Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Sleeping is making me stress about sleeping

Apparently too little sleep makes you fat. And apparently too much sleep also makes you fat. One would think there would be some magical calculation out there for the optimal number of hours you need, but I keep seeing conflicting information. Add to this my own social observation of my dog, a 2 year old daschund mix, who sleeps about 18 hours a day and is skinny as a rail. What gives?

Is it the quality of the sleep? Is it the number of hours a day spent in bed? If you get some good sex before sleeping does this add or subtract from your hours? If you lay in bed worrying about sleeping, or the errands you forgot to run, does that affect your perfect sleep number equation?

And what about those pills? There's one that makes you sleepwalk and eat hotdog buns in the middle of the night. Then there's the one that appears to give you trippy hallucinations about butterflies. Then there's the one that supposedly makes you dream of talking beavers and Abe Lincoln. Does drugged sleep count as better sleep than natural sleep?

All I know is I wake up still tired almost every single morning. Then I worry I had too much sleep or I worry I didn't have enough. Either way, I didn't have quality sleep, which I feel is unobtainable. Maybe I'm overthinking things. I'm guessing the reason my dog can sleep 18 hours is he has no worries.

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