The quality of your life depends on the quality of your mind.

To some extent, we all know this. If you want more out of life — taking care of your mind isn’t really optional.

Yet people ignore the single most important habit for your mind — Sleep.

Most people think they get a good amount of sleep — but they still stay up late, drink caffeine like there’s no tomorrow & get on their phones 1 minute before bed.

Most people live life disconnected from reality, Because…

The true reason we need to sleep is to maintain order in consciousness.

Order in consciousness has a nifty function — it’s how you create an enjoyable and meaningful life (as you’ll come to find).

Sleep deprivation on the other hand — creates conscious chaos (or psychic entropy). It stands in the way of an enjoyable life because it disorders the mind.

The best way I’ve found to describe this chaos is “being disconnected from reality”.

It’s looking at the most beautiful scenery but not really being there.

It’s having a conversation with a friend all the while being deep inside useless thought. 

You can’t appreciate the world because you feel like you’re not a part of it. It’s an illusion — but it’s created by not sleeping properly.

When you’re disconnected, when you’re detached from the world — your goals become foggy. As a result, life becomes dull, boring and unfulfilling. 

Living in conscious chaos (being disconnected from reality) makes everything suck.

It’s the enemy of an enjoyable life because it inhibits the one thing required to achieve it — focus.

The people who master their sleep on the other hand — are the ones who lay the foundation for an enjoyable and meaningful life.

Sleep doesn’t solve all your problems — but the lack of sleep creates almost all of them.

With a foundation of perfect sleep you can actually feel like a part of reality — you can actually shape your own future (because you’re not stuck in a mental civil war).

This is why I’m convinced that sleep deprivation is the single biggest reason for life dissatisfaction.

Quality sleep is the prerequisite for a high quality mind — and a high quality mind is the prerequisite for a high quality life.

“The future belongs to those who learn to keep the peace inside their heads when there is war outside. “

If you want more out of life — lay the foundation for a high quality mind.

If you want more out of life — learn to fucking sleep.

Preventing Mental Civil War (Psychic entropy)

To understand the true value of sleep – you have to know why this war happens.

To go even broader:

You have to understand the connection between consciousness and life (this will all make sense in a moment).

As with everything in life – if you don’t see the bigger picture, you won’t be consistent with the pixels that make it up (the tools, habits and behaviors).

For example, imagine riding a bike to your friend's house:

If you only knew the micro-actions (peddling, steering, balancing) and not the bigger picture (meeting your friend) – you would stop in the middle of the road asking yourself: 

“Why the f am I doing this?”

This is the problem with the human mind – it’s lazy. People want the step-by-step, the 5 habits or the 7 hacks. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, you need actionable advice to actually do something.

But if you don’t understand the bigger picture – you’ll always fall off your goals because you can’t see the importance of the small steps to get there (you don’t know WHY you’re taking them).

So before we get to the actionable parts of this letter… 

Let’s understand the bigger picture.

The 2 Players Of Your Mental Civil War

Your mind is always moving towards chaos. 

When there isn’t order in consciousness – psychic entropy ensues.

Entropy is chaos. Psychic entropy is chaos in consciousness. It’s when you have no idea of what you should do and even if you did, you have no clue how to do it.

Psychic entropy is the source of all pain, the enemy of flow and therefore – the enemy of an enjoyable life.

It is mental civil war.

Let’s re-frame reality from the common perspective:

Pain exists only in consciousness.

This is true even with physical pain. When you’re physically hurt – pain signals disturb your attention which causes psychic entropy — that’s why it’s painful. 

If it didn’t disturb consciousness – it wouldn’t be painful. Think of marathon runners running on broken bones. Their consciousness remains ordered and so pain isn’t an issue.

To put it simply, psychic entropy is pain. 

Whether it be physical, emotional or mental.

This is what happens when you feel disconnected from reality. Your brain is filled with psychic entropy. 

This is the single biggest problem with sleep deprivation. Because sleep deprivation maintains psychic entropy.

If you’re not fully sleeping (and reordering your mind) you are living a life in constant psychic entropy.

In other words: YOU ARE LIVING IN PAIN.

Wakefulness creates psychic entropy.

The longer you’re awake – the worse it gets. This is why sleep deprivation maintains psychic entropy – you’re not allowing your mind to reorder itself and recover from wakefulness.

