Sleep: Good for What Ails You

Finish this sentence in the privacy and courage of your own bedroom: "I know I am tired when__________." If you have a burning urge to tell someone, then write it down, wad it up, and wing it out the window. And that could be the window of said bedroom, car, tractor, office complex or classroom. (Just make sure the window is down.) Here's my confession: I know I am tired when I let my daughter (or wife) do the driving, with me in the passenger's seat. That's how I felt yesterday when my piano-teacher daughter - Number Three, if you're counting (and still Number Three, even if you're not counting) - had to drive me home from work. It was one of those sudden and overwhelming feelings of exhaustion that hit me, sometime between Spelling and PE - between a base word and a baseline, if you will. By the time I got home I passed on supper, headed to bed for the evening. (Interpretation: When I skip a meal for sleep, I must be really tired.) I was comatose for hours, then staggered around till midnight, and finished off this grand scenario by sleeping in the next day. (Sleeping in, for an old goat like me, is sometime between 7:00 A.M. and 7:30 A.M.) While I am unaccustomed to spending any of your valuable time discussing the personal quirks of my household, I indulge here because I believe I have a possible solution for many of this world's ills. It's called sleep. And the more we do of it at certain, deliberate times, the better off we would be. If you sleep when you should be eating, you won't eat as much, unless, of course, you are counting sheep. (Uhmm, one lamb chop, two lamb chops...) If you sleep when you are sad, you will be sad for eight hours less. A hockey player can be complimented for being a sleeper, -- a guy with latent talent, I suppose. (Is that where the expression, "He shoots, he snores," comes from? I didn't think so.) If you sleep during church, you might sleep right through the offering, and thereby save a dollar a week. Speaking of sleeping in church, I don't drink coffee before I attend services: I tend to toss and turn all through the sermon. And on that coffee note: Some people cannot drink coffee after the middle of the afternoon, for the simple reason that it would keep them awake well into the night. That doesn't bother me at all: I can drink coffee just before I turn off the light, then sleep like a baby. It is a no-brainer that sleep is the ultimate panacea for headaches, listlessness, and overall weariness. On a slightly more serious note, I am alarmed at how many people I know that have some sort of sleep disorder. They either find it hard to go to sleep or hard to get back to sleep once they've woken up. I am no doctor nor the son of a doctor, but I wonder if they are too stimulated all day - and so nightfall becomes a real battleground to slow down, turn in, and drop off. There is little more satisfying than going to bed early, along with a good book and a mug of something hot (which is not the same as a pitcher of moi). Oh, one more positive solution that sleep brings: If you sleep when your daughter is driving, you will be freaked out less.