That Time of Day is Whiskey Time

This isn't actually related to the blog above (below?), but one of the sleep hygeine suggestions, #15, is to quit worrying. And how do we quit worrying? "Find a time during the day to get all of your worries out of your system." I guess the idea is that worrying a lot early in the day will keep you from worrying later on? I can just imagine what would happen.

I Wrote This Blog at 5:30 AM

Along with eating less, Americans can't stop thinking about how to sleep more. Why anyone would want to sleep more (anyone who's not suicidally depressed, I should say) is beyond me. It keeps you from being sleepy, of course, but to my mind, being sleepy is chiefly a problem because it's a harbinger of... still more sleep.

As someone who eats too little and sleeps too much, I find our national conversation frustrating and alienating. I don't want to know 4 easy tricks to end my meal with food still on my plate. I need the four tricks to eating more. Likewise, I sleep just way too much. It could be worse, but I sure don't like wasting that much time.

So I wish I hadn't found out about www.sleepeducation.com. Naturally, it's a website that claims to be about sleep in general, but tacitly assumes that your problem is insomnia. On the Sleepiness Scale, testing how likely you are to nod off in certain situations, I rate a perfect zero, so the test tells me, "Congratulations you are getting enough sleep!" I'm not surprised, since I slept 11 hours last night, and slept like a baby.

(On a related note, one of the situations is, "Lying down to rest in the afternoon when circumstances permit." This is something normal people feel like they have to do? And if so, I don't know why they go on living.)

The website also offers this "Sleep Hygeine" checklist, no doubt to help people *increase* the amount of time they spend unconscious with their mouths wide open. No thanks. Reading the instructions contrarily, I gather that to sleep less I should be smoking and drinking right before bedtime, and playing cards in bed. And apparently I should be popping sleeping pills. Clearly the trick is to foster a party atmosphere in bed. After all, as the sages at Sleepeducation.com put it, "[Bed] is not a place to go when you are bored.""