This happens because of 2 reasons:

1. The Law Of Entropy

“Any spontaneously occurring process will always lead to an escalation in the entropy (S) of the universe.” – 2nd law of thermodynamics

In other words:

The universe moves towards entropy (chaos).

This. Includes. Your. Mind.

Your mental civil war will continue to get louder and louder the longer you’re awake. 

To visualize this – imagine what would happen if you stopped cleaning your room:

First, dust would start to collect. But as time went on – furniture would fall apart – animals would move in and finally (on a long enough time-scale) – nature would break down your entire house and turn it into itself.

The universe moves towards entropy (and your mind isn’t an exception).

1. Attention Is A Limited Resource

Attention is your most precious resource.

It’s what allows you to create flow, prevent psychic entropy and create an enjoyable existence.

But psychic entropy can’t be prevented – only delayed.

As you’re awake, you’re constantly taking in information that your mind has to structure. But your mind has a limit.

If your brain were to take in all information at once – it would overload and quite literally explode.

To keep this from happening – your attention blocks things out. 

“Focus isn’t about saying yes. Focus is about saying no.” - Steve Jobs

Focus isn’t choosing one thing to direct all your psychic energy towards – it’s about ignoring everything else.

But here’s the thing – attention breaks down the longer you’re awake. 

A Pinch Of Science

Being awake creates chemical waste products – adenosine being the most common.

The more adenosine that’s in your body and brain – the less functional you become. The less you can use your mind (this includes your attention). The more adenosine in your system — the more your drive for sleep increases.

We’ll dive into the neuroscience of this in a future letter. But for now – this is what you need to know.

To visualize this, think of your mind as a computer: 

The longer it’s on, the warmer it gets. But in this case, the only way to cool it down is to shut it down for a while (so you can use it again). Just as the only way to be awake is to be asleep. 

Attention is your RAM (your short term memory), the more tabs you open up (thoughts & tasks), the more psychic entropy you create (chaos in consciousness).

You can delay the overheating of the computer (psychic entropy) by only having one tab open, but eventually the computer needs to cool down.

In exactly the same way, when your attention breaks down, you can’t delay psychic entropy any longer. Instead, you need a declaration of mental independence.

You need to sleep.

Let’s tie the knot on this mess of a section.

The quality of your life is determined by the degree of which your consciousness is ordered (the more flow, the better).

But as long as you’re awake – your mind moves towards psychic entropy (or mental civil war).

Meaning: The enemy of a meaningful and enjoyable life is wakefulness itself.

To be able to handle the extremely taxing state of wakefulness (and create an enjoyable existence) – we need a reset process.

At some point – we have to clean our mental room. 

At some point – we have to sleep.

The Psychic Reset (Putting Order To Chaos)

You can’t prevent psychic entropy – you can only delay it.

You can do this by straining your attention, using stimulants or taking meditation breaks.

But there is only 1 way to reverse it. There is only one way to structure the mess being awake is creating — sleep.

Sleep is the reset process of your mind.

It structures the chaos your brain has collected through the day and allows you to experience reality again the next.

It takes all the chaotic threads of information inside your head, cuts, trims and organizes them into a pattern that makes sense. It makes sense of the world with the information you’ve collected. 

Sleep is also a forgetting process. 

Your mind has a finite amount of space. 

To not overload with useless information – your brain has to forget a lot of things.

It cuts out unnecessary threads of information such as:

• Insignificant details

• Routine activities (habits)

• Transient emotion (short bursts of emotion)

When you sleep, your mind takes the information it deems important and stores it in the long term memory and erases EVERYTHING from the short term memory. This way, your short term memory is ready to store new information the next day.

The process of forgetting is something beautifully installed in all our psyches. 

For example:

• How is it that, every morning, you can enjoy the same cup of coffee as the day before?

• How is it that every day, you can enjoy the view of virtually the same sunset?

Because, every night – you forget how amazing the world is.

Do you remember when you were a child, and everything was just so wonderful? The colors, the trees and every little insect – all managed to amaze you.

As a child – everything was completely new. You hadn’t seen anything like it before – and so everything was just fantastic.

And so it is with sleep. It allows you to forget, so that you can experience life again.

