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“…the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.”
- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
I have a confession to make. I snore. Badly.
I have for years. Or at least as long as I’ve shared a bed with someone. I get nightly reports on the severity of my snoring. And it ain’t good.
Want to know just how bad I can snore? Let me play you an example. Spoiler Alert: It’s bad. And also weird.
Last month I went skiing with my family. It was a holiday weekend that we didn’t end up booking until the last minute, which led to sleeping in a weird little cabin that looked like it belonged to Hansel and Gretel’s grandma. Also it was infested with ladybugs.
Needless to say I didn’t sleep very well while we were there. Neither did my wife because, as she reported back to me, my snoring was at an all time level of horribleness. When we got home I chose to be merciful to my sleep deprived partner and set up a mattress in our basement where I would spend the next couple of nights snoring to my heart’s content.
For context, as fine as my basement is, it's not the greatest place to sleep. Between tossing and turning and realizing that sleeping on a crappy mattress in my basement was not really a long term solution, I had the idea to Google “How to deal with a snoring spouse?” I found a link to an article that reviewed the Cadalliac of ear plugs, ones designed especially for long suffering snoring widows like my wife. According to their packaging they were “#1 Doctor Recommended”. I immediately ordered a box and rolled over and fell back asleep. Problem solved! I had planned to tell my wife about it the next morning, sure that she would be thrilled with how I had taken action.
To say that she wasn’t thrilled would be an understatement. “That’s a pretty depressing solution,” she began, “and do you really want this to be the way we live for the rest of our lives?”
Of course she was right. My solution had been to ask her to adjust the way she sleeps in order to accommodate the way I sleep. Fine for me, but obviously not so fine for her. The other solution, of course, was for me to find a way to stop snoring.
I sat with that for a while. I knew in my gut that that was the only answer. I just wasn’t sure how I was going to do it.
Back to the Drawing Board
I returned back to my basement snoring purgatory, and once again tried my hand at some late night Googling to try and help solve the problem. I came across something that fundamentally changed the way I approach my life.
What I found was a link to the book “Breath” by James Nestor. I am a mouth breather, which is something I felt embarrassed about until I read that half of us are mouth breathers too. It’s not good. According to Nestor, mouth breathing is a result of evolution gone wonky. We should be breathing through our noses but because of changes to our diet brought on by easy to chew processed foods, our skulls have literally changed. As have the ways we breathe.
He also writes a lot about snoring. He claims that people who snore are literally choking on their own faces. I obviously do not relish the idea that I’m choking on my own face, but what to do?
I chose to take some advice from his book and attempted to fundamentally relearn how to breathe. The first thing I did was get a snoring app. Snoring apps basically record you sleeping and then rate the quality of your sleep based on the conditions you were sleeping in that night. The first night was terrifying. At the end of any sleep the app gives you a ”Snore Score” based on a scale of 0-100 (zero being the least amount of snoring possible). The average new user gets a Snore Score of about 25. My score was more than double that. It was 51. I was horrified.
Taking Action
I immediately sprung into action. I bought a kick ass humidifier to make sure that the air I was breathing wasn’t too dry, really tried to limit my alcohol intake, and perhaps most importantly I taped my mouth shut at night.
Taping my mouth might sound extreme, but the more I talked to people about it, the more mouth tapers amongst us I discovered. It’s actually less severe than it sounds. The idea is that you put a small piece of medical tape on your lips so that you are forced to breathe through your nose while you sleep. You are basically retraining your body how to breathe.
Taping my mouth shut was actually awesome for my waking time as well. I didn’t tape my mouth during the day because, well, that would be super weird, but it did make me conscious of my breathing in a way I had never been before. There were many moments throughout the day where I would pause, take notice of my breathing, and make sure that I was consciously and deeply breathing through my nose.
With my ginormous humidifier, my snoring recording app, and my roll of medical tape I emerged from the basement and reentered the world of sleeping in my bedroom with my wife. In a couple of weeks my “Snore Score” had gone from a horrendous 51 way down to a very reasonable 2. I was better rested when I woke up, and my breathing felt better during my waking hours. At mid-life I was now on the path of learning how to breathe properly for the first time.
Stopping Snoring = Creativity?
Now it would be totally fair of you to be asking what the heck does snoring have to do with creativity? Maybe nothing, and maybe everything. What it taught me was the lesson of how to approach life with a beginner’s mind. To take a moment to stop and reassess a locked-in and limiting pattern, one as fundamental and basic as breathing.
I’ve been breathing pretty consistently for almost half a century now, and it was something that I thought I was pretty much an “expert” in. I felt just fine to keep doing it unconsciously, after all the way I was breathing was certainly keeping me alive. But after feeling the benefits of learning how to actually breathe properly I was left thinking that there may also be creative areas in my life that I could take this same approach to.
There are many creative things I do that are largely self taught. Writing, cooking, drawing, music, all things I have no doubt brought similarly strange unconscious methods to. What if I could take the experience of re-learning how to breathe to some of those? It’s an idea I love.
There are a couple of art classes I’m looking into taking in the spring. A printmaking course and a cooking class. These are things I’ve been doing for years but I’m purposely signing up for the beginner level to find approaches I never before knew existed.
There’s something incredibly liberating about being in mid-life and realizing that I don’t know the first thing about anything. It takes the pressure off. If I view everything around me as a student rather than a master then it’s ok for me to not be perfect at anything. It gives me the opportunity to open myself up and truly see limitless potential.
Also, and perhaps more practically, it means that I’m no longer spending my nights choking on my own face. Which I have to say, is a definite plus too.
Takeaways
What areas in your life would you consider yourself a long-time “expert” in, and what would it look like to go back to being a beginner?
Are there places in your life where you could research to find out whether there are better or different ways than the ways you’ve been using?
The Kicker
Our kicker this week comes from the graphic artist @boringfriends who has been making amazing inspirational posters and putting them up all over Toronto. This one speaks to our very souls.
Ok so this is a hilarious and also very smart article. I also live with a snorer -- he opted for the radical deviated septum surgery -- which works, by the way! But the metaphor of taping your mouth shut is too good to pass up. I think when you "tape your mouth shut" in a creative situation -- say a client meeting or brainstorming session -- you automatically open your ears to listening more deeply, which leads to more empathy and creative problem solving. I also like the idea of the (metaphorical) "mouth taping" as a kind of creative "hack" -- a way of doing something differently than you did it previously. I think about things like Chat GPT and integrating it -- like mouth tape -- into the process of creativity (which for me is like breathing.).
I just bought my first roll, in anticipation of a nice hotel stay this weekend with my partner. I too sleep downstairs, and the sleep clinic says I don't qualify for a machine! So you and Steve have inspired me to try taping. Wish me luck! (Great article too BTW:)