Chemistry’s Simpler than Formula for Sleep

Chili fries. Ugh!

I’ve had trouble sleeping for decades. Finally, I went to my doctor last year and got a prescription for a mild sedative. The pill helps me drop off to dreamland most nights, but not that evening last week when I decided to medicate my bruised ego with an impulse purchase of chili fries to accompany my take-out dinner order.

Being a show-me-and show-me-again-and-again kind of guy, though, I tried a dose — an overdose, actually – of the greasy “comfort food”, which led not only to a night of tossing and turning but also a large, daylong serving of heartburn, with a side order of self-loathing.

Foolish me. I hardly needed help getting another session of fitful sleep. I sleep quite discomfortably without help, thank you. What I do need, perpetually, is what doctors call good sleep hygiene.

The specialists state that the bed should be used for just two purposes, and one of them involves sleep. The operating principle is that the body and brain must be trained to recognize the bed as the place for sleep; any other use of the slumber couch confuses the easily distracted mind. Watching TV, web surfing, reading, texting/talking on the phone or midnight munching should be done elsewhere

 The other keys to good sleep hygiene include abstaining from food after 8 p.m. (ideally after 6); eating the smallest meal of the day at suppertime; not drinking caffeine after dark; and avoiding exercise or stimulation (I’m talking about action movies, TV shows, video games or upsetting conversations) before sleep. In other words, prepare yourself for bed the same way you would a child – by providing a calm, quiet environment for the vital rest that restores the body’s hormones during deep, continuous sleep. And, of course, get to bed early and sleep eight hours, the pros advise us.

If the above sounds like a primer, it is…for me. I need to say it, write it, repeat it constantly so that someday I actually will follow my own advice (hmm, practice what I preach; now there’s another blog topic).

Chili fries aside, I generally eat healthy food in reasonable quantities at dinnertime and don’t snack late at night. I don’t use my phone near bedtime, I refrain from Words with Friends and other online games in the boudoir. I don’t drink caffeine, ever, and I don’t exercise after dark. I even build in quiet time for prayer and journaling before shutting the light.

As for the TV part, though, well, I don’t follow the doctors’ orders. The TV is our nightlight and white-noise machine throughout the wee hours. My wife maintains that the sonorous stories on Murder She Wrote drown out my snoring and allow her to fall asleep. Unfortunately, as an up-and-down sleeper awake every two hours and find myself falling into those silly plots. Or worse, they insinuate themselves into the next dream when I nod off again. I’m not ready (and hope never to be) to sleep in a separate room, so that’s not part of a potential solution.

Now, about those frequent interruptions in my sleep. It seems to matter not a whit whether I did or did not drink fluids close to bedtime; I simply have to use the bathroom anywhere from two to five times a night (my record was 16 in a six-hour period one long-short night recently). The sleep medication usually helps me get through a couple of potential wakeups but never all of them. Not ever.

I was seriously considering replacing my aging plumbing with PVC tubing but I’m still too attached to my original equipment to take any such action. In truth, I’ve been to several urologists and have tried a number of medications with no success.

For me, poor sleep (when not chili-fry-induced) is all about anxiety. And not even capital “A” anxiety, either. The issue could be something as simple as knowing I have to be up early for an appointment or meeting. Even though I have my alarm set, my brain will ring out intermittently during the night, directing my eyes to the digital clock to check the time. Given my hair-trigger worry-ometer, any pending or unresolved big problem will assure me a yo-yoing night’s sleep.

I’ve tried all the remedies; I know all the tricks. I simply have to accept that this is the way my model came off the assembly line.

  Oh, and going to bed at a reasonable hour surely would help. But, again, that’s a whole nother blog (as is the ungrammatical term “a whole nother”). If you don’t hear from me soon, it means I fell asleep on the keyboardddddddddddddddddddddddddddddzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.