A few days ago, I invited you to consider a different perspective on sleep.
The idea is this is: Poor sleep is not the problem you need to solve. Poor sleep is a symptom.
Today, I want to expand on that idea and show you why reframing the problem of sleep is the first step in the Vault 5-Part Sleep Clarity Masterclass—and the foundation for lasting sleep improvement.
Let’s get started.
Sleep is notoriously difficult to conceptualize.
Unlike a strained muscle or injured joint—structures you can visualize and often feel—sleep is a brain state created by chemical & neural signals transmitted between brain regions and affected by signals happening in the rest of the body.
You can’t feel melatonin being synthesized in your pineal gland. You can’t sense GABA receptor activation. You can’t detect the shift in your suprachiasmatic nucleus signaling in response to light. You can’t see this happening on an ultrasound the same way you can see a joint issue.
Yet, these processes build and sustain sleep in ways similar to how structural support maintains spinal stability. But because they’re “invisible” in our day-to-day experience, we tend to default to addressing what we can observe: the symptom of disrupted sleep itself.
This is where a mental comparison with back pain becomes valuable.
It provides a visual model for an otherwise invisible system.
Lower back pain is a symptom. It can arise from multiple different causes:
The cause is important to know because: