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Introduction: Why Feeling Safe Matters

      To feel safe is one of our greatest and most primal drives.

      We come into this life on an ongoing quest to find inner safety from the moment of birth until the moment of death. When a baby is born it leaves the warm, dark, safe cocoon of its mother's womb and arrives into a harsh, bright, noisy environment which probably feels profoundly unsafe. In those first moments after the birth, in both mother and child, levels of oxytocin (the love and trust-building hormone) and endorphins are at peak levels to maximize bonding between the baby and mother. To enable the baby to feel safe. Skin-to-skin contact between mother and child deepens the feeling of safety. Once the baby has an embodied experience of safety, it moves to suckle and breastfeed and an even deeper connection between mother and child is formed.

Feeling safe is essential to our ability to both survive and thrive. As Deb Dana, leading trauma therapist says, ‘With our first breath, we embark on a lifelong quest to feel safe in our bodies, in our environments, and in our relationship with others.’

      But why is a ‘sleep expert’ writing about feeling safe?

      I started writing this book 15 years ago and ended up writing three books on sleep in the meantime. The world needed books on sleep; technology had well and truly landed on the scene, the speed of life ramped up, and we struggled to slow down … and sleep. Globally, the sleep industry is now worth billions of pounds with our state-of-the-art mattresses, pillows, blackout blinds, aromatherapy candles, meditation apps … We've come a long way since the hunter-gatherer lying on a mat of leaves in a cave.

      I never set out to be a sleep expert. I discovered a knack for helping people to sleep (largely driven by my own long-standing issues with insomnia), wrote my first book Tired but Wired and boom! Now, I'm called a sleep expert.

      ‘We sleep when we feel safe’ was what I started saying in presentations and people took notice. They wrote this sentence down.

      I knew that the real key to helping people to sleep was to help them to feel safe.

      And I knew the key to helping people to thrive was to help them to feel safe.

Our nervous system is designed along the premise of:

       Is the world safe or unsafe?

      We're constantly, subconsciously, scanning our environment, relating to the world around us. Our nervous system judges whether we're safe or unsafe, whether we're free to thrive or we need to fight to survive.

      This neurophysiological judgement – safe or unsafe? – affects everything. The way we live and relate to others. The way our bodies behave – our health and wellbeing. The choices we make.

      And more recently, with the Covid-19 pandemic:

The Covid-19 pandemic has well and truly placed the issue of feeling safe on the agenda. But in reality, it has been there for a while; for too long, people have been walking around in survival mode – I've been observing and measuring this for the last 20-odd years. The speed of life ramping up, becoming so chaotic that our nervous systems have collectively, subconsciously habituated to survival, to feeling unsafe.

      In other words, we've got used to living in the wrong part of our nervous system. We've got used to feeling on edge, over-stimulated, unable to stop, afraid to stop, sick when we stop. We're constantly running away from hidden threat. We don't feel safe and we don't even realize that.

      I began to see and measure this decade ago and the desire to write this book began to take form. But then I didn't have all of my answers. And, at the end of the day, it's all about timing. At the time, publishers didn't want it – they thought no one would understand or want to buy a book about feeling safe. Or at least, the ordinary man on the street might not want to buy a book on feeling safe, but in another world, the scientific and trauma therapy community,

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