Published: October 31, 2009 10:21 pm         

To sleep, per chance to miss all of the good TV

Fortunately we got to turn our clocks back last night, so we got an extra hour’s sleep last night.

Or not.

Oklahomans, it seems, are not good sleepers. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found Oklahomans were in the bottom five when it came to states whose residents got the most sleep.

Oklahoma ranked fourth on the CDC’s snoozing scale, with 14.3 percent of residents reporting they had 30 nights of poor sleep in the last month.

West Virginia is the nation’s sleepiest state, with 19.3 percent of residents saying they didn’t get enough shut-eye. Hawaiians are the most well-rested Americans, with 35.6 percent of that state’s residents reporting they had no sleepless nights in the past month.

So why are Oklahomans so sleep-deprived? This study was conducted in 2008, so anxiety over Sam Bradford’s shoulder or Dez Bryant’s prevarication can’t be blamed.

The researchers didn’t ask why people weren’t getting enough sleep, so they don’t really know why some states are more sleep-starved than others. They did say health factors like obesity, smoking, heart disease and the proportion of adults with disabilities could be a factor.

Diet, financial stress and working odd shifts could play a role, as well. There’s also a correlation between sleep and gender (women get less sleep than men), age (younger people sleep worse than those 65 and older), race (whites sleep better than blacks), education (those with some college sleep better than those without a high school diploma) and marital status (married folks sleep better than those who are divorced, widowed, separated or living together outside of marriage).

I have no problem sleeping. In fact, my struggle is to stay awake (at least I’ve trained myself not to snore while sleeping upright at my desk, ostensibly deep in thought while staring at my laptop).

I consider myself lucky of an evening if I stay awake long enough to catch the 10 p.m. news. My bride normally doesn’t make it that long.

The scene is a familiar one. We will settle in for a favorite television program, me in the recliner and she on the sofa. At some point I’ll hear gentle snoring coming from across the room. Generally she won’t awaken until after the show ends, at which point she immediately begins quizzing me about what happened. Being a trained journalist, I immediately launch into a detailed description of the show’s plot and any sub-plots. For example, “I don’t know. That one guy with the hair killed that other guy with the glasses, but hair guy got himself a good lawyer and got off, I think. What show were we watching?”

Sleep is good for your health. It makes you more alert, puts you in a better mood, helps lower blood pressure, produces valuable hormones and lowers the risk for heart disease. The old saying about getting your beauty sleep, however, is a myth. I get hours and hours of sleep every night, and look at me.

Letting your bride sleep when she is really, really tired also is good for her health, and yours, too. Such was the case the other morning when I got out of bed, pulled on a robe and tiptoed quietly out of our bedroom, gently closing the door behind me.

I was quietly eating my breakfast in the dining room when all of a sudden came a crash that sounded like something had fallen on the house, like a hippopotamus or something.

I rushed into the bedroom to find my frightened bride, sitting halfway up in bed making little whimpering noises, trying to blink away sleep.

It turns out our cats, with a combined weight of close to 40 pounds, charged headlong down the hallway and hit the closed door at full speed, opening it with a great crash and scaring my bride out of a couple of year’s growth.

To my credit I didn’t laugh, or at least not right away. After all, I don’t sleep well in the garage.



Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle. E-mail him at jmullin@enidnews.com, assuming he’s awake.