Counting Your Way to Sleep

Most of us have probably had to deal with sleeplessness sometime or other. Advice on how to fall asleep is plentiful and runs a wide gamut of techniques - lower temperature, calming music, exercise, journaling, avoid late dinner, focus on staying awake (yes, I found this nugget on the internet!), etc. It sounds paradoxical that natural functions like sleeping, eating, and even going to the bathroom have now become subjects of How to Guides and serious research. This post, however, is not serious and definitely not an attempt to offer any tips for the sleep-challenged. And if it fails to entertain but makes you yawn, well, that is okay too.

There are apps (of course, there are) on your phone to help you drift off into the dreamless and fitness trackers that tell you if you did and for how long. I wonder if the latter bit helps or makes you more stressed about not getting enough sleep. It also sounds paradoxical to rely on electronics while being told to avoid screen time at bedtime. Apart from that, I think the phone apps still present some problems.

If you are sleeping alone, you can merrily play the calming music (more on that presently) or listen to celebrities read stories to help you fall asleep. Otherwise, you may be disturbing the person lying next to you. As to wearing headphones in bed, do I even need to comment on it? The music itself, I think, is designed to be non-descript so that the tune does not get stuck in your head and become an annoyance. You know how catchy jingles can take over your head. But I find much of the music from the apps sounds somewhat eerie and foreboding, not the best kind to induce sleep. Anyway, my problem is not falling asleep but getting up after a few hours and staying awake. Picking up my phone at that point is the last thing I want. 

The oldest advice for insomnia has got to be 'counting sheep'. This really intrigues me. How on earth did someone come up with such an idea? Why sheep? When such profound questions arise, there is only one thing to do and that is to consult the internet. Yes, the collective wisdom found online may be confusing and contradictory but it is readily available so I 'let my fingers do the searching' to paraphrase an old advertisement. And I was not disappointed.

The idea seems pretty old and goes back more than a thousand years according to this article. Before deciding whether the idea works or not, I had to think about the actual process. One cannot just whip up some sheep to count. One has to expend some energy to imagine the scene. Are the sheep at rest or moving about? If they are all sitting and ruminating, it may be easier to count them but if they are huddled close to one another, it can be hard to distinguish individual sheep with all that fleece covering their bodies. On the other hand, they are freely moving about, it will be difficult to keep track of the count. If you are particular about the accuracy of the count, that will be a problem. Even if you are not, what if you finish counting the lot before you fall asleep?

One of the suggestions (see this 'How to Guide' - there really seems to be nothing you cannot find online) is to imagine them jumping over a fence in an orderly fashion. Just how do you achieve that? What if they jump back? There is also no mention of the noise level but won't the constant bleating of the animals prevent you from falling asleep? The article goes on to list other methods including taking a pill. I am guessing the author spent watching countless (!) sheep before adding that little gem. 

Then there is this sheep counting app (this should come as a surprise to no one) which features two modes of play whatever they may be. I am not even sure if this is a serious app but it proffers this advice: 'Enable the blue screen filter on your phone so you won't get distracted and start counting to fall asleep faster!' I will leave it to the readers to sort out the ambiguous wording. But staring at the small screen with or without a filter sounds like terrible advice to me. 

For the definitive word on the sheep method you have to just watch Mr. Bean demonstrate it. That's absolutely the best way to do it! And if you want to follow him, I am sure you will find pictures of sheep for sale online. May I note that this is also a rare documented case, albeit fictional, of the method actually being effective as a soporific.

I did not quite find out why sheep are selected for this though. I was going to say there is no rhyme or reason but in this case sheep rhymes with sleep, so there you have it. Seriously though, would you ever accept rhyme instead of reason?