Sleep Deprivation

There are those of us who have a difficult time achieving peaceful slumber. We cannot get to sleep. We awake in the middle of the night and we cannot get back to sleep. Forty million Americans share our frustration. We are called insomniacs.

We suffer from sleep impotence. Braggarts are thrusting their chests out and boasting that they had eight, nine and sometimes more hours of sleep. Seriously ? We want witnesses. It is not as if we do not want sleep. We do. We want it . We need it. It is an essential part of our physical, emotional and mental health. It re-energizes us. It refreshes us.

Yet thirty percent of adults suffer from insomnia. No surprise that most of them are women. We think about everything when our exhausted heads hit the pillows. We hear barking dogs. We hear screeching tires. We hear crying babies. We hear the person next to us snoring. We hear voices that are not there.

In the movie The Money Pit, Tom Hanks' character gets trapped in the floor and is awake all night and at one point confesses that he thinks he saw the Care Bears. Hallucinations come with the territory. If you truly want to be thoroughly creeped out, invest in a noise machine. After two thousand repetitions of the same noises, the machine becomes satanic and starts telling you things like you will never sleep again, or you filed your taxes incorrectly.

Our brains go into overdrive when everyone else is relaxing. We begin to think of checklists dating back thirty years. Did I turn in that term paper? Is the iron turned off ? Did I pick up the prescription ? Did I mail my checks to save the sealions and redwoods and Democratic party ? If I did not then the ozone will disappear because of me. Entire human rights and environmental movements will fail because of me. Those are our disturbing thoughts.

If we accidentally choose television late at night we are bombarded with erectile dysfunction ads and unsettling programming. Should we drink ? Should we eat? Should we self-medicate? Sleeping aids are a $20 billion dollar industry. Suckers. You bought the noise machines. We do not need more noise. We need a telethon for sleep deprivation. We need a star-studded affair demanding research and results. We need sleep.

We must embrace the nap. A mere 45 minute nap can improve your mood and memory. Banking sleep over the weekend does not work. We have to incorporate the naps into a habit. Just like drinking warm milk can help us go to sleep. But it is not the milk but the habit of it that comforts and relaxes us.

Sleep is a challenging state for many of us. Know that it can help us to live longer, lose weight, have improved concentration and focus. We have to work at it one night at a time.

Count sheep. Count bottles of beer on the wall. Count the number of reality television shows that you find absurd. Count the Counting Crows. Count Dracula. Count Chocula. Count me in.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.