To Sleep, Perchance to Heal

How I'm seeking to solve my sleep deficiency.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

In my post about my cancer diagnosis, published 18 days ago, I wrote:

“I choose to see this ordeal as a trial and this trial as a blessing. It has pushed me to get my act together in many ways: instilling in me greater intentionality and discipline with regard to my diet (I’m finally going keto, which a growing number of doctors say is powerful against cancer), exercise, family, work, and faith. I hope and pray that such improvement will continue, making me a better father, husband, son, brother, colleague, friend, and steward of my body and soul. I hope and pray that such character growth will help me conquer the very disease that prompted it. And in any case, I am grateful for the peace that following God’s ways more closely has given me.”

Since then, I have continued to make strides on those self-improvement fronts, and that has further provided me with inner peace, which in turn has helped me make progress on one issue I didn’t mention: my sleep.

For years I’ve struggled to get more than 4-6 hours of sleep a night. I believe my chronic sleep deprivation was one major factor in my body being unable to prevent my cancer from emerging. (See Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker on this connection.) And I regard solving my sleep problem as a crucial milestone in my quest to beat cancer and get healthy. Now that it’s a matter of life and death, I am finally getting serious about resolving this issue once and for all.

I am firmly set against any pharmaceutical “fixes” for my sleep struggles, but I am all for using food and natural supplements to address any biochemical imbalances that are contributing to the problem. On the hypothesis that magnesium deficiency may be one such imbalance, I have been taking magnesium lysinate glycinate before bed every night.

I have also worked on improving my “sleep hygiene,” for example by limiting my screen time in the evenings and spending quality time with my family instead.

A major impediment to sleep for me is worry. I often wake up in the middle of the night and cannot return to sleep because I cannot stop thinking about various loose ends in my life. My chief defenses against worry have been:

1. Jesus’s teachings on worry in the Sermon on the Mount

2. Dale Carnegie’s advice in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

3. David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) productivity methodology.

GTD can get your loose ends off your mind by getting them into an external system that you can use to reliably transform vague worries and ideas into concrete projects and actions. Your mind is able to let go of your loose ends, because it trusts your future self to use your system to handle them in due time. (For more on this, see my Medium posts “How Using an In-Tray Can Tame Your Anxieties,” “Getting Things Done… and Off Your Mind,” and “The Allen Algorithm: GTD in a Nutshell.”)

But that only happens if the system and your habits of using it are fully implemented. And, even though I’ve been using GTD techniques for a very long time, my implementation of it has rarely been watertight enough to get the full psychological benefit of it: to attain the “mind like water” state that David Allen talks about. So that’s another thing I’m trying to get more serious about fixing in order to fix my sleep.

I also purchased a subscription to and started using Abide, Christian guided meditation app with an extensive library soothing and spiritually uplifting audio tracks designed to aid sleep.

And as I mentioned above, my overall efforts to more closely walk with God and become a better steward of my spirit, mind, and body has helped improve my peace in mind, and thus my sleep.

For a long period after my hospitalization, I was pretty consistently only getting four hours of sleep a night. But as I adopted the above measures, I have managed to slowly but steadily extend that. The night before last night, I got a total of seven hours of sleep.

Last night, however, I was back to only four hours again, so I still have some work to do and gaps to fill. But I feel like I’m on the right track and I’ll keep experimenting until I regularly get a full night’s sleep.

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.

Ecclesiastes 5:12 KJV