Good sleep is a gift. I can’t put it any better than Martha Beck did in the November issue of O, the Oprah Magazine: “Sleep makes you smarter, better-looking, more creative. It can add years to your life. It does more to improve the long-term quality of that life than money, fancy vacations, or hot sex.”
I’d swear to it. On a good sleep day, I’m a decade younger, happier, a better parent, friend, mother and person. I love sleep (and woe to the child who interrupts it). Which is why I deeply sympathize with the mothers Pamela Paul wrote about in the Sunday Styles section: women for whom various sleep medications — from the innocuous Tylenol PM and melatonin right up to Xanax — have become “Mother’s Little Helper” and the only sure way to reliable sleep. I feel their pain. Their churning brains, frantically running through the minutiae of the day, could be my own at any crazed moment. When else does whether a child’s leotard got washed for tomorrow seem more important than at 3 a.m.? In the small hours, the mind has no sense of proportion.
I’ve had my personal bouts with occasional trouble sleeping, but luckily they’ve been limited. Right now, I’m sleeping soundly with nothing but the natural effects of exhaustion and a really, really slow-moving book. But when I’m not, I’ll do anything I can to get back on sleep track, and at times that’s included meditation, a pillow over my head, white noise machines and the judicious use of the leftover Ambien from an old prescription in the medicine cabinet. Sleep is essential.
What do you do — what will you do — for sleep?