Freshness & Sleep

You’re standing at the checkout, or talking to your boss, and suddenly a wave of heat rises from your chest. Within five seconds you’re sweating, your face turns red, drops run down your back. Two minutes later you’re shivering cold, because you’re now soaked in a chilly room. Hot flashes aren’t just something that happens…

“Sometimes you stop breathing completely.” That’s what your partner tells you — frightened, because at night they listen to you go quiet for a few seconds, and then suddenly gasp for air. You don’t know about it. You sleep “like a log.” And yet during the day you’re tired, as if you hadn’t slept at…

You’re sitting in a meeting and suddenly realize your head just dropped — for a second, maybe two, you were genuinely asleep. Or you get home from work, sit down on the couch, and you’re gone within a minute. On the weekend you sleep twelve hours straight and still wake up as if someone beat…

You wake up more tired than when you went to bed. You sleep a full eight hours and still feel wrung out like a squeezed lemon. You drink coffee by the liter and nothing helps — it’s as if your body forgot what energy feels like. And when you go to the doctor, they tell…

It’s three in the morning. The whole house is asleep. And pain rips you out of your deepest sleep and chases you out of bed — your calf stiff as stone, your toes twisted, and you’re hopping around on the cold floor waiting for it to let go. It might last a minute. But you…

I still don’t feel old. Honestly — in my head I feel like the same guy I was twenty years ago, and somehow I don’t quite accept that it should be any different. But the body sometimes has a different opinion. And it always picks the most embarrassing moment to tell me so. This is…

It’s three in the morning. You wake up as if someone rang a bell. You lie there staring at the ceiling, and you know it — you won’t fall back asleep. At six, when it’s time to get up, sleep finally takes you. You’re wrecked all day, and the evening brings the same thing all…

The alarm clock disappeared when you retired. No more early mornings, no fixed routine. And sleep that used to just work on its own suddenly fell apart. You nap after lunch, doze off in front of the evening news, go to bed at nine — and at one in the morning you’re wandering the house…

You fall asleep easily in the evening, but by two in the morning you’re wide awake. You stare at the ceiling, the clock ticks, and you count how many hours of sleep you have left before you need to get up. In the morning you feel tired — and you tell yourself that “an older…