You can even look at sleep as death and rebirth. You go to bed one person and you awake another.

Now, imagine never getting this full reset.

You will slowly drift into a state of being not quite awake but not quite asleep. Motivation and the joy of life, suddenly becoming a fantasy. Days will turn gray as they all blend together. Life will disappear in front of your eyes,

This is the nature of being disconnected from reality – it’s effectively how you waste your life.

Because you’re never fully living – you’re stuck inside your head watching your life go by without you.

Sleep isn’t just “necessary” or simply “good for you”. 

Sleep is how you experience life.

If you’re not getting high quality sleep – you’re not living.

Of course this is getting pretty philosophical, but humans understand things by seeing the bigger picture – not the small details. We don’t see one oxygen combined with two hydrogen — we see water.

Getting back to more practical matters – let’s dive into how sleep reverses psychic entropy and reorders the mind.

Dreams are ordered chaos 

We don’t know why we dream.

We have all sorts of theories as to why – the Freudians and the Jungians for example, they know why we dream.

But no one really knows why.

What we do know however, are the benefits of dreaming and the consequences of not.

A few benefits of dreaming:

• Creativity

• Emotional stability

• Better mental health

You can think of dreaming as your brain taking all the threads of information created by wakefulness and sorting them out. 

But while your mind is reordering and trimming the threads, an even greater mess is created. The threads go everywhere, and cut off pieces of information appear all over the place. 

But when it’s done, your mind is ordered, structured and ready for another bout of wakefulness.

To visualize this, think of someone cleaning their entire house.

They bring out all sorts of nonsense. Books, useless furniture, rugs and all kinds of things. This creates an even bigger mess than it originally was – the entire house is now cluttered! 

But the person continues organizing, cleaning and throwing away things. And when she is done, the house feels completely new.

Look at dreams as a form of ordered chaos.

They create a mess to clean a mess.

How To Reconnect Yourself To Reality (Sleep Is A Game)

Sleep is something very mysterious.

It’s not something you do – it’s something that happens to you.

That’s why it’s called “falling” asleep.

In exactly the same way that you cannot make yourself fall – you cannot make yourself fall asleep.

But there are things you can do to increase the chances. And there are things you can do to make sleep almost impossible.

But you can never tip the scale all the way. For example, I know people who can drink 2 espressos one minute and fall asleep the next.

And I know from personal experience that I can optimize my entire day for my nightly blunder, and still lay wide awake for hours.

Having that said – let’s go over how you increase your chances.

Playing the game of sleep (the 8 inner gates)

Sleep is difficult.

To get a perfect night’s sleep — you need to optimize your entire day from the moment you wake up.

Ironically, there is a lot of trouble and energy that goes into rest.

But why is sleep something that’s so damn difficult?

The short answer is modernity.

We’ve evolved to follow a specific pattern of nature. The sun, meal timing, stress, physical activity and so on… 

Back in the really old days, our environment hit every cue for a great night’s sleep. Today it’s the opposite.

That’s why it’s become so difficult to put your head on a pillow and drift off.

You need to know what acts as enemies to your sleep. You need a set of rules to navigate the modern landscape that seems to be hellbent on destroying your sleep.

If you don’t learn the obstacles – you’ll fall into the routine modernity has set up for you – and you’ll live a life in permanent mental chaos. 

You won’t be able to give the world what only you can give it, you won’t be able to live a meaningful and enjoyable life. This connects to every part of life.

You can’t ignore the obstacles to your life – you need to open your eyes.

I want you to view these 8 steps as a series of gates. Each one leading you closer to the final destination – sleep.

For each step you unlock a new gate.

Every new gate builds on the last and gets more complex. For example, you can’t really unlock the third gate if you’re stuck at the first one. 

Even though each gate works individually – they multiply and build on each other.

The 8th gate is very unconventional (because no one talks about it) – but it’s the MOST important of them all. Without it, you’ll just lay awake until morning.

The 8th gate is the final step. You do it every night whether you’re aware of it or not. But it is ALWAYS required. All the previous gates are simply improving your chances – the 8th gate seals the outcome.

It’s why people with 1000 mg of caffeine in their systems can still fall asleep like newborns.

You can ignore all gates except this one and still fall asleep (that’s how powerful it is).

