It may not be 7+ hours, but the quality of my sleep – the amount of REM and deep sleep I get, is significantly better. I wake up feeling better – more energized, with mental clarity and increased resilience.

Ultimately, it’s helped me improve my relationship with myself, building body awareness in what feels optimal and what doesn’t. In turn that’s also opened the doors to increase self-awareness in other areas – by having the mental and emotional capacity to build better boundaries, be more efficient and productive in my day-to-day responsibilities, communicate more effectively, aligning myself to my Human Design.

It all works together - when you sleep better, you can handle stress better, and you become resilient, with confidence in yourself to trust your decision-making especially with the things that impact the quality of your life every single day.

If you struggle with managing and recovering from stress and sleep continues to be problematic, and you’re ready to take a deeper look, start peeling back the layers and continually ask “why.”

Why can’t I sleep? And when you have an answer, keep asking. Why?”

I’m curious as to what you discover through this exercise. Come on over and fill me in – you can leave a comment on the show notes which you’ll find at www.livefablife.om/297 for Episode 297 or find me on Instagram at @livefablifewithnaomi.

There's always a lot of interesting discussions around sleep and stress, so I look forward to hearing from you.

And with that, I wish you a week of optimal recovery and lots of nights of blissful sleep, and I'll see you right back here again next time. Bye for now!