Don’t read studies about sleeping if you want to get a good night’s sleep.
Can you believe we are only two weeks into 2026? It feels like a decade has passed since CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen got tipsy on New Year’s Eve. Producers should hide the tequila shots as soon as Cooper starts giggling like a child inhaling helium and Cohen starts ranting with the wild eyes of Charles Manson, circa 1969.
Did you stay up for the midnight ball drop? What time did you awake on Jan. 1?
I ask because this could predict if you should be getting your affairs in order.
Per ScienceDaily: “Sleeping less than 7 hours could cut years off your life.”
Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University have concluded “insufficient sleep was more closely tied to shorter life expectancy than diet, exercise or loneliness.”
If you are both a night owl and early bird you better see your doctor.
Do the nerds not understand such studies cause us to lose sleep?
Bedtime tips have evolved from the days of counting sheep or having a nip of brandy. For optimal health, now you should sleep on your side with a pillow between your legs. Or maybe on your back with your head pointed toward the magnetic north. Breathing exercises can help as you seek the soothing embrace of Hypnos. Use a blue screen filter while doomscrolling in the dark.
Better yet, hide your phone in another room like it’s a time-bomb.
Daytime napping is as bad as daytime drinking. No, hang on. A power nap can rejuvenate. Don’t have caffeine after 3 p.m. Turn in at the exact same time every night. Take a bubble bath. Go for a brisk walk. Buy room-darkening shades. Stand on your head. Eat a turkey sandwich with tart cherries and bananas so the tryptophan, melatonin and magnesium work together as biochemical gate crashers into the restorative heaven that is REM.
We are the only species that needs a game plan for nighty-night. New research found sleep even comes naturally to brainless jellyfish — and I’m not referring to Lindsey Graham.
Science has tricked us with a false promise: thinking about sleep will help us sleep. It does the opposite. At a time when the world has entered a chaos moon phase, the last thing your brain needs is an internal narrator freaking you out: “Go to sleep. Why are you still awake? Go to sleep. Do you want to shave four years off your life? Go to sleep. Do you want to get heart disease or dementia? GO TO SLEEP RIGHT NOW OR YOU WILL DIE.”
The nerds are even stressing us out about dreams. At 4 a.m., when your hippocampus and visual cortex start producing disjointed films that would disturb Netflix execs, that is your body regulating emotional states. Dreaming is self-therapy. No dreams? You are doomed.
I had a disturbing one the other night. My wife and I were chatting about installing pot lights in the living room. She was saying we should just transform the ceiling into one big light that blinks when she is right about something. One of our cats was knitting a scarf and humming Stray Kids songs. Then my wife suddenly turned into Melania Trump and insisted I attend the premiere of her upcoming documentary in seersucker pantaloons and a cowboy hat.
I shot bolt upright in my bed and screamed.
Scientists say a lack of sleep causes anxiety. You know what else causes anxiety? Alarming sleep studies when the world has lurched into the Upside Down. The grim situation in Iran alone is keeping me up.
There should be a moratorium on all sleep studies until the news isn’t so disturbing. I don’t want to read another word about how my four hours of sleep last night amounts to a death warrant. Not another word about how the bags under my eyes are entirely preventable. Not another word about inflammation. Oh, the nerds love inflammation the way astrologers love Mercury in retrograde.
We humans slept just fine for thousands of years without knowing squat about the N1-REM cycle. We managed to sleep through war, famine and disco fashion. Sleep was sleep. It just happened. You didn’t give it a second thought. It wasn’t a series of meta-abstracts and pie charts and tabulated data and health apps that measure recovery with metabolic scores that only cause more sleeplessness.
The more we are optimized, tracked, warned and quantified, the harder it gets to enter La-La-Land. So here’s a radical proposal: until the world returns to normal, the nerds should swallow a couple of Ambien and knock it off with the bedtime commandments.
I can’t remember the last time I slept for seven hours. So I’ve already lost four years. A reminder is not helpful. It is what it is.
The surest way to shorten our lives even more is to scare us about sleep.