But at this point – you’ve probably understood the value of getting high quality sleep and the hell that comes with it if you don’t

The 7 first gates don't just increase your chances – they increase the quality.

Your dreams become stronger, your body recovers like crazy and your mind restructures itself for high performance.

If you care about sleep – make these gates rules for life.

If you care about being connected to reality – master the 8 inner gates.

1. Gate 1: Caffeine 

I have a love-hate relationship with caffeine.

On the one hand It’s something nice and warm that boosts mood, productivity and performance.

But it’s also something that holds your personality hostage, messes with your brain and destroys your sleep. It’s a thin line to walk (and deserves a letter of its own).

But why is caffeine the first inner gate to sleep?

To put it simply: You CAN’T sleep with caffeine in your system. Even if you think you can – your body doesn’t.

This happens because caffeine blocks your adenosine receptors. Your adenosine receptors detect the adenosine in your system and send signals to your brain telling you you’re tired.

Essentially, caffeine blocks tiredness.

It doesn’t take away the negative side effects of being awake – it hides them.

It keeps you running on fumes and taxing your body to the point of no return. 

How caffeine actually affects your sleep is not entirely understood. All we know is that it disrupts dream sleep and messes with your biological clock.

But the biggest reason caffeine is the first gate is that it makes it next to impossible to fall asleep.

Because your brain doesn’t know it’s tired.

I’m sure you’ve experienced a feeling like this (at least unconsciously):

Your entire body and mind are falling apart but your mind is still working on overdrive and alert. You live in a state of stress because your body and mind wants to rest but the caffeine won’t let it.

I won’t tell you to quit caffeine altogether – but you need to know how to use it. 

Here’s how:

Caffeine Just Won’t Die

Caffeine has a quarter life of 12 hours.

If you drink a cup of coffee at 10 am (200mg) you’ll still have a quarter (50mg) in your system when you go to bed at 10 pm.

This will disrupt your sleep.

50mg is probably the limit for how much caffeine can be in your system before you hit the hay.

The first rule of caffeine is: Drink it before 10 am.

This brings us to the next point…

No matter how early you drink it – caffeine will mess with your sleep.

The only way to make sure it doesn’t – is to cut it out.

If you’re like me (and most people) the idea of caffeine fasting makes your cringe.

It’s extremely addicting because of how it makes you feel by raising energy, motivation and focus.

But the negatives outweigh the positives.

Another point is that your body adapts to it…

To cope with the clogged adenosine receptors – the brain creates more.

What this means to you: 

1. You’ll feel tired all the time because you’re picking up every little piece of adenosine.

1. You’ll constantly need more caffeine to maintain your energy, motivation and alertness.

At some point you’re just destroying your sleep (and life) by downing 8 cups of coffee a day just to feel normal.

The solution to this is simple – caffeine fasting.

This will desensitize your brain to caffeine (one cup of coffee will give you superpowers). It will taste so much better, give you much more energy and not destroy your sleep.

The second rule of caffeine is: Caffeine fast for the majority of days of week.

You open the first gate to sleep by caffeine fasting and not taking it after 10 am.

2) Gate 2: The Sleep Window

You have a natural sleep window. 

A window during the night where your body is accustomed to sleeping. This is where night owls, morning larks or third birds come from. We all have different natural sleep windows.

It’s not something you can change on your own – but it does change. You may have been a morning lark in your youth but become a night owl as you’ve gotten older.

During your natural sleep window is where you get your best sleep. And if you wear off it – you’ll lose sleep.

An hour-long nap in the afternoon isn’t the same as 1 hour of deep REM sleep during your sleep window.

Most people go to bed when it suits them and wake up when they have to. But doing this, they almost always sacrifice their sleep window. Instead of waking up with energy and motivation – they wake up tired and complaining about their lives.

They don’t realize that they never get the sleep quality they need – and so they always stay disconnected from reality.

The funny thing about your sleep window is that you can’t negotiate with it.

If you go to sleep 2 hours later than normal – you can’t just sleep in for 2 hours – you’ll lose 2 hours of quality sleep.

You need to follow your sleep window.

Here’s how you do it:

Observe yourself and your sleep habits.

• When do you start feeling tired? 

• What time do you wake up with energy?

