A few years ago, I mentioned having difficulty sleeping to my doctor. She asked a few questions and before I knew she had prescribed me a "mild" anti-depressant and a sleep medicine. Seeing my reaction she said I could take Tylenol PM instead of the sleep med - everyday if required.
My need for good sleep turned out to be lesser than my fear of mind altering drugs - I "lost" the prescription after I read up about the medicines in question on WebMd. In time, my sleep pattern returned to normal on its own. Until that happened, I did worry if I was doing myself irreparable harm by ignoring medical advise and letting things run their natural course.
It seemed to me that importance of eight hours of sleep was enough to warrant rather extreme measures when it may turn out that "the eight-hour mantra may have no more scientific basis than the tooth-fairy"
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
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Glad you "lost" the prescription. I find when I exercise consistently I can get by on < 7 hours sleep.
-gg