Are you ready for some diesel grade sleep tips?
Good. ’cause we’re jumping right in today.
No annoying intro. No background on why sleep’s important. Just tips you’ve never read before.
So, here we go:
1. Stay up late
Don’t have to be at work til 10? Then you can totally go to bed at midnight. I mean, 8 hours is 8 hours right? It doesn’t matter that months of doing this have added massive bags under your eyes and made you wake up in Arby’s parking lots with sauce all over your face. The logic makes sense to you, so just stick with the A.M. bedtimes. Cuz repeating the exact same stuff and expecting different results is totally sane.
2 Waste time on social media
Don’t listen to the innumerable studies or mind the imaging studies of your mind snorting up lines of iPhone. Don’t heed the research saying that too much scrolling addicts and depletes the function of your brain, contributing to depression and fatigue. If I can’t snort, smoke or drink it, it’s not a drug and it’s not messing with anything. Much like the myth of carbon monoxide, we all know that what you can’t see can’t hurt you. Plus, all that awful posture you stick yourself in while Smoegal’ing over your phone means you’ll toss and turn in bed later, which totally burns calories and eventually wears you out so you fall asleep. Win-win, am I right?
3. Drink caffeine and just counteract it later
No caffeine in the afternoon? Who came up with that wheelbarrow full’ve of BS? I mean, really. How do they expect me to get through the second half of my day? Oh, I get it, you think it’ll keep me up late tonight when it’s shut eye time. No worries, love. That’s what tip number 4 and/or 5 is for…
4. Alcohol
Sure, I come home a little keyed up from caffeine, stress, and the chronic fantasy all commute long of taking a flamethrower equipped tank through traffic, mowing down all of I-95, and Optimus priming into a chopper that GTFO’s before the authorities arrive. That’s true. But that’s what alcohol is for. It doesn’t matter if studies have shown how it just makes you more restless all night after luring you in with a false sense of serenity initially. (Or that it eventually doesn’t work at all after you build a tolerance.) Maybe just drinking more will help. I mean, it’s totally worked for everyone else you know who does it. Right? Plus, caffeine’s non-negotiatiable, buddy. So this has to be too.
Unless…
5. Drugs
… Unless Lunesta? Or Ambien? I mean why not take a pill every night to fall asleep? The guy in the white coat who gets an extra check for every bottle of it he prescribes to me and the other twitchy patrons I’m in his waiting room with said it’s safe. So, who cares if the side effect list is so long you can’t read it even with a subatomic particle microscope? Who cares if you wake up inside your own oven wearing tin foil and rocking a reverse Mohawk? At least you slept (kinda) right?
6. Work in bed
Fine. Maybe we took it a bit far. Mayhaps we should venture in the other direction and let productivity wear us down in lieu. Surely sitting in bed, replying to emails and writing drafts for work can’t be adverse to nap time? Right? Right, then. Fastforward to nine or ten-ish. We feel good ’cause we got a good productive hour under our belts before bed. So, let’s wrap up, put it to the side, lay down, and turn the lights out. Now I can slee-… Oh wait – dd I save that draft? (*Checks phone. Puts back down. Closes eyes.*) Oh wait – did I actually send Becky the attachments in that email? (*Checks phone. Puts back down. Closes eyes.*) WAIT- did I set my alarm?!
Yeah, working from bed is working so well.
Okay.
By now you probably (hopefully) understand that this list of sleep anathema is actually satire. (Right? We get that?) As promised, these are 6 tips you’ve never heard – mostly because no sane person would ever say them. But then, let me ask you this: if this is such clearly terrible advice no one would ever follow, ever, when they wanted a good sleep, then why are we taking it? Because that’s what we’re all doing when we sofa surf into the witching hour or stay up late on our devices – regardless of whether it’s to drool over soche-meed feeds or get actual work done.
I’ll tell ya why. Because we don’t know how to balance, most of us. We’re so addicted to our waking lives that we don’t put enough effort into our resting lives. But the reality’s that each one should be preparation for the other. Getting to sleep earlier takes into consideration that we’ll be able to wake up earlier with a quality rest fueling us through the day. And avoiding chemicals that make us restless takes into consideration that we want to get to sleep earlier, so all’ve that can actually happen. In reality, if we just started slumbering earlier, we could wake up earlier to get all our busy work done. We’d be rested enough to skip that afternoon second triple shot latte that keeps us doing the human rotisserie, spinning around on the mattress all night. We’d get more accomplished (thanks to an optimally operating brain that can properly task manage) so we wouldn’t have to sit stiff in bed, wide eyed and wired with stress.
Imbalance is why we take the bad advice no one (but our self destructive side) would be dumb enough to give.
Realize and change that, and you can reclaim your whole life by balancing out its lucid and snoozy sides.