For me, it’s 10 pm to 7:30 am.

Once you have your schedule – stick to it. It doesn’t matter if it’s the weekends, you need to reinforce your sleep window.

Yes you’ll lose some time in the evening, yes some people will look at you funny for a second – but this is how you get to experience life.

It’s how you create an enjoyable and meaningful life – it’s fucking worth it.

If it bothers you that much, you can take one day a week where you go past your bedtime.

Once you’ve established a schedule around your sleep window you have some freedom.

Even though it’s best to always fall asleep and wake up at the same time – you have a 1 hour window of flexibility. You can go to sleep 1 hour before or after your bedtime and still get a good night’s sleep.

If you want to reconnect to reality – master your sleep window.

You open the second gate to sleep by finding and sticking to your natural sleep window.

3) Gate 3: Light

Light rules your body.

It does this by controlling your energy.

To simplify things: Light increases energy – darkness decreases it.

This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. The sun’s rise and fall was the only constant in our entire evolution.

No matter what happened – the sun would always rise and the sun would always set.

Back in the old days this worked wonderfully. You rose with the sun and fell asleep with the darkness

But as is often the problem with modernity – it messes with our nature.

We live in a civilization that takes the energy out of our day and the tiredness out of our nights.

Let me explain.

When sunlight would hit our eyes in the morning – our brains were stimulated and boosted our energy. When the night came – the “energy signals” wouldn’t reach the brain and we would get tired.

The situation most people find themselves in today is quite the opposite.

People wake up with their alarms and spend their mornings indoors. If they get outside at all it’s for commuting to work or school where they continue their avoidance of light.

When their day is finally over they get on their chosen electrical device. This sends energy signals to their brains that are just strong enough to disrupt their sleep (your brain doesn't realize it’s night).

This way they manage to be tired through the whole day but not tired enough to fall asleep. So they wake up tired and repeat the miserable day again. Eventually, they get trapped in an eternal cycle of subpar energy.

This is the trap modernity has accidentally placed on us.

And it’s why light is the 3rd gate.

Here’s how you solve it:

1. Get Morning Sunlight

As soon as you wake up, you should be doing everything in your might to stare at the sun.

When sunlight hits your eyes in the morning, your brain spikes your energy and as a result – you get tired in the evening.

If the sun is completely out, 10 minutes is enough. If it’s a cloudy day, 20 minutes will do the trick (If it hurts your eyes, look slightly below it)

The important thing is that you get direct sunlight in your eyes)

Will this be a little uncomfortable – yes.

Will it worth it – also yes.

1. Hide From Blue Light

The other key part of this is not tricking your brain in the evening.

You do this by avoiding electronic devices.

These devices put out “Blue light” that more or less trick your brain into thinking it’s day.

Either avoid any electronics 1 hour before your bedtime or turn the night mode all the way to warm light.

You open the third gate to sleep by matching your light exposure to your biology.

4) Gate 4: Diet

Your diet is your destiny. 

Diet connects to every part of your health (but we’ve already talked about this).

More specifically – what you eat determines your sleep.

It’s the reason you wake up in the middle of the night.

It’s the reason you can sleep for 8 hours and still wake up exhausted.

And it’s the reason you never get a full psychic reset (and live life disconnected from reality).

The highest leverage thing you can do for your life is mastering your diet (because it connects to everything else)

I go over all this in “your diet is your destiny” (read that one after you’re done with this).

Your diet affects your sleep on 2 levels:

1. Digestion

During sleep your body slows down the digestion of food.

It does this in order to use all the energy it has to repair the body and mind.

But if you eat right before bedtime – you’re forcing your body to digest it. You’re essentially telling your body not to repair itself. 

You're directing the energy towards metabolizing food instead of healing your cells and structuring your mind.

And you’ll wake up exhausted, groggy and miserable – because you didn’t actually sleep. 

You were just digesting food.

You avoid this terrible existence by not eating 2 - 4 hours before sleep.

This will give your body time to digest the food and heal itself during the night.

1. Food choice

A calorie isn’t a calorie.

The kind of food matters – especially regarding sleep.

