Even if you’re Vicki the Robot from Small Wonder, and you spend every night in a cabinet, you need this book. If you’re a human being, then you definitely need this book! I can’t possibly recommend it enough. Shawn Stevenson is hip, funny, and deeply knowledgeable about sleep. Even complicated charts and medical terminology are accessible through his engaging, witty prose. I’ve followed sleep research closely for at least the last decade, and I learned a great deal from Sleep Smarter. I can also validate a lot of the information as crucially important for healing sleep problems. Before I talk more about the book, I’ll share a bit about myself. I started having problems with insomnia at age seven. At fourteen, I woke up one morning and couldn’t open my mouth because I had clenched my jaw so tightly. I wound up cracking four mouth guards, and I wore through a set of amalgam fillings in eighteen months. I also had restless leg syndrome; sometimes it would start early in the evening, before I even went to bed. In college, the clinic sent me to the school psychiatrist to make sure I didn’t have a neurological problem, because I was only sleeping about three hours a night. Garden variety stuff. The real issue I had in my thirties was pavor nocturnus, or night terrors. I would wake up in a different room, shaking and crying, with no memory of how I got there. My poor husband would have to chase me and bring me back to bed. I don’t have sleep problems anymore. If someone like me can learn to sleep eight peaceful hours every night, then it stands to reason that anyone could. I’m also including a thumbnail of my sleep issues in case Shawn Stevenson reads this. If he does, HI! In the second edition, which you know is inevitable with a book this great, would you please consider including an appendix on insomnia and parasomnia disorders? Sleep Smarter includes short, fascinating chapters on sleep research. At the end, there is an easy set of micro-habits to try out over two weeks. It would be pretty easy to start with the chapter that seems most relevant; they don’t necessarily have to be read in order. For instance, anyone who has ever tried to share a “full” sized mattress with another person knows to start with the chapter on beds! If you’re reading this because you have annoying sleep issues, attend closely. Stevenson and I both make magnesium deficiency the first priority. If you can’t handle dietary change at this point in your life, you can buy a spray-on topical supplement. At least 80% of Americans are deficient in magnesium, so if you have any kind of sleep problem, be objective before you rule it out. For restless legs, talk to your doctor about an iron supplement. (Or you can keep a food log for three weeks, look at your micronutrient consumption, and make your own judgment). For tooth grinding, my dentist leveled out my bite by replacing my fillings. It changed my life. For pavor nocturnus, I discovered that it was related to blood sugar levels. I make sure not to eat for three hours before bedtime. I also became a marathon runner, and I believe that this changed my body’s ability to store glycogen in the muscles. This most likely helped my body to regulate blood sugar more efficiently, as I never get hangry anymore. I also quit getting migraines at the same time that I quit having the night terrors, which is now over two years ago. I took melatonin for five years, and it helped me learn to sleep properly. About three weeks ago, I quit taking it, and was astonished to find that my sleep is the same quality and duration! I was very worried about experiencing sleepless nights, but it didn’t happen once. To me, this is verification that all the other changes I made really did have an impact. For everything, I quadrupled my cruciferous vegetable consumption. What Stevenson has to say about nutrition and fitness is completely true. I was also extremely interested in his personal story about battling degenerative disk disease as a teenager. He asked his doctor if his diagnosis “had anything to do with what [he] was eating, or if exercising a different way would help.” His doctor completely blew him off. That was precisely my experience with talking to my physician about my thyroid disease when I was 23. Stevenson’s disk disease had nothing in common with my thyroid disease, but the bogus, unscientific professional opinions we got were the same. I believe in medical science, but I seriously question whether doctors are keeping up with the most current research before they convey life-changing opinions to people. That’s before we even begin to consider nutrition and exercise, which few doctors seem to take seriously on a personal level, much less a professional one. Please read this book. Please take the quality and quantity of your sleep seriously. Please believe that improving your sleep truly does have the potential to revolutionize your life. Oh, and PS: Noelie says that if you have a pet parrot or other bird, please make sure it gets twelve hours of sleep in a dark, quiet room every night. Give yourself jet lag in advance. Why not? What follows is the log of my 12-day jet lag experiment. It worked pretty well, and I plan to repeat it the next time I travel across time zones. For the first time, I’m planning ahead and trying to do what I can to avoid jet lag. I’ll be traveling east by 9 time zones. The trip will last over two weeks, which is a long enough span of time to make the adjustment worthwhile. Since I work for myself and set my own schedule, I can make my own constraints. I’ve decided that it’s better to suffer at least some of the effects of jet lag in advance, at home, rather than have it spoil the first few days of our trip. This morning, I woke up at 9:45 AM. This is unusually late even by my standards, but it’s 6:45 PM where I’m going! I like working late at night, and when I get into a groove, my schedule will start creeping later and later. I have been known to swing around the clock until I’m going to bed at 6 AM. This is a way I have of annoying myself, because I always sleep badly during the daytime, being woken up by every lawnmower, ice cream truck, and barking dog. My current schedule is not optimal either for home or travel. (Well, it would be fine if I went to Hawaii). I’ve always hated taking early morning flights. In light of the reading I did on jet lag planning, I am changing my attitude. Getting up at 4 AM to go to the airport would not only give me more options and probably save money, but it would also put me closer to my goal of adjusting to the destination time zone. The tickets for this trip are already booked, but it’s something I’ll keep in mind for future trips. My flight leaves in 12 days. I’m planning to adjust in 30-minute increments. I happen to be