The Sleep Expert

All my life I’ve heard that good health requires eight hours of sleep a night. This morning on the radio, however, some sleep expert was saying that people who sleep seven hours a night live longer than people who sleep eight. Why weren't we told this before? It is pretty upsetting to think we’ve been wasting that extra hour a night under the impression it was going to keep us healthy, and then find out we were misled into engaging in life-threatening bedtime behavior. This makes the WMD story look like a little white lie!

My guess is this cover-up was perpetrated by the mattress industry. Face it, the more you sleep the better it is for Big Bedding.

We’ve all heard those mattress mountebanks say, “You spend one-third of your life in bed”. That sounds like a lot. It’s worth investing in a good mattress for one-third of your life. But “you spend seven twenty-fourths, or 29.1666666667 percent, of your life in bed” just doesn’t sound so persuasive. Heck, for 29 percent I could sleep on the floor.

Clearly, more time in bed means more wear and tear on the mattress, which means more frequent replacement, which means more of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sleepyhead's money going into the ill gotten coffers of the Sleep Cartel.

Pretty clever, these mattress boys. Pretty clever, indeed.

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The sleep expert went on to discuss common sleep problems which keep some people from getting their solid seven. I personally have little trouble sleeping. It is easy for me to let the cares of the day drift away whilst the moon goddess Selene gently osculates me into the slumber of the innocent, as the gentle rise and fall of the waves................................................

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..........Sorry, I nodded off there for a minute.

Occasionally my wife has trouble sleeping, though, so I relayed to her these suggestions from the sleep expert:

1. Don’t read or watch TV in bed. Bed is for sleeping and you must train your mind to know that.


2. If you find yourself lying awake at night worrying about things, set aside a "worry time" before you go to bed to work those things out, or even write them in a journal. Then by the time you’re in bed you won’t have them on your mind.


3. No matter how much your husband snores do not poke him, kick him, or tell him to roll over. Under no circumstances must your husband’s sleep be disturbed.

Okay, I threw in that last one myself, but, hey, if I don’t get my 29 percent I’m just no damn good.