TORONTO – Fresh off a week of sleepless nights, local insomniac Amy Woodford decided to try a brilliant new tactic of meticulously mentally documenting how many hours of rest she could hypothetically get if she went to sleep right at that very moment.
“When I first went to bed, I was like, ‘Sweet, if I pass out right now I’ll get a solid nine hours and finally pull myself out of this exhaustion spiral,” Woodford explained, sipping her fifth cup of coffee that morning. “It was a perfect plan. Then I got distracted on Facebook. But it was okay, because when I put my phone down I realized I could still get six hours and thirty-seven minutes if I miraculously and improbably fell asleep right then and there.”
“After that, I stared at ceiling for God knows how long, remembering the time I waved at the wrong person on the subway. This greatly impacted my calculations because hey, if I get four hours starting now I could still technically function the next day! The next thing I knew, I had to get ready for work. Yes, I do want to die.”
Sleep specialist Linda Forrest said this behaviour makes perfect sense.
“It’s imperative to know exactly how long you’ll be able to sleep for,” she said in a phone interview from her clinic at the University of Toronto. “As we all know, the best kind of sleep is the sleep you are obsessively desperate to get in order to exist as a human being. It’s just science.”
Woodford says she’s confident her calculations will result in slumber eventually.
“I’ll try harder tonight,” she insisted, popping a handful of caffeine pills. “It’ll work. Otherwise I’ll have to develop a more healthy lifestyle with an emphasis on a proper sleep schedule, and that just sounds exhausting.”