writing this on a Friday, so this plan won’t infringe too much on my husband’s ability to snooze a little over the weekend. I already know that the easiest way to get up earlier is to go to bed earlier, and that is more or less impossible unless you’re tired enough to go to sleep. Thus, I will be setting both a bedtime reminder and an alarm. Within a few days, I’ll be tired enough to start drifting off earlier. If I can keep to my plan, on the morning I leave, my alarm will go off at 3:45 AM, or 12:45 PM destination time. (My husband is leaving a few days before me, meaning on his travel day we would be getting up right around the same time). I’m a childhood-onset insomniac, so I’ve been through every iteration of fully or semi-sleepless night possible. If there is one thing I know how to do, it’s to drag myself through the day no matter how tired I am. Let’s see how it goes. Night 1: We’re both super-tired for some reason. It’s a Friday night and we’re asleep by 11. I wake up at 7:45 AM. The previous night, I slept from 2AM to 9:45 AM. I’ve already shifted two hours earlier and gotten an extra hour’s sleep. I feel groggy and out of sorts. Immediately, I make the connection to jet lag. If I feel this way after a 2-hour shift, how would I feel without the adjustment, being off by 10-12 hours? Night 2: Stayed up until 1:00, woke up at 7:50. Not as tired as the 9-hour night. Night 3: In bed at 11:30, up at 7:00. I have awoken before my alarm every day so far. I’ve shifted roughly 3 hours in 3 days with no real effort. Just keep reminding myself why I’m getting up. Night 4: In bed at 10:30, up at 6:30. Took a while to fall asleep. Today I needed the alarm. The first 3 minutes were really bad, and all I wanted was to roll over and go back to sleep. Then I was fine. Unfortunately, I found out that what I thought should be an 8-hour adjustment was a fluke, an artefact caused by the difference between Daylight Savings start dates in the US and Europe. This definitely validates my plan, because I have more adjusting to do than I had thought. Night 5: In bed at 11:30, up at 6:15. My husband gets up at 6, and he’ll only be here through the end of the week. I’ve decided to slow my rate of adjustment and just get up with his alarm. He did not sign on to be part of my experiment, and I can’t think of a way to wake up earlier without disturbing him. I’ll still have four days to adjust downward after his flight. Pretty tired. Going to bed earlier is definitely the complicated part of this plan. Night 6: In bed at 11:30, up at 6:30. Forgot to set an alarm and gradually woke up while hubby was getting ready for work. Really tired and feeling stupid about not going to bed sooner. Night 7: In bed at 11. Woke up while it was still dark, thinking hubby was leaving for work, but he was just using the bathroom. It was only 1 AM and I had mostly dragged myself awake. Woke up at 5:45 before the alarm. Managed to read quietly without waking him up. Feeling fine. Night 8: In bed at 10:40. Up at 4:20. Not even tired. Had lunch at 11 AM and realized it’s probably time to shift my mealtimes earlier. Night 9: In bed at 8:30. Up with the alarm at 3:45. Woke up at 1 AM for the second time in two days, feeling like I could get up, but made myself go back to sleep. My dog has a grievance about being put to bed at 8 PM, and he whined for a while. Trying to figure out how to continue adjusting over the next few days without making life too difficult for my pets. (The bird sleeps from 7 to 7). Night 10: In bed at 9:30. Up at 2:45 without an alarm. Took a nap from 6-8 AM. I’m still committed to shifting my wake-up time, because I believe it will work, and also because I believe half of the reason it works is drinking water and eating at the new wake-up time. But I’ve been getting pretty tired, and there’s the dog factor to consider. Night 11: In bed at 9:45. Night terrors at 10:40. THIS. SUCKS. I deal with pavor nocturnus, and I hadn’t had an episode in over two years until this point. I woke up in my bathroom with the light on, panting, alone, and with no immediate idea what had happened. As my heart rate returned to normal, I remembered that I had “dreamed” a lizard was slowly crawling up my wall. Pavor dreams are more like split-second images of things that bother the primitive limbic brain, like spiders and snakes, rather than regular dreams, which are more like movies on any topic. I have always liked lizards and think they’re cute, so it annoys me even more that my sleeping brain decided an imaginary lizard was cause for doubling my heart rate and launching me out of bed in my sleep. Listened to podcasts until 11:15, back to sleep until I awoke naturally at 4:15. My experiment is effectively over. Even if this wasn’t Travel Day, I don’t feel comfortable tinkering with my sleep for a while. I’m not precisely where I wanted to be, but I am waking up naturally 5.5 hours earlier than I was at the start. On the plane: I managed to sleep between 10:15 and 2:15, waking up every hour in between to readjust. One hour, I slept folded over the tray table, waking up when both of my arms went numb from the shoulders down. Nodded off for 20 minutes on my connecting flight. First night in Hamburg: Fell asleep at midnight, then woke promptly at 2:30 AM. Lay awake for two hours. Comfy bed, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, no sleep! Got up at 7:30 to catch flight to Barcelona. Results: I was exhausted from sleeping roughly 8 hours in two nights. I was able to go to bed and fall asleep at an appropriate time on the first night in Barcelona, and woke up naturally at about 8 AM. I slept pretty well throughout the trip. On the trip home, we had a 20-hour travel day and went to bed in our own home around 8:30 PM, or 5:30 AM Spanish time. My husband took Benadryl and slept for 11 hours; I woke up at 2:15 AM. On the second night home, I slept from 10 to 6. I can live with that. There are several factors that contribute to the complexity of adjusting to a time zone change. Some are psychological, but most are physical. The psychological adjustment was easy for me to make because I had a specific deadline for something desirable. I didn’t feel like my default schedule had much going for it. Changing my sleep schedule would have a net positive impact, both for me and for my husband. The only drawback for us has been that I sometimes distract him when he’s getting ready for work in the morning and would rather talk to me. The physical adjustments have a lot to do with hormone regulation. This includes melatonin, and it also includes leptin and ghrelin, the hormones that control satiety and appetite. There are most likely others, but three separate sleep-related hormones are enough to get my attention. The other, more obvious