Here are some examples:

• High fat and high protein meals are great – but not close to sleep. These are the foods that will force your gut to work overtime (literally) and not let you enjoy deep and restful sleep

• High sugar meals are not that great – and even worse close to sleep. They mess with your blood sugar and energy levels. As a result they disturb your sleep cycles and make you wake up in the middle of the night.

The better your diet is, the less your body will have to fight the foods you’re eating and can focus on healing your body and mind during sleep (take a look at ”the nutrition amendments”).

To open the 4th gate to sleep you need to fast or avoid high sugar/protein meals 2 - 4 hours before bed.

5)The 5th Gate: Exercise

To sleep you need to be tired.

In a more scientific wording – your homeostatic sleep drive needs to be high.

As you’re awake you build up something called “sleep pressure” (another word for “adenosine in your system”).

While being awake builds up a lot of sleep pressure on its own – it’s not enough. As Andrew Huberman would say – it’s necessary but not sufficient.

If you’re laying on your ass all day – it doesn’t matter that you timed your light, perfected your sleep schedule and caffeine intake.

You still won’t be able to get quality sleep.

This is the case with the majority of people.

Less than 5% of people get at least 30 minutes of exercise a day.

They wake up just to spend their entire day at a desk, get home and collapse on the couch.

When it’s time to go to sleep they’re lying wide awake because they’re filled with emotional energy that hasn’t been drained.

So they lay in bed, dreading the early wake up but still won’t fall asleep. And if they do – it’s a slumber without any quality to mention.

Not draining your emotional energy is why you're in a fight with yourself every night.

It’s why you lie awake staring at the ceiling – why you’re forcing your head against the pillow screaming “go to sleep” and why you wake up in a cloud of psychic entropy.

To reconnect yourself to reality – you need to use exercise to your advantage.

Here’s how:

Exercise creates energy.

Exercise drains emotional energy (anger, irritation, sadness) but increases your life energy (happiness, motivation, peace).

Exercise, pain and energy is the topic of the next letter – so I’ll keep this brief.

Exercise increases your core body temperature, accelerates blood flow and energy mobilization. All of these send signals to your body to increase alertness and energy.

To put it simply,  exercising requires energy – and so your body gives you that energy.

This spikes your daily energy and lets it fade afterwards (making you tired enough to fall asleep).

But this requires you to follow a fundamental principle – exercise timing.

The earlier the better – but if your schedule doesn’t allow it, exercising in the afternoon or in the early evening works extremely well too.

To open the 5th gate to sleep you need to use exercise to drain your emotional energy and time your daily energy.

6) The 6th Gate: (The Ultimate Sleep Stack)

This one will be quick.

A lot of people swear by their stacks of supplements. And don’t get me wrong – they can be very useful.

But if you haven’t opened the 5 first gates – not even the perfect sleep stack will save you. (They’re called “supplements” for a reason)

That being said, if you want to maximize the effectiveness of all gates… 

Here is the ultimate sleep stack:

• Ashwagandha – inhibits cortisol (the stress chemical) which calms you down. Get this through supplements.

• Magnesium threonate – increases GABA which decreases the activity of the neurons (making you calmer). Get this through supplements.

• Apigenin – This is basically the opposite of caffeine. It binds to receptors that are part of the brain complex that inhibits brain activity – i.e it makes you relax. Get this through chamomile tea or supplements.

• L-Theanine – this little rascal increases GABA and serotonin (the wellbeing chemical) which decreases brain activity and calms you down. Get this through supplements.

7) Mental Clarity

If you want to sleep – learn to empty your mind.

Learn to be formless, to be shapeless… to be water my friend.

This gate has a lot to do with the ultimate one – it sets your mind up for the final surrender.

When your mind is chaotic, when thoughts are racing and when you can’t stop thinking about the troubles of tomorrow – sleep becomes extremely difficult.

You can spend an entire night just laying and planning conversations and decisions you’ll make the next day. And a lot of people do.

I always envied people who could fall asleep in less than 5 minutes.

They seemed to be able to empty their mind and dooze off in a matter of seconds – while I would lay for 2 hours with countless thoughts going through my head.

So if there is one skill you can cultivate to increase the quality of your life – it’s the control of psychic energy. 

It’s (in other words) focus.

To allow sleep to occur, your mind must be still. For it to be still – you have 2 options:

1. Use your focus to keep thoughts out of mind

2. Have nothing to think about

Some people are great at the first one – some people are exceptionally good at the 2nd one.

