Sleep problems and the 12th house

For people with life-long sleep problems, chances are better than not that they have something disruptive in their 12th house in their birth chart. Personally, I have Mars. The strangest cases I've seen are people with Uranus in there: they usually physically need less sleep than most people, but to get them to settle requires a herculean effort. 

The 12th house is hard to understand because every author and website says different things about it, and usually the words "self undoing" come up, meaning that planets in the 12th house are often used the wrong way and wind up accomplishing the opposite of what they were attempting. All of the water houses (4, 8, 12) are psychic houses: house 4 is what's deep down in the recesses of your psyche, the 8th house is your subconscious, your need to transform yourself, and dealings with the people you're bonded with, and the 12th is how you connect to humanity at large...psychically. Thus, planets in the 12th house can't easily be used for personal gain because they're too busy connecting to psychic undercurrents. Usually when you try to use them for worldly gain, you try too hard or not hard enough because it's a subconscious house and you can't directly control that energy. (You do have conscious control of 4th and 8th house planets, for the record.)

But what's going on in your subconscious is another matter. Having 12th house planets can make you a budget version of a Jedi, because you sense things you can't explain, being sensitive to the energies that your 12th house planets represent, and you also can't use your abilities to move objects (boo). Let's say you have Saturn in there. 12th house Saturn means that unless you try to use your authority for altruistic purposes, it's going to come out weird. It's a goldilocks situation: it'll be too much or too little. But it also confers a sensitivity within your own environment to the air of judgment and authority. You'll know if someone is too big for his britches and flexing on others long before most of the other people in the room, but you won't be able to EXPLAIN it well. (Is the 12th house a cruel joke? Possibly!)

And then there are the sleep problems. If there's more than 1 thing in your 12th house in your birth chart, you're probably going to have sleep problems either intermittently or constantly, because YOU might want to go to bed, but your subconscious might be like "...we have some things to think about exhaustively before we sleep tonight!" Or when you do sleep, you have really bad/weird dreams, so you prefer not to sleep. Another really common issue for 12th house people is that alcohol makes them feel temporarily better, because for about 40 minutes they feel like they can clearly express and articulate what they're feeling subconsciously. It feels like all of a sudden everything aligns and seems to be working well, and then you drink TOO much and....oops it's over. But that can become a habit and then a problem.

So how do you not have sleep problems? Well, this is where you have to figure out what works for you, but I find the following to be helpful:

• Wear yourself out on purpose.

• See if there's anything in your diet that contributes to bad sleep (if you're drinking Red Bull at 4 PM and complaining you can't sleep, I don't feel sorry for you.) This also generally means follow conventional sleep wisdom.

• Get quiet time to connect with your subconscious, whether that's catnapping, going to bed earlier and letting yourself doze before sleeping, meditating, or just alone time.

• Understand and forgive yourself for being more sensitive to energy than others, so if you feel super wired after being out at a concert and can't sleep, that's normal and to be expected. Then make informed decisions.

• Know that when you try to suppress 12th house feelings and impulses, they don't go away just because you asked them to.

• Try and access things rattling around in there that are bothering you, making the subconscious conscious. Journaling is GREAT for this, especially the throwback pen and paper kind.

Even if you don't have anything in your 12th house in your birth chart, you will have stuff in there by transit with relative frequency. Whenever transiting Mars is in my 12th, either all I want to do is sleep or I don't get any sleep at all, with no happy medium. I find this is the case for the people I read for, as well.

If you or someone you love has sleep issues, check the 12th house before concocting wild explanations. I wish I could tag 12th house babies as such--it would save a lot of time and anguish. Do they make “possibly shitty sleeper” baby bracelets?

XO,J