physical factors include mealtimes, hydration, and elimination. Gradually adjusting mealtimes also gradually adjusts the digestive system. It’s easier to get up earlier in the morning when you’re hungry. The easiest way is to respond to a full bladder! About the pavor nocturnus problem: I’m pretty sure what set me off was messing with my blood sugar. That was the key to my two-year remission. I ate too close to bedtime because I was running around preparing for the trip. I already know that it’s best for me to plan meals to end at least three hours before bedtime, and this time, I pushed it to 90 minutes. That, combined with weeks of shifting my sleep times, stress about planning everything, and mild anxiety about sleeping in the house alone, was enough of a trigger. I haven’t had any more episodes in the following three weeks, and I believe it was a fluke. I believe this gradual adjustment plan would still be feasible for someone working an ordinary 8-5 workweek. It would be difficult to come home, eat dinner, and go to bed almost immediately afterward. If I were doing this at an office job, I’d heat up a meal and eat it during my afternoon break, partly because of my parasomnia issues, partly because I’m sure I’d be hungry after eating breakfast at 4 AM. Our kid is 21 and out of the nest, but this plan could conceivably work for parents of young children because they get put to bed early anyway. Sleep deprivation in children is a real problem that affects their learning and development. Children of every age from infancy to 13 need at least 9 hours a night, and most age groups need at least 11. Going to bed weirdly early could have positive results for a family; let them get "extra" sleep while you get up early and do grown-up stuff. Being awake anywhere between 2-4 AM is a reliably quiet time to get through a great deal of work without interruption. Every family is different, but it’s something to think about. It’s not like travel itself isn’t going to cause some disruptions to the routine. Be your own test subject! Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not to everyone. It brings to mind Arthur Dent’s unintentional experiment with eating the least alarming leftovers out of his fridge and thereby preventing the spread of some space plague. By ‘designing a life experiment,’ I don’t mean to imply turning oneself into a petri dish so much as creating an interesting hypothesis (my dog is physically capable of learning to jump rope) and then testing it. (If I jump rope in front of him, will he eventually cut in?). Daily life is really too boring most of the time. About 80% of life is maintenance. Bathing, preparing and eating meals, commuting, working, doing housework, paying bills, cleaning the gutters, looking for things the dog buried in the yard… It never ends. That’s part of the reason to have pets, because they introduce an element of unpredictability into the mix. Setting up controlled life experiments is another way. There are two different approaches toward setting up a life experiment. The divergent way is to ask, “What happens when I go like this?” Commit to a new action and attend to what happens afterward. What happens when I give up soda? What happens when I initiate more phone calls? What happens when I quadruple my vegetable intake? What happens when I try to listen to everyone more attentively? The convergent way is to ask, “How many ways can I think of to tackle this problem?” If my issue is poor sleep quality, I could experiment with nutrition, hydration, mealtimes, exposure to different types of indoor and natural lighting, exercise, hypnosis, weight loss, sleep hygiene, snore strips, a visit to a sleep lab, ear plugs, melatonin, a white noise generator, prescription drugs, or kicking my pets out of the bedroom at night. The convergent approach is probably what most people are doing when they claim that they’ve “tried everything.” The drawback to “trying everything” is that we may be testing a bunch of irrelevant variables, and we may also be eliminating them from consideration without applying them for the necessary duration, frequency, or intensity. For instance, improving my vitamin A and C intake by eating better may not resolve my problem if the real issue was deficiency in D and magnesium. Nutrition was the correct approach, but we needed to get more specific. When we’re genuinely willing to “try everything,” it helps if we can pinpoint what we are doing with exacting, meticulous, painstaking detail. Many elements of one’s lifestyle can be tested in a lab or recorded with objective data. When someone says “my blood sugar is low” or “[X] gives me migraine,” that is a factual statement (“the moon is made of green cheese”) that can be tested and proved or disproved. We can test our micronutrients. We can record what we eat. We can keep time logs of the hours we slept. We can go to sleep labs and get monitored whatever it is that they monitor. We can have our body composition clinically measured. We can record the barometric pressure. We can examine our food logs against a record of our various health mysteries and look for patterns. (“Paprika gives me night terrors.”) When we’re not sure what’s wrong and the doctors aren’t, either, we can just record everything we can think of and eyeball it for a while. Tried everything? I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m saying I’d really love to take a look at your documentation. What I have usually done up to this point is to have a harebrained idea, such as “Next year I will take up running.” Then I dive in and wait to see what happens. There have always been more unintended, unexpected results than there were predictable results that conformed to my model. When I am pursuing a new interest like this, it tends to become all-consuming. Curiosity dominates my attention. I HAVE TO KNOW. I don’t always do well simply reading something, believing it, and implementing it. Sometimes, I try something because I want to debunk it, or because it confuses me and I can’t rest until I’ve figured it out. Most of the time, I just have an idea and it doesn’t seem like a bad idea until later. Questions have included: Is it possible to make Brussels sprouts taste good?, Can I walk on the treadmill barefoot?, Are walnuts good in minestrone?, and Can I tap-dance in roller skates? (Yes, bad idea, horrible idea, and yes but why?). What I now want to do is to try an extremely specific input for a very specific purpose and find a way to test whether it does or does not work. The goal I have in mind is to reduce my anxiety about public speaking. It’s already getting better through practice – my legs don’t shake anymore, although my heart still pounds and I have a lot of trouble making myself stay at the podium for an