There are things to be said about both of these – none is better than the other.

But the 2nd one requires work.

It requires dealing with things as soon as they happen, it requires letting things that you can’t control go.

The 1st one is merely a bridge for getting to the second.

The goal isn’t to focus on an object — it’s to drop the concentration and dissolve into nothingness.

At that stage – sleep becomes as easy as flicking a switch.

While it’s easy to talk about – it’s harder to practice. 

But here’s how you do it:

1. Meditation

Meditation is simply a way of getting to a still mind.

The goal of meditation isn’t to focus on something – it’s to drop the focus off everything. 

The goal is to reach a still mind.

The most common way of doing this is focusing on your breath.

An easy example: Count the in-breath and out-breath. Once you reach 10, start over. If you lose count or get lost in thought – simply return to your breath and start counting again.

Once you’ve done this for a while – you can finally drop the object of consciousness (the breath) and enjoy something called a “mind gap” (an interval of consciousness without any thoughts).

1. NSDR

NSDR or yoga nidra is like meditation, also a way of ordering consciousness.

If you do this in the middle of the day, your mind will be a lot more quiet at night (from my own personal experience).

From an evidence supported standpoint, NSDR (done in the middle of the day) will improve your sleep quality, sleep duration and decrease the time it takes to fall asleep.

Do this by searching for “NSDR” on youtube and following the instructions.

Now that we’ve opened the 7th gate, you're ready for the final step.

The 8th gate of sleep.

8) The 8th Gate Of Surrender (The Thing That Makes Everything Else Meaningless)

Sleep isn’t something you do – it’s something that happens to you.

To fall asleep you need to allow yourself to be taken away – you need to let go.

All the previous gates are all about lowering your mental defense (your mind generally doesn’t want to go to sleep unless it absolutely has to). 

Sleep is a lot like dying – You can’t control it.

You fade out from existence while everything turns black. 

It takes tremendous courage – because you need to trust the universe. You need to have faith that the universe won’t fall apart while you’re gone and that your nervous system will wake you up in the morning.

Falling asleep is an act of faith – and faith isn’t holding on – it’s letting go.

For example… 

Sleep is a mystery – and so is death.

In fact, the god of sleep (Hypnos) is the twin brother of the god of death (Thanatos). And both require immense courage to experience.

Once you’ve lowered your defenses with the 6 first gates, and cleared your mind with the 7th gate – all you need to do is let go.

The 8th gate is the final gate of surrender.

I can’t really give you any practical steps for this – it’s not something words can describe.

You have to learn this one for yourself.

But if you do master it – a whole new world will open up.

The last gate is sort of a slap in the face to everyone that obsesses over their sleep.

Because the more you try to force it – the more you’ll make the outcome impossible.

A funny example that exemplifies my point is the concept of insomnia.

Insomnia is a very funny thing. Because if you do get insomnia – the worst thing of all you can do is to worry about it. Because that will only make it worse.

To open the 8th gate and finally fall asleep, you need to let go.

The Road To Sleep

You can’t make sleep easier – you can only make it harder.

All these gates are removing the blockages that will naturally occur, but if the god of sleep doesn’t take you – it doesn’t matter anyways.

Sometimes, you can’t sleep – and there is no explanation for it. Sometimes, you lie in bed wondering what more you could have done when the answer is nothing. 

When such a thing happens, it is quite funny. And there is only one thing left to do…

Stop trying to go to sleep.

We’ve talked about the civil war inside your head (psychic entropy) and how it connects to the ultimate goal of life (flow).

We’ve discussed how sleep reorders your mind and reverses psychic entropy.

Finally we’ve gone over how to master your sleep with the 8 inner gates:

The 8 inner gates of sleep:

1. Caffeine

2. Sleep window

3. Light

4. Diet

5. Exercise

6. The ultimate sleep stack

7. Mental clarity

8. Surrender

You’re now armed with the knowledge required to reconnect yourself to reality, structure the chaos in your mind and reach a life that is meaningful and enjoyable with flow.

If I could only use only 1 sentence to sum this whole letter up:

Sleep is what allows you to experience reality.

That’s it for this week.

Thanks for reading.

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- Simon