Because learning about your brain and sleep can be fun . . .
Sleep takes up a major chunk of the day. That can conflict with your other goals. How can you sleep less yet maintain health? I spend hours every week writing a sleep blog. I’m also longtime a sleep science enthusiast with a 25-year background in healthcare. I’ve both read and experimented a lot with sleep.…
Sometimes, a bandana blindfold is a quick answer to improving sleep because even a little light can be annoying and interfere with falling asleep. Go to bed like a hostage! Morning sun creeps around gaps in the curtains, getting you up too early. Once again, the sunbeams have started cheating you out of a few…
It doesn’t have to be difficult to sleep with GERD GERD, acid reflux, and waking up suddenly in the middle of the night coughing and hacking: the terms and experience go together—especially after you eat a little too much a little too close to bedtime. They don’t have to. Until you develop what they call…
Zapped by zolpidem: part 2 of 2 When we have a physical problem in the West, our first choice is to take a pill to fix it. Not all people in the West, but most. Pills are a quick fix. Alternative medicine, also called integrative medicine, is getting more popular, though a long way from…
Zapped by zolpidem: part 1 of 2 Back in my teens and twenties, back in my days of work in food service and the Army, my coworkers and classmates would to talk about how wasted they got on alcohol. These drinking stories would inevitably involve a tale of someone drinking a lot, passing out, and…
The Bedtime Stories We Tell Ourselves and Others: Part 4 of 4 Lots of people are hungry, hungry to get better. Some are more than hungry; they’re starving. In the United States, the personal development/ self-improvement industry was worth almost $10 billion in 2019. That number represents serious spending. It’s a competitive world out there.…
The Bedtime Stories We Tell Ourselves and Others: Part 3 of 4 Hearing about conflict has a way of making an impression on you. It heightens your senses, makes you sit up and pay attention, gets you thinking about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s just the kind of thing you want to avoid before…
The Bedtime Stories We Tell Ourselves and Others: Part 2 of 4 Kids are always going through phases. When I was around seven or eight back in the 70s, I went through a phase that lasted for weeks. I wanted to listen to fairy tales at bedtime. That particular phase was before superheroes and after…
The Bedtime Stories We Tell Ourselves and Others: Part 1 of 4 If you asked me ten years ago, hypothetically, “What is a bedtime story?” (and I had a bit of time to think of an answer) I’d reply with something like, “A story is a tale of what happened. It could be either true…
God grant me the serenity… Why it’s a great idea to memorize at least the first verse of the Serenity Prayer. Internalize it upon your heart and mind. It happens to every man and woman too. Sometimes you feel powerless. You feel like you’re a member of the security detail on Star Trek, the crewmembers…