David R. MacIver's Blog

How to rest

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-rest.

Here’s another single-spell post.

(if you’re new, I use “spell” to mean something like “procedure”. There’s no “real” magic here)

People (it me, I’m people) are remarkably bad at resting, and a lot of things we end up doing to rest are really more dissociative rather than restorative. I think it’s worth putting some effort into fixing that, and I’ve got a couple of spells that are… tactically good for this - I don’t necessarily feel like they address the broader problem, but they do give me restorative ways of resting in response to particular problems.

This is the spell I use to recover when I’m very tired and failing to function as a result, but am unable or don’t want to have a nap. It’s especially useful for periods where I would ideally be asleep (e.g. insomnia or waking up too early), and thanks to working from home I also sometimes do it during the workday if I find myself staring at the computer ineffectively.

Isolation Rest

  1. Close the blinds / curtains / etc and turn off the lights so it’s darkish in your room.

  2. Put on some sound cancelling headphones, connected to either your phone or your laptop. I find big over-ear headphones much better for this than earbuds, but earbuds will do if that’s all you’ve got.

  3. Play this youtube video through them. 

1.  You could try other sound tracks, but for whatever reason this one in
    particular works *very* well for me in a way not many other things do.
    It's almost certainly partly that this is the one that I've been using
    for a while so I've got a strong association with it, but I think it's
    also well suited to the task without the familiarity.

2.  My second best choice would be [thunderstorm
    noises](https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/stormSoundGenerator.php) or
    some similar track from from [mynoise.net](https://mynoise.net/).

3.  Don't use actually good music. Definitely don't use an
    audiobook.[^2]

  1. Put on a 45 minute timer. You can do shorter if you don’t have time for 45 minutes, you can do longer if you want, but if you’re going past an hour probably you want something that results in an actual nap.

  2. Put on a sleep mask.

  3. Lie back on your bed and close your eyes and listen to the music until the timer goes off.

Here are some additional things that help:

Debugging notes

I sometimes have a weird amount of resistance to doing this. Here are some things that help:

Some problems that can come up during the protocol:

-   Looking for any parts of your body that feel tense and stretching them
    out.

-   Paying attention to the sound track.

-   A couple of [breath holding attention
    locks](https://drmaciver.substack.com/i/145467600/breath-holding-attention-lock)

-   Doing some box breathing (breath in, hold your breath, breath out, hold
    your breath. Keep the same count for each of the four steps. A slow
    count of 4 is traditional, though I usually do longer than that and try
    to slow it down as far as I can manage)

-   Finding something to think about to occupy your mind. e.g. a problem to
    solve, a question about something you've been doing recently, etc.

-   Pay attention to any "light behind your eyes" / hypnagogic visual
    effects.

One of the best use cases for this is if I wake up early enough that it’s too early for me to want to get up, but late enough that I’m not going to manage a full REM cycle before I have to get up unless I get right back to sleep right now. Similarly, if I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep.

When this happens I use this as a sleep substitute that is allowed to turn into sleep if I want it to, and basically perform the spell without a timer (though I’ll likely have an alarm going off at some point).

This is one of my more detailed spells, and it’s still very much a work in progress. In particular I would like better tools for getting me to use it more reliably, and I would like to make it more reliably effective. Sometimes I come out of this feeling amazingly restored, while sometimes it helps a bit but doesn’t really feel that worth it.

Unfortunately these two are a bit in tension, because I suspect making it more effective is going to increase the complexity and effort of it, which will make it harder to do as reliably. I think the solution is just some mix of gentle on ramp and optional steps: If there’s something I can do to make it more effective, I’m allowed to do that or not do that, at whatever point in the process I feel ready to.

Spell development: Hypnagogia

One interesting thing about this spell is that it’s really good at producing hypnagogic imagery. When everything lines up perfectly, I get into an extremely relaxed dozing state where my brain just generates random visuals. This is really neat, as I don’t normally have much facility to visualise at all.

The hypnagogia seems to go hand in hand with this being extremely effective, which makes it a nice feedback loop to work on. This makes sense to me, because as far as I can tell the thing that makes it effective is relaxing into a light partial doze, which is where the hypnagogia happens.

I haven’t figured out how to produce this effect super reliably (it seems dependent on my ability to relax), but the best entry point I’ve got so far seems to be a couple of breath holds followed by some box breathing.

My guess is that this is almost but not quite the right entry point, and that there’s some simple breathwork approach that triggers it, but I haven’t quite reliably figured it out yet. I need to do some more experimentation here.

I recently read James Nestor’s book “Breath”, which I thought was excellent (I doubt many of the specific claims in the book, but I still think is excellent) and need to have a bit of a run through of the various well-explained breathwork exercises he has in the appendix.

My current guess is that Tummo breathing is probably a pretty good entry point, which he describes as follows:

  • Find a quiet place and lie flat on your back with a pillow under the head. Relax the shoulders, chest, legs.

  • Take 30 very deep, very fast breaths into the pit of the stomach and let it back out. If possible, breathe through the nose; if the nose feels obstructed, try pursed lips. The movement of each inhalation should look like a wave, filling up in the stomach and softly moving up through the lungs. Exhales follow the same movement, first emptying the stomach then the chest as air pours through the nose or pursed lips of the mouth.

  • At the end of 30 breaths, exhale to the “natural conclusion,” leaving about a quarter of the air in the lungs. Hold that breath for as long as possible.

  • Once you’ve reached your absolute breathhold limit, take one huge inhale and hold it another 15 seconds. Very gently, move that fresh breath around the chest and to the shoulders, then exhale and start the heavy breathing again.

  • Repeat the entire pattern at least three times.

Or, if you prefer, here’s Wim Hof taking you through it.

I haven’t tried exactly this, and if this works then there’s something I’m not understanding about the mechanism behind the hypnagogia, because allegedly this is a method for activating your sympathetic nervous system (so should get you worked up rather than relaxed). On the other hand, it’s extremely similar to both the thing I have that almost works (I don’t breath heavily for as long beforehand mainly), and is effectively a mini version of Holotropic Breathwork, which is known to produce visual hallucinations, so I don’t know.

Anyway, this is all an unvalidated hunch, so possibly this bit is completely wrong, I’m just pointing in a direction where clearly More Research Is Needed.