entire minute. I didn’t qualify the other day because I only made it 29 seconds out of 60. My mind goes blank and I lose my train of thought. My focus fades out into the middle distance, and it’s like the colored lights aren’t even there, much less the faces of my audience. I believe there is a significant physiological input that I can master, in the same way that I trained myself to be able to run more than 1/3 of a mile. I haven’t been able to run in a year and a half. It started with an ankle injury that responded only slowly to physical therapy. Just as I had healed enough to start running short distances again, I fell and tore open my knee. That took weeks to heal. While I was still wearing gauze pads for that, I bruised my nailbeds while hiking, and it’s taken six months for the nails to grow back properly. One darn thing after another. What I noticed was that my background mood dropped from a 9 out of 10 to more like a 7. Running initially helped me to beat my problem with night terrors, and I feel like it had a way of eliminating stress hormones. My suspicion is that reigniting a regular running practice will help to diminish my speaking anxiety, even though they seem to have nothing to do with one another. How do I design this experiment? What kind of metrics can I track to tell whether it’s working? Most of the variables involved in public speaking are subjective. How did I feel? How competent did I seem to others? Was my speech any good? There are a few numbers that are relevant, and the group does track them. How many times a month did I give a speech? How many seconds was my speech? How many times did I say “Um”? I know I say “um” more often when I’m nervous, although I don’t notice it at the time, and I also know that my speeches get shorter when I feel more nervous and less prepared. Lowering the first number and increasing the second will be positive signs that I am improving. As for running, I can easily and automatically track metrics with my sports watch and the RunKeeper app. How often did I run? How far? How long? What was my pace per mile? What were my split times? I can also subjectively track my daily mood, sleep quality, soreness, or anything else that seems relevant. There is the possibility (probability?) that my speaking abilities will improve over time anyway. I won’t be able to prove anything to anyone but myself, but I couldn’t with a sample size of one anyway. In the worst case scenario, I give myself something to do while waiting for time to pass. At best, I might notice that the “butterflies in the stomach” [factual statement again] fade as soon as I get in a good 5-miler. Learning to quantify my life taught me a lot. It taught me that my certainty about my behavior was almost always unwarranted. I went to bed later than I thought. I drank about ¾ of the water I thought I did. I ate about 50% more than I claimed. I exercised about 2/3 of the frequency I thought, at a lower intensity. (Walking instead of running, running instead of calisthenics, calisthenics instead of body weight resistance training, etc.). I can’t even say for certain whether I lied to myself deliberately or carelessly. All I know is that my picture of myself, based on doing what came naturally, did not match with the reality of an honest record of my actual behavior. My real habits did not match my perception of my habits. Part of why I like to plan life experiments is that it helps to focus my awareness. I want to live intentionally, and that is more or less the opposite of doing what comes naturally, at least at first. What I want is for a better life to start emerging naturally from new and improved behaviors. My natural tendency to interrupt people needs to be consciously replaced with a strong effort to listen more carefully. My natural tendency to have my feelings hurt by other people’s thoughtless remarks needs to be replaced by a conscious effort to reinterpret the situation. I annoy myself all the time, and my quest is to pause, reevaluate, and act in ways that I find more acceptable. Another reason that I like to plan life experiments is that I have overcome some serious difficulties, and it would have been much quicker and easier if I had been less stubborn. I often look back and feel that I could have saved myself years (or decades) of pain and frustration if only I had heeded certain signs. I beat fibromyalgia and thyroid disease. I beat poverty. I beat obesity. I beat the odds and found love again after my divorce. These problems were so difficult for me that almost anything else seems simple and easy in comparison. I have every reason to believe that action and habit change can bring me improved results, as long as I focus my attention and actions in the correct places. There are a million problems and situations that could respond to a life experiment. Weight, depression, energy level/vigor, headaches, punctuality, debt, shyness, loneliness, cooking skills… Can I prevent family quarrels? Can I streamline my morning routine? Can I earn a promotion at work? What happens when I try to put on 10 pounds of muscle? What happens when I clear six carloads of clutter out of my house? Any frustration, irritation, or annoyance probably has a solution. What I’ve found is that taking any positive action toward any issue tends to have unanticipated positive side effects. When we try to eliminate hassles from our lives, it tends to ripple outward, benefiting everyone around us. I used to cry myself to sleep at night. This is something most people only do when they are alone in the bed. I was divorced and single and flat broke. I felt like I would be alone forever. I believed I had missed my chance at love. I had long known I couldn’t have children, and now I wouldn’t have a mate to call my own either. There would be nobody at my side to keep me company while we grew old. I was SO. SAD. I determined to be ready if the day ever came. If I met someone who was worthy of my devotion, someone who could be my true partner and companion, I wanted to make sure I had room for him. I wanted him to feel completely at ease in my home. If he came in the door, where would he hang his coat? Where would he sit? Would he like a cup of tea? (As it turns out, he does). Would I want him in my bedroom? The question of the bedroom is more often a question of whether we are embarrassed to have anyone see the state of the room itself than whether we are ready, willing, and able to get physical with someone. (There’s more room on the floor, after all). Many of us use our bedrooms as storage sheds. It’s standard for people to get ready for guests by cleaning the living room and hiding stuff in the bedroom. In most modern homes, it’s one of the few rooms with a door to shut. A typical bedroom is full of dirty