I’ve spent a lot of time on the couch. Not because I have therapy, but because I don’t have a bed.

Where most children graduate from a little bed to a bigger one, I graduated to one of those foldable couches where you can keep things beneath the seat.

This hasn’t affected my quality of sleep at all. I barely feel those tennis rackets.

It’s not like being sleep-deprived shrinks your brain to the point where you writing a very long sentences full of grammatical flaw that that your editor would fix if only he wasn’t so tired.

Now that I think about it, I’ve spent more time on a couch than I have on an actual bed. I bet you haven’t spent enough time in a bed, either.

Why else would you read this? Or this? Or that?

Our attention spans are affected by catching too few z’s, which is why I can’t even make it to the end of the.

I assume the primary causes behind sleep deprivation are the lightbulb and the internet. You can’t get forty winks if you find a million distractions.

Since you can’t short out your neighborhood’s electricity without exchanging stern words with the police, the only things you can change are your personal habits.

Want more sleep? Try less caffeine. You shouldn’t pay six dollars for coffee every morning. That creates problems. For example, you lose six dollars.

Think about it this way. You buy one cup of coffee per day. There are 365 days in a year.

Forget about however much money it costs. You drink more than 22 gallons of lukewarm bean water per year.

Caffeine affects our physical health. All of us can be a little kinder to our insides. Otherwise we’ll get old and gray a lot faster.

Take Abraham Lincoln. He must have drunk loads of coffee. Every photo I see of him, he’s gray. The guy probably didn’t get much sleep, either.

What should you do? I’m glad you asked, imaginary reader.

If you can’t get eight hours of sleep a night, maybe it’s worth it to turn to naps.

Me, I’m big on napping. I try to catch a few winks wherever I can: during movies, in class, behind the wheel, et cetera.

The problem is I can’t fall asleep. The only time I feel drowsy is during meetings where the presenter, who has a pleasant, measured voice, discusses important things like how lack of sleep makes you… uh…

I’m sure I’ll remember at some point.

You might not need to nap if you can get all the sleep you need in a night. I’ve heard the best way to get a good night’s snooze is to log off the computer a few hours before bed, unwind by walking or reading, and keep your room cool.

There are benefits. Ever since I started getting more sleep, I’ve felt more energetic. My comprehension has improved. I realized that I waste a lot of time reading dumb articles.

There are so many more dumb articles on the Internet. If I only looked, I could find a few outstanding ones.

Plus there’s the news, and social media, and cat videos… and it’s three in the morning again.

Well, I made my couch. Now I have to lie in it.

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Copyright 2024 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.