These days it seems like everyone is talking about it, thinking about it and trying to get more of it. It is the subject of magazine articles and books and there are many studies about it. You wonder if your friends and colleagues are getting better quantities of it than you are. When you haven’t gotten it, you are convinced that everyone around you can tell. You may have taken a class in what happens to your body during it, and how to enhance and invite more of it into your life.
‘It’ could be sex, of course. These days, however, ‘it’ is just as likely or perhaps more likely to be sleep. Just searching the Internet quickly using the words“sleep trouble” returns 29,100,000 results. It seems many of us are not getting any, or certainly not getting enough of it and we are desperately looking for ways to get a restful night’s slumber. Considering the dire health consequences of chronic sleeplessness, sleep should be the new sex.
There are a variety of reasons why sound sleep eludes so many of us. These range from stress, disease, alcohol, poor sleep habits and more. For many of us women, the culprit can be our hormones, particularly surrounding perimenopause and menopause.
So what to do? Try some chemical intervention, meditation, removing caffeine and alcohol from your diet, yoga, no TV in the bedroom or all of the above. Grabbing some knowledge by exploring those 29,100,000 references would definitely induce additional insomnia. Perhaps a sleep hygiene or sleep strategies class is the solution.
Find what works for you some of the time and deploy it when needed. If you find what works for you all of the time, write a book about it and give a TED Talk and you will enjoy a cult like status.
They say that 60 is the new 50, so why can’t sex be the new sleep? If sex is the new sleep, I definitely want to be a player.
Originally published at medium.com