Much needed sleep

 What do you do when you can’t get to sleep? 

Do you get up and watch TV, do yoga, meditate, or play games on your phone until 4 AM?  Is it better to toss and turn while solving the problems of the universe, at least in your head? Clean your house, fold laundry, or some other mundane task?   There is always the proverbial warm milk trick.  No, I have never tried it. I don’t like warm milk.  I don’t know how this would help in sleeping. 

Sleeping is good for you.  It is needed for a very long list of things.  Just ask Google.  Sleep is required.  A good night’s rest is so essential that not getting it is stressful.  And we end up stressing over not getting enough.  How long must you be awake before taking a sleeping aid?  Or when is it too late to take a sleeping aid because you need to get up in the morning? Is a sleep aid even worth it?

Just turn your mind off, concentrate on your breath, focus on one thing, breathe, and let your thoughts just come into your brain and leave them without any deeper connections.   Be at peace, relax, and a good morning will come.  Bull shit. 

What exactly does that mean? How do you turn your brain off and why would you actually really want to?  Even unconscious I like to keep breathing and I want my heart to keep beating. I prefer to be woken up so I can go to the bathroom before wetting the bed.  Or have my brain wake me up in any other emergency.  Some part of my brain always has to be on. 

You’re worried you’re anxious, your mind just keeps running, and that’s why you can’t sleep...... It’s too hot, too cold, the bed is too hard or soft, dinner isn’t setting well… Yeah well, whatever. 

What if you are just not wired to be a morning person and you would rather get stuff done at 3 AM and sleep till noon? Trying to force yourself to go to bed at nine and get up at six for what?  What if it’s just better for you to stay awake and not being able to sleep is your body’s way of saying hey we don’t want to sleep we have stuff we wanta do not sleep through it. 

We live in a world of sleeping aids, breathing techniques, alarm clocks, and caffeine.  It may be the chicken or the egg thing, but I would say that one is in direct correlation to the other.  You can’t sleep because you have caffeine.  You need caffeine because you can’t wake up with all the sleeping aids you took.  Maybe it’s the other way around, it doesn’t really matter.  

Who said the world had to get up at 6 AM drive through traffic have lunch at 11:30 work until five and drive through traffic again?  Why is that the norm?  If it were natural would we need alarm clocks and sleeping pills?  Just because the farmers got up with the cows doesn’t mean the rest of us have to.  I mean after all none of us are cows or rosters.  And anyone who is ever been near a rooster knows it crows all day long whenever it feels like and rarely ever is it just because the sun came up. 

If your natural body clock is NOT to go to bed at 10, get up at 6 fight traffic, and then follow the crowd home at five, what do you do?  Are you destined for a world of sleeping pills and caffeine?  Do you find yourself a second-shift job and fuck the norm? Would you be happier working the night shift?  Are those really options for most people?  Yes, they are. 

We are a society forced to play by arbitrary rules set by people who don’t exist and centuries before clocks were made.  It's all because of agriculture.  That has been the norm because that’s the way the farmers worked.  NOT!!!!  When the world was an agricultural society, the farmers worked when the crops and the animals needed them.  They also took long breaks in the afternoon since it was often too hot to work outside during the heat of the day.

What happened to afternoon naps?  Hello siesta.

Most of us do not live in a world where we can set our own schedules and sleep according to our natural rhythms.  It would be totally wonderful if that actually could happen.  How much healthier and better we would be.