clothes, unfolded clean clothes, and often an unruly desk or computer station as well. Some people have storage boxes or multiple laundry baskets stacked up. Many bedrooms have three or more dressers. Many have closets that won’t shut due to the clothes and other things pouring out. One of my clearing jobs involved a couple of boxes related to a project that had been procrastinated since 1983. It was positioned so it could torment the owner with guilt from the moment the alarm went off each morning until bedtime each night. Bedrooms are our secret places, and by secret, I mean the bad kind, not the fun kind. A bedroom is a private place. People who live alone and like it that way still have an opportunity to make the bedroom a lovely, peaceful room of rest and solitude. It is a place for dreaming. A bedroom should be cozy and drowsy. It should be a room with a boundary that is respected, a place of retreat, a place to get away from the cares of the world and put life on hold. Sleep, and plenty of it, can make a relaxed person out of a crabby person. Sleep recharges us and allows us to be patient, kind, and generous. Sleep gives us the energy to face the day, to retain willpower, to make good decisions, to be productive, to look forward to exercising our bodies. A bedroom can be a charging station. Sleep procrastination is a real phenomenon. Why won’t we go to sleep when we are tired? Parents know why; that space between the kids’ bedtime and grownup bedtime is the only chance during the day for High Quality Leisure Time. We lie to ourselves about how tired we know we will be the next day. The less we like our jobs, the more likely we are to punish our bodies by chronically depriving ourselves of sleep. This guarantees that we will never have the energy to look for something better. Why else would someone who was exhausted fight sleep, like a fussy toddler? Some of us are avoiding bedtime because we don’t want to acknowledge an emotional disconnect with our romantic partner. Some of us don’t like the bedroom and subconsciously avoid it, due to the mess and clutter and, perhaps, the accumulated dust that causes respiratory issues while we sleep. Some of us (such as myself) have nightmares or other parasomnias or sleep disorders. Some of us are lonely and afraid to go to bed alone, when the house keeps settling and cracking and making creepy noises. Nobody who sleeps in a Temple of Love would ever delay going to bed at night. I made my bedroom a Temple of Love. I make my bed every morning as soon as I wake up, so that the bed looks inviting and welcoming all day. It takes 45 seconds. In my single days, I had a full-size mattress, barely big enough for two, but I made sure to have two pillows, and a bedside table on both sides. The other side had an empty drawer. It also had a reading light. My bedding was as girly as I could ever want, because I planned to get it out of my system while I was still single. At one point, I had rose and gold with brocade and tassels, and then I had rainbow-colored florals. Now that I’m married, we’ve gone for a more sedate look, the way I always knew I would. We always choose the smallest room for our bedroom. We like it cozy. It’s easier to keep warm on cold nights (and easier still, now that I have the biggest, hairiest man I could find). There is nothing in our bedroom but the bed, a nightstand on each side, and a blanket chest at the foot of the mattress. Maybe two feet of space is left between the bed and the wall, all the way around. When we get in bed at night, it’s like being in a tent, or the cabin of a ship. We are enclosed in a small, warm space, like our own little burrow. The bed has a deep pillow top. We spoil ourselves with mounds of soft pillows and a huge, fluffy comforter. In winter, we even have a heated mattress pad. For the first time in my life, I can fall asleep in minutes and stay that way for the next eight or nine hours. Sleep is one of the best parts of our day. I had so much love to give, and it felt like it was just being wasted, like turning up the heat and opening a window. I wanted a MAN, not just any man, but a man who would be my partner in life. My equal. I would find him and make him mine. I would coax him into my lair. He would look around and realize how lucky he was to be there. As it turned out, love crept up on me, rather than the other way around. I almost missed the opportunity because I saw him as a friend, rather than a romance waiting to happen. I did, however, have a welcoming place ready, in my home and in my heart. I built a Temple of Love where we now return each night, remembering what it is to devote yourself utterly to one certain person. It’s not that I’m not attracted to him. Objectively, he is attractive. Everyone agrees. You know how much I talk about him. It just seems like I want him more when he isn’t there. I think about him all day, every day, but when it’s time and I know he’s waiting for me, I can’t seem to get in the mood. I can’t figure him out. What does he want from me? Sometimes I go to bed and wait for him, and who knows what he’s doing, because he’s sure not there with me. Sometimes I wake up at night and he’s gone. Other times, the sun comes up, and I know we’ve spent the night together, but I wasn’t fully present. It’s never as good as I want it to be. I wonder if maybe I’m just impossible to satisfy. But then I think it’s him again. Are we not a good match, or do I have commitment problems? It’s my on-again, off-again relationship with my old boyfriend, Morpheus, the god of sleep. He says I’d rather stay up complaining about our relationship than come to bed. He says it’s like I’d do anything to avoid spending time with him. He says he feels like I care more about playing games, watching movies, or reading than I do about him. I never put him first. In spite of all our problems, in spite of the fact that we have the same argument over and over again, I want him to change first. I want him to be something he isn’t. I hang too many impossible expectations on him. I’ve done things to try to impress him, but not anything that would really mean something. It’s like I want to check off the boxes to prove that I’m trying and everything is really his fault. If only I’d listen, we could turn to each other and find each other again, somehow, one dark night. I wish we could just be together without second-guessing each other all the time. Remember that trip to Cancun? We would stay in the room scandalously late every morning. Then we’d fall into bed for hours every afternoon. We’d make excuses and go to bed early. We couldn’t get enough of each other. When we went home, I felt ten years younger. It felt like a whole new beginning for us. Within three weeks, though, we were back to normal. The