The sleep problem of the professional life is one of the most consistent themes in the conversations we have with the members who come to the Naora legs from the high-performance career. Not acute insomnia in most cases, the clinical condition that requires the clinical intervention.
The specific degradation of the sleep quality that the sustained professional intensity produces over the years: the sleep that is technically adequate in duration and that does not restore in the way that the sleep of ten years ago restored, the mind that is active at three in the morning with the version of the workday that the body left but that the mind has continued in the dark. The phone on the nightstand is the last thing and the first thing. In between, the sleep is what it is.
The anchor watch at midnight is two hours of sitting on the afterdeck of the Eighty2 in the specific conditions of the offshore anchorage at night: the dark, the sound of the water against the hull, the stars if the sky is clear, the instruments glowing softly in the cockpit, the specific requirement to be present and attentive without the attention having anything to do except be present and attentive. No phone. No inbox. The anchor is set.
The instruments are monitoring. The task of the watch is the task of the fully awake person who has nothing to manage except their own presence. This sounds like the description of the meditation practice that the professional life has not produced the time or the discipline for. It is also the description of the anchor watch.
The Sleep That Follows
The specific quality of the sleep that follows two hours of the fully-occupied offshore watch is a consistent observation across the members who describe the Naora leg’s effect on their sleep. Not the correlation that the tired body and the sea air and the physical activity of the offshore day produce — those contribute. The specific contribution of the watch is the specific quality of the rest that the attention that has been genuinely occupied without the mediation of the screen produces.
The two hours of presence are the two hours in which the mind was doing what the mind was built for: attending to the real environment in real time, without the screen between the mind and the thing the mind is attending to. This is the occupation that produces the specific fatigue that good sleep requires, not the exhaustion of the overstimulated day but the tiredness of the genuinely present one.
The member who comes below after the midnight watch and sleeps until the morning watch change at six is not sleeping because the offshore air is cleaner than the city air, though it is. They are sleeping because the two hours on the afterdeck gave the mind the thing it needed to rest: the genuine occupation, in the real world, without the device. The sleeping pill addresses the symptom.
The anchor watch addresses the cause. The offshore sailing life has been providing this remedy for the entirety of the offshore sailing life, long before the device that created the problem existed.
