Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

They said working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they’d lose their sex drive.”

He started out as a junk-food addict but had his Road-to-Damascus moment when he was fifteen and attended a health lecture. His diet from then on consisted of raw fruits, vegetables, fish, oatmeal, and egg whites—come to think of it, pretty much my diet. Our lifestyles are remarkably similar. Except he avoids coffee. Also, he used to drink a daily quart of blood. Oh, and the towing of the boats on his birthday thing.

His quotes are both hilarious and inspiring: “Fifteen minutes to warm up? Does a lion warm up when he’s hungry? ‘Uh-oh, here comes an antelope. Better warm up.’ No! He just goes out there and eats the sucker.” I printed that out and put it on my wall next to the passage from Carl Sagan.

Along with healthy eating and lots of exercise, the third pillar of Jack’s lifestyle is sleep. He goes to bed between 9 and 10 p.m. (though he is nearly a hundred years old, so I guess that’s not exactly a shocker). But it’s good motivation. I need to work on my nighttime health.

Chapter 19

The Inside of the Eyelid

The Quest for the Perfect Night’s Sleep

I ENVY DOLPHINS. Not so much for their grace or power, but because of the way they sleep. Dolphins sleep one half brain at a time. When the right side of their brain is asleep, the left side is awake. And vice versa. They developed this skill because they need to be conscious enough to return to the surface every few minutes for a gulp of air.

Why couldn’t evolution have come up with this system for us? It’s so frustrating. Think of all we could do while half asleep. All the bills I could pay, the Esquire meetings I could sit through, the Dora the Explorer concerts I could attend.

Instead, we’re stuck with this absurd, eyes-shut, openmouthed, dead-to-the-world system. I hate sleep. I’m wasting one-third of my life drooling on my pillow.

Julie, on the other hand, is a huge fan. Sleeping is her favorite hobby. She talks about a good night’s sleep in rapturous tones, like a jazz lover talks about a Miles Davis solo at the Blue Note. She could sleep for fourteen hours a day.

She’s so fixated, she blames any health problem our family confronts on lack of sleep. Cold, flu, infection, sore elbow—you just need more sleep, she’ll say.

Sadly for me, she’s not far off. More and more studies show undersleeping’s deadly sway. It contributes to heart disease and hypertension. It hobbles our immune system. In the United States, one hundred thousand sleep-related car crashes occur every year. It impairs our cognitive function, effectively lowering our IQ and our ability to pay attention. It costs the U.S. economy an estimated $63 billion a year.

I sleep about six hours a night, and spend a lot of my day exhausted, as if there’s a twenty-pound weight pressing down on the top of my head.

Here’s how tired I am: Several times in the last few weeks, I fell asleep while reading books to my sons. I’m proud to say that these naps didn’t stop me from finishing the book. It’s just that the plots took on a more Dadaist tone.

I’m not sure what the phrase “three-alarm cabinet” means, but when I heard myself utter it while reading a Corduroy the bear story, I knew I’d dozed off. I jolted myself awake. Then fell asleep again.

Maybe I’d be more enamored of sleep if I were good at it. I just don’t have Julie’s talent for it. I snore, I go to sleep too late, and I can’t fall asleep when I’m finally in bed. These are the dragons I have to slay.

Noisy Night at Home

Julie has always told me that I snore at leaf-blower levels. Plus I thrash around like I’m having a seizure. And I tend to illegally occupy her mattress territory, even if we’re at a hotel with one of the fourteen-foot-wide dictator-size beds.

This has resulted in our marriage’s shameful secret, which I’ll reveal here. I hope you won’t judge: We don’t sleep together often. I’m not talking having sex together. I’m talking going through REM cycles in the same room.

About five years ago, she told me she’d had enough. Whenever possible, I should find another place to sleep. Ever since, I’ve been spending most nights in the home office.

A couple of months ago, The New York Times ran an article about separated-at-night couples. We’re part of a trend. A survey by the National Association of Home Builders says 60 percent of custom houses will have dual master bedrooms by 2015.

It’s still a bit taboo, though. Too Victorian for modern tastes. Me, I’m happy to come out of my separate closet. Julie was more reluctant but has fessed up to it in recent years. We both think it has advantages. She doesn’t have to listen to my snoring, and I can go to bed whenever I want without worrying about disturbing her.

So I’m not sure whether we’ll ever return to sleeping in the same bed. But regardless, I need to fix the original cause of the nocturnal separation: the snoring.

Snoring is linked to a host of horrible problems: fatigue, of course, but also heart disease, depression, and car accidents. Snoring occurs when your airways are obstructed. It could be the tongue falling back into the throat, or lack of air through nasal passageways, or fatty tissues in the throat—any number of things.

Snoring could also be a symptom of sleep apnea, a more serious condition in which the air passages are blocked and the sleeper stops breathing altogether for several seconds, if not minutes.

I visit Dr. Steven Park, antisnoring crusader and author of Sleep, Interrupted in his midtown office. He wants to take a look at my airways. I wince as he pokes a probe up my nose and down my throat.

He sits on a stool and breaks