honeymoon couldn’t last, could it, not with alarm clocks and commutes and laundry. Maybe that’s part of the problem. The bedroom. It’s not exactly a romantic hideaway. I’m tired, okay? Lots of people keep piles of clean and dirty laundry in their bedrooms. Lots of people have a TV they can watch from the bed. Basically everyone goes to bed with the phone or the tablet or the laptop or the e-reader. It is not just me. I need some downtime, all right? I can hear him saying he’s got better ideas for how I can spend my time in bed. It’s like that’s all he ever thinks about. Sleep, sleep, sleep. He thinks he’s god’s gift to women. Okay, maybe that’s true. I do always get into it if I can stop mentally multi-tasking for five minutes. Why does everything have to be about him though? I’m probably being unfair. I just needed to vent. I’m not going anywhere. We have a lifelong commitment, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sleep, baby, come back to me. I didn’t mean it. I love you. The common cold has struck our house. According to my five-year diary, this seems to be a January kind of a problem. I thought I would share some thoughts about the common cold, as I’ve realized that my experience with it has changed. My poor husband is coughing, wheezing, sleeping around the clock, feeling queasy, and generally having a very bad time. I can tell my immune system is on the prowl, and my energy level is down, but otherwise I’m okay. This is how it’s been the last three or four times the common cold has blown through. After being so sick that I coughed up blood one winter, I assumed that respiratory stuff would be rougher on me as I got older. I was 28 then and I’m 40 now. Fortunately, my assumption seems to have been incorrect. There is never going to be a “cure” for the common cold. I don’t think there will ever be a “cure” for cancer either. These are two categories where it makes far more sense to focus on prevention and living the healthiest lifestyle possible. After all, what rational argument is there for not living the healthiest possible lifestyle? It’s just that common knowledge is not the same as common action. On the other hand, I don’t think common knowledge includes everything that’s important to know. These are the factors I think have helped me boost my immune system the most.
I’m not a doctor. I may be completely, utterly wrong in all my ideas. Just because I don’t really get sick anymore doesn’t mean I understand why. It could be a coincidence. On the other hand, maybe I’m onto something. In the last 22 years, I have virtually never had any kind of stomach bug or digestive issue; I’ve thrown up on only four occasions, the last one nearly 7 years ago. I quit having migraines two years ago. Now I can say that I don’t really get respiratory bugs, either. There are no drawbacks that I can think of to washing our hands more thoroughly, getting plenty of sleep, being functionally fit, eating more cruciferous vegetables, cutting sugar and soda, keeping a cleaner house, or being at a healthy weight. It might even be less expensive to live this way. Making a complete paradigm shift to a lifestyle that is different at a core level is really challenging for most people, though. We prefer to stay in our comfort zones even when they aren’t all that comfortable. I feel a little cruddy as I write this. My hubby has gone back to bed. He came home from work early, took a four-hour nap, went to bed early and slept 12 hours, ate breakfast, and now he’s sleeping again. Leave it to an Upholder like him to be sick over the weekend. Poor guy. I’m glad I feel strong enough to cook dinner tonight. No matter how sick we both get, there are certain things we still do: we still load our dishes in the dishwasher, we still put trash and recycling in their cans, we still eat at the dining table, and we still put our laundry in the hamper. To our way of thinking, it takes the same amount of time to put a dish in the dishwasher as it does to put it in the sink. It takes the same amount of time to drop clothes in the hamper as it does to drop them on the floor. There is always a tail end to a sickness, when we’re trying to get from 70% to 100%, and it’s no fun to try to clean up a disaster area when our energy levels are still low. Maybe the bathtub doesn’t get scrubbed one week, and that’s fine, because that only means two weeks between cleanings. Being sick is one of many times when it pays to live an orderly life the rest of the year. I hope I’ve presented some ideas that may be helpful. The common cold is something we all understand, one of those annoyances that should help us feel compassionate toward one another. One way to demonstrate that compassion is to hole up at home when we suspect we’re contagious. We can also demonstrate compassion toward ourselves. We can take care of ourselves, treat our bodies as well as we know how, and try to avoid bummers like a cold. Sometimes I get mad at my body. I expect all my body parts to work together as a team, but every now and then, one of them quits on me. “Traitor!” I say to my ankle. “You need to get with the program!” After over a year of rehabbing and resting and generally depriving myself of any athletic outlet, my ankle finally felt ready to run again. Almost immediately afterward, I tripped and fell on the sidewalk and ripped the skin off my knee. (Well, both knees, both hands, and an elbow). This happened five days before a hiking trip 900 miles away, for which I had already bought my plane ticket. I went on the trip, bringing a fully-stocked first aid kit for my still-bloody knee, and came home with blisters under both my big toenails. At this rate, I’ll be lucky if I’m running by Thanksgiving. I can’t even wear pants or proper shoes right now. Body, why can’t you just give me what I want all the time? Sometimes I feel panic when I consider my body. Sunburns are one of these times. I still have a brown tiger stripe across my lower back from a second-degree sunburn I got there over a year ago. (A tough area to keep covered, since it is so hard to find pants small enough to stay up where they belong). About once a year, I am careless with the sunblock, and I get a bad burn on my chest. There is a mole there where there wasn’t one ten years ago, and every morning, I examine it fretfully, afraid it will turn on me. My gums. Oh, my gums. I may be aging in reverse in many ways, but my receding gums are the bane of my life. Thirty years of grinding my teeth, chewing through four mouth guards, wearing through amalgam fillings in 18 months… I wish I could start over. I’d go through teething like a baby if only I could have a fresh new mouth. I look at myself, with my stretch marks and spider veins and my one Rasputiny chin hair, and I sigh with