Sleep, Sleep, Sleep

“Innocent sleep. Sleep that soothes away all our worries. Sleep that puts each day to rest. Sleep that relieves the weary laborer and heals hurt minds.”  Shakespeare

So many people have a nightly struggle with sleep. Not having enough time seems to be the biggest complaint. And then, when there is time, inability to fall asleep or stay asleep kicks in. What is causing these problems?  Are we really too busy in our daily life not to be able to squeeze out 6 to 8 hours for rest? Or do we place such a low priority on rest that we make sure not to allow time for the daily requirement our body needs to repair and rebuild?

I used to put off bed time because I knew as soon as I fell asleep, the worries of the day would catch up with me.  The brain has a funny way of doing this to us.  It never lets us off the hook when we try to push away troublesome events or ignore things that really require our attention. All the work that was left unfinished or the phone calls that weren’t returned somehow manage to pop up in the middle of the night to either wake us up or give us disturbing dreams.  How often I have just gotten up after a few hours of sleep and started working again simply to relieve the weight of work worry. And there were more than a few times I could not fall asleep because I was rerunning the events of the day in my mind. Not the good events, of course. No, the focus was always on the things I should have said when a fellow employee or the boss was out of line. And sometimes it would be a comment I should have said to a client to help them over a rough time or to better explain something to them.

But now that I am semi retired, sleep wraps around me like a warm blanket on a cool evening. I no longer have work worries and the only daily problems I have to face are decisions about what to eat or when to do laundry. I’m afraid to admit this but here it is. These days I not only get a good night’s sleep but also an hour nap after lunch. I wonder if I would have been a better, more alert worker if I could have had one of those daily after lunch naps. Too late to question it now, but somehow I think it would have been a good thing.

“The replenishing thing that comes with a nap–you end up with two mornings in a day”  Pete Hamill