For an activity that fills roughly a third of our hours of life, sleep can be frustrating. Immersed in our deeply cerebral culture, we have trouble letting go of deliberative consciousness, and thoughts run over into every corner of wakefulness and knock against the boundaries of sleep. Meanwhile, we readily bring our analyzing, problem-solving brains to bear on every detail of sleeping. I’ve struggled for years with the question of how much sleep I should get. If I feel tired, am I sleeping too little? Too much? At the wrong time? Is my room too cold or too warm? Or maybe I am trying too hard to sleep—the supreme irony of the whole process.

It’s a perfect example, really, of how the relentless sharpening of our deliberative thought has dulled our senses to the point of near-stupidity when it comes to our own bodies. How can I possibly not know how much sleep I need? Wild animals don’t need to ponder the intricacies of their sleep schedules in order to get the rest they need. To them, it is a completely simple equation. When tired, sleep.

The difficult part is letting go of the thoughts. They armor us from the sensations of our own bodies that would render our doubts about sleep needs irrelevant. But somehow, we are very bad at letting go. We are so soaked with thought, as we are with physical tension, that we have forgotten how to release. Maybe the two—tension and thought—are partly the same underneath the surface.