disappointment. Sometimes I wish I was better looking. Other times, I feel like that would be an irritating complication in my life. The dream of invisibility is more compelling for me than the dream of physical beauty. I used to be fat – significantly fatter than I thought I was. I have stretch marks on my calves, knees, thighs, hips, and butt. In some ways, I carry them as tangible proof that I used to live on an alternate timeline, in a parallel universe. In other ways, they crush my spirit. They’ll never go away. They don’t itch anymore, the way they used to when they were still stretching, and they’re not purple anymore either. Still, I’m disappointed when I see them. When I was at my heaviest, I used to play with the fat roll on my belly. I addressed it affectionately as my “jelly roll.” I would grab a handful and hang on to it. It interested me. It was comforting. I didn’t think I “looked fat” – I was smaller than most of my friends, and I thought of myself as “average.” I had seen a statistic about the proportions of the average American woman, and I was marginally taller and weighed slightly less. (Or thought I did. I hadn’t weighed in for quite a while and I know I would have been surprised if I knew the truth). I had nothing to worry about. I felt attractive to men. I never felt the body shame that so many women seem to feel. I’ve been angry with my body. I used to ride my bike around, swearing to myself. “F.U., thyroid gland! You can’t do this to me!” When I would get migraines, I would cry into my ears, in fits of rage and humiliation that my body once again insisted on being so demanding. It wanted something, I knew not what, and I felt helpless and powerless against it. I would wake up in my dining room or living room or standing in the middle of our mattress, shaking and crying, heart hammering, with no memory of how I got there. These moments were the worst: Mortification that my body ran around with screams coming out, while I was sound asleep and unable to control it. Deep fear that I had started opening doors during my night terrors, and that I would run out into traffic one night and be killed, the way others with my condition have. Disquiet that I might attack my husband and that I would have to start tying myself to the bed, the way others have. I would like a new body, please, and a new brain, too, if one is available. Fortunately, I’m on top of it. I haven’t had a pavor nocturnus episode in about a year, and it’s been longer than that since I had a migraine. My thyroid nodule went away many years ago. I’m at a healthy weight. I may not have all the skin on my knee that I want right now, and I have no idea how long it takes a blister under a nail to go away. Generally, though, my body is fit and healthy and ready to go. I would be in better shape if I had a longer attention span and if I stayed more alert to my physical parameters. I’m always pushing at the limits, trying to go farther and faster, and pushing myself 1% too far. It’s hard to miss the epic levels of shame that people are feeling toward their bodies. Someone shares an article about it nearly every day. I don’t identify with this feeling, though. When I was heavy, it was pretty obvious to me that my life wasn’t working. Fibromyalgia, migraines, mysterious hair loss… The more I learned about nutrition (and applied it), the better I slept, the more active I got, the better I felt. My annoying health problems pulled the carpet out from under me less frequently. I started to realize that significant time had elapsed since the last time I had had X or Y problem. I felt and looked stronger. I began to trust my body more. My thighs and abs look amazing. I like my body more at 40 than I have at any time in my life. I feel like what people are interpreting as a negative emotional reaction to external forces (such as “the culture”) is ineluctably tinged with an interior dismay that various internal systems are out of balance. There is a sense of rightness inside the body when it is well rested, fully hydrated, fed the proper amount of micronutrients, and allowed to move as much as it wants. I am not sure how someone could feel that rightness in a state of chronic sleep deprivation, nutritional imbalance or deficiency, dehydration, weak muscles contributing to bad posture contributing to constant aches and pains, and/or a chronic health condition. I certainly never did. When I was sick, I didn’t care how I looked; I went to the movies once in my nightgown, with my hair unbrushed, because DEAL WITH IT. I wasn’t ashamed, I was just ill. Now that I’m healthy, I wouldn’t care if I grew a tail and everyone stared at it, because I’m grateful and I feel good for once. It is possible to wake up and feel glad to start a new day. It is possible to see yourself naked in the mirror and think, “AWW YEAH!” It is possible to wrestle chronic illness to the ground and put your boot on its neck. It is possible to feel triumph rippling through your body. I believe that in many ways, I am aging in reverse, and that I will be physically stronger, faster, and more agile in ten years than I am today. I believe I will look better at 60 than I did at 30. I’m proud of my body now. I appreciate my resilience and strength and grit. When people stare at my body, as they do sometimes, I square my shoulders and hold my head up. This is what a marathoner looks like. (Well, a slow one). This is what a survivor looks like. Body, you disappoint me sometimes, but we’re still a team, and a good one. Now, about this knee… My parrot is more of a ‘sound effects’ bird than a talker. I often think, though, that if she ever added a phrase to her repertoire (other than “Hi Noelie”), it would either be “I’ve tried everything,” “It’s the texture,” or “You don’t know what it’s like.” (How do you know I don’t know what it’s like?) There is a glaring loophole in the idea that one has “tried everything.” The statement is like a bumper sticker for a certain mindset. The loophole behind “I’ve tried everything” is that whatever I was doing before is the behavior package that created the problem. That means it’s defunct. Whatever I do wind up doing, I know going in that I’m going to have to say goodbye to my current comfort zone. If I’m dating someone who refuses to stop cheating on me, it doesn’t matter what I try, I just need to kick his happy little butt to the curb. If I’m trying to quit smoking, the base issue is that I started in the first place. If I’m struggling to lose weight, my default settings are where the extra weight came from. “I’ve tried everything” implies that I’m behaving in precisely the same way as everyone else, and getting different results, because I am a special snowflake. (I used to work with a heavy smoker who had cancer and a stroke, and would