Thought for Food

It’s Sleep Week on Noraleah.com (apparently)

After yesterday’s three posts on the subject, I laughed when I saw this week’s GOOP topic: sleep!

There are lots of tips, some of which I doubt I’ll use (stop using an alarm clock? really?), but this one in particular seems like something I should embrace:

Create an Electronic Sundown

By 10 pm, stop sitting in front of your computer or TV screen and switch off all other electronic devices. They are too stimulating to the brain and inhibit the release of these sleep neurotransmitters.

Here that Internet? I’m gonna quit you at 10 pm. So there!

The Backpack Theory

More on sleep, from the archives…

A health guru once described sleep to me this way:

For every hour we are awake, we collect a brick in the metaphorical backpack that we carry around in life.

For every hour that we sleep, we lighten our load by 2 bricks.

So in order to maintain well-rested equilibrium, we must sleep half the time we are awake (i.e., 8 hours a night). One or a few nights of less sleep do not immediately effect most of us, but if that balance is out of whack for too long, we end up with 30 bricks in our backpack. Even getting 7 or 8 hours of sleep doesn’t help much, and we drag ourselves around all day….

Sleep Challenge: 9 hours, 1 week

Thank you, friends, for your advice regarding my sleeping problem!

After reading my post, Jane wrote to me to tell me she is on Day 3 of a week-long Sleep Challenge that a professor teaching a law and psychology class at her law school gave to his students. He’s encouraging them to create healthy sleep patterns because studies have shown that more than anything else — family, friends, job, money, love, exercise — sleep has the biggest effect on happiness.

He may be referring to the study cited by Arianna Huffington (who is also taking a Sleep Challenge):

It found that getting just a little more sleep had a greater effect on a person’s state of mind than a large increase in income. According to psychology professor Norbert Schwarz, one of the authors of the study, “Making $60,000 more in annual income has less of an effect on your daily happiness than getting one extra hour of sleep a night.”

It didn’t take much to convince Jane or myself that sleep is a key to happiness. I feel pessimistic about the world and awful about myself today, I can barely concentrate — and why? Just because I got a bad night’s sleep.

So here’s the professor’s challenge, in Jane’s words:

he says you need 9 hours a night (NO EXCUSE) for a full week.  eight hours of sleep, and one hour ritual pre-sleep.  he says the first half hour of that time you do the same thing every night (it can be a bath, reading, sex, whatever, but it has to be the same thing) then the second half-hour is just laying in bed to allow yourself to fall asleep and ensure you get the full 8 hrs.

I’m going to commit to the challenge when I get home from California. Maybe I can even convince my favorite nightowl to take part, too.

Who’s with me?

My left eye is twitching. Now my right.

I’m very tired. Sharing a bed with a nightowl who doesn’t work an office job and so doesn’t get up ‘til like 9:30 or 10 am is tough sometimes.

I believe that I’ll only get ahead if I wake up early to workout and start my Day of Achievement (TM). My inspiration, cheesy as it is, is the Obamas, who get up at 5:30 to hit the gym (if they can run the country, raise two kids, and workout every morning, surely I can do 45 minutes of cardio before I leave for work).

But I’m a light sleeper (even with the help of Tylenol PM, earplugs, and relaxation exercises), and he likes to stay out or stay up late. I rarely sleep through his getting into bed, and sometimes I’m jolted awake when I reach for him and he’s not there.

I’m really at a loss here. Any suggestions?