pontificate about how these conditions were 100% genetic. Then he died of a heart attack. The gods, they are so cruel). A Google search on “I’ve tried everything” turns up: Let’s do the sleep one. Having dealt with pavor nocturnus for years, and beat it, I have a certain amount of credibility. Sleep issues are complicated. Changing one input is never enough. I’ve become a “morning person” who wakes up at 7:30 AM on weekends, I sleep 8 hours a night, and I haven’t had night terrors in a year. It feels better than you would even imagine. However. It took years. It didn’t all happen at once. Now that I sleep so beautifully, the greatest luxury in life (followed only by having sound digestion), I can easily recognize a very long list of inputs that have the potential to disrupt my sleep. (Alcohol, caffeine, eating too much, eating too late at night, paprika, red pepper flakes, curry, drinking any liquid after 8 PM, napping, looking at my phone screen late at night…) In the past, I would attribute my insomnia to bright light coming in the window, or loud noises, or genetics. Now, I can fall asleep even when there are bright lights or loud noises. My sleep habits were so stochastic that it was really hard for me to suss out any patterns. It turned out that they started to resolve themselves as a bonus effect of making other changes. My insomnia and parasomnias (bruxism, restless leg syndrome, confusional arousal, etc) were probably the result of nutritional (magnesium) deficiency, compounded by chronic sleep deprivation. I married a man who is a comically sound sleeper, an early bird, and a lifelong athlete. His sleep habits worked for him, and I got them by osmosis.
Me: Belief in genetic legacy of insomnia. Reading in bed. “Catching up” on sleep by sleeping late on weekends and napping whenever I could. Sugary snacks at bedtime (identified to be the prime trigger for my night terrors). Sedentary habits. Coping with exhaustion by drinking caffeinated soda or green tea. Chronically dehydrated and didn’t know it. My husband: Upholder from family with early bedtime (9 PM; I am not kidding). Athlete. Wakes up at same time every day and bounces out of bed. Goes to bed, turns out the light, and falls asleep. Has pillow-arrangement system to prevent snoring, which I agree seems to work. It transpires that he taught himself, around the age of 6, some kind of Jedi mind trick to make himself fall asleep and program his dreams. I had “tried everything” to fix my sleep problem (except going to a sleep lab – herp de derp!). In college, I went to the health center with a tote bag of sleep interventions and dumped them all out on the exam table. Earplugs, an eye mask, a white noise generator, various herbal supplements, chamomile tea, lavender-scented everything, melatonin, subliminal CDs, bath salts (the bath kind)… I was even taking a yoga class. The doctor said, “Wow, you must be really frustrated!” She referred me to the school psychiatrist, to make sure I didn’t have a brain tumor or something. He prescribed both Sonata and Ambien, neither of which worked for me. Fixing my nutrition, exercising, drinking enough water, quitting soda, changing my schedule, and learning to trust in my natural ability to sleep were what did work. (Note: I do use melatonin regularly now. I take 5 mg every night. It took several months before it started working, and I have found significant variation in quality between brands. My mistake when I first tried it was in turning to it on isolated nights, after tossing and turning for hours. I now take it at 8:30 PM, after experimentation to figure out when it would kick in. Too early and it doesn’t work. The obvious skeptical response would be, What if melatonin is the relevant input and the rest doesn’t matter? I would respond, Try it for three months. If it works, great! If it doesn’t work, add in the other inputs, all of which have additional benefits to offer). “I’ve tried everything” – except living an overall healthier lifestyle, modeling the behaviors of a successful sleeper, or consulting sleep experts. “I’ve tried everything” – except being consistent and keeping records over a significant period of time. “I’ve tried everything and still can’t poop.” Have you tried keeping a meticulous food diary for several months and tracking your water, fiber, and micronutrient intake? Do you even know the RDA for dietary fiber for your age and gender? Do you eat vegetables? Or are you looking at this as an isolated incident? “I’ve tried everything and can’t quit smoking.” Did you go to a doctor and ask to be put on nicotine replacement therapy? Are you hanging around with other smokers every day? Are you still shopping at stores that sell cigarettes? “I’ve tried everything and can’t lose weight.” I’ve been told by multiple people, “It is physically impossible for me to lose weight.” Oh? Did you get that in writing from a medical professional? Did you ask for a second opinion? I had thyroid disease and fibromyalgia and I lost weight. If I had it to do over again, I would ask to be referred to a nutritionist and put on a medically supervised diet. I don’t know anyone who has done this. I hesitate to mention this, but I follow a plant-based diet, and when people say “I’ve tried everything,” they generally have not tried that. Most have not tried keeping a food log, either. I resisted tracking what I ate for years, because it was the worst, most annoying thing I could imagine. As it turned out, the food log quickly revealed all my ineffective eating patterns, of which there were several. It’s hard to argue with greater self-awareness, metrics, and the scientific method. Name a problem, and there will be a large segment of the population that does not experience that problem. Whatever those people are doing, it works for them. The secret is to figure out the parameters of that range of effective behaviors, and then imitate it completely. If you made a Venn diagram of my sleep habits and my husband’s, the only overlap would be that we both slept in a bed. The more my circle started overlapping his, the better we both slept, since he no longer has to chase me through the house after I wake him up sleep-screaming. People with retirement savings have a predictable set of behaviors; people with well-trained dogs have a predicable set of behaviors; people who are punctual have a predictable set of behaviors. People who are lean and fit have a predictable set of behaviors. People with clean, organized homes… You get the idea. “I’ve tried everything” except make a radical and systemic change to a completely different paradigm. “I’ve tried everything” except whatever it is that actually works. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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