I have been feeling guilty lately. My therapist, Penny, tells me repeatedly that guilt is a worthless emotion, much like second-guessing what has already been completed. She is right, but that doesn’t mean I listen to her. Which makes me feel guilty.
The newest guilt is over wellness. It’s all the rage now, and there are seemingly a million stories a day on the subject, or at least as many as shots of Taylor Swift during the Super Bowl—how to sleep, how to eat, how to clean your ears, how to read a book, how to have sex.
I’ve seen liquid wellness shots that you drink, wellness dog food, wellness programs at universities that claim to improve academic achievement, personal growth and confidence, career fulfillment and social connection.
Roger Williams University, in Rhode Island, offers something called the “10 Dimensions of Wellness”: physical wellness, emotional wellness, social wellness, spiritual wellness, intellectual wellness, financial wellness, occupational wellness, creative wellness, environmental wellness, digital wellness. Or UnitedHealthcare’s “Health and Wellness topics A-Z,” an extremely clever list, except there is no G, J, L, N, O, R, T, U, X, Y, or Z.
Personally, I find life stultifying enough without wellness. I think we all need a little more badness—drink, smoke, eat fatty foods and sugar, tell men they are hot and women they are sexy. I won’t dispute the existence of legitimate wellness experts in certain areas, but the movement still has a suspicious ring to me, like people insisting the moon is made of green cheese, every bird in the universe is actually a C.I.A. drone, and Donald Trump’s hair is real, rather than restored steel wool you can use to scrub a pot.
In 2021, the Global Wellness Summit invited believers to spend $350 for 66 videos and presentations, which sounds almost as torturous as starting Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, for the 10th time—all these cheerful people with cheerful grins on how to be more cheerful, as if taken hostage by Up with People. This year’s summit will take place in November at the Old Course Hotel near historic St. Andrews in Scotland, for $6,935 including spouse, although I wonder if you might be better off ordering 231 Whisky Macs at the Palm Court at the Plaza for the same price, which spread out over a month would be eight drinks a day, and, in my estimation, would definitely make you happier.
Maybe wellness and conscientious living and the hair shirt of abstinence can make you squeeze out a few more years, but in this world of eternal misery we live in, why? We all end up in the same place anyway.
I wonder if you might be better off ordering 231 Whisky Macs at the Palm Court at the Plaza.
But the wellness hysteria is impossible to ignore, so I am intent on giving at least some of it a try. Let’s start with sleep.
The number of suggestions on how to improve your sleep goes around the world and back, books as plentiful as a plague of rats with titles such as The Little Book of Sleep, Sleep till Noon, The Revolution of Sleep, Why We Sleep, This Book Will Put You to Sleep, Yoga for Better Sleep, Restful Sleep, Sleep Smarter, Sleep Wiser, The Secret Life of Sleep, Sleep like a Tiger, Sleepyhead, and on and on and on …
According to the National Institutes of Health, between 50 million and 70 million Americans suffer from some type of sleep disorder: it sounds like one of those pie-in-the-sky numbers used to justify the sleep industry. Chronic sleeping disorders are said to be linked to diabetes, stroke, heart disease, obesity, cancer, and high blood pressure.
So is living.
Growing up in the 1960s, I personally favored the “count sheep” method or, even better, the parental method: “Go to sleep before I f*** you up.” But that was then.
In the now, my favorite advice, courtesy of The New York Times, comes from Aric Prather, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who treats insomnia and is the author of the book The Sleep Prescription. Prather suggests that instead of caffeine in the afternoon, which will keep you up at night, stick your head in the freezer to give yourself a jolt.
I tried this.
I needed a footstool so my head would be high enough to fit. I did feel a blast of cold, particularly when my nose got smushed into a bag of frozen peas. To be honest, it looked as if I were trying to commit suicide using the freezer instead of the oven. I can’t say I felt much of anything, just remarkably stupid.
As a reader of The New York Times pointed out in the comments section, this method is particularly difficult if you have a refrigerator with the freezer section at the bottom. You have to get on your hands and knees, and there isn’t much space, and you may well need the maintenance guy to wrench your head out.
It looked as if I were trying to commit suicide using the freezer instead of the oven.
Some experts suggest making a log of your sleep patterns at night, but if you do this extemporaneously—I peed four times, I heard a police siren, a car alarm went off, the person next to me snored so loudly the bed levitated—you are going to be up most of the night. If you wait until the morning, it is likely that you have forgotten much of what kept you awake. It is the same with the sleep books: you are going to stay awake trying to remember what to do in order to sleep.
Another expert, Charlene Gamaldo, M.D., at Johns Hopkins Center for Sleep and Wellness, suggests the following:
- Consider exercising no closer than three to four hours before bedtime. (The only exercise I do at the age of 69 is chewing.)
- Have a wind-down routine of 30 to 60 minutes before you go to bed. (My wind-down routines are pretty much from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and I see no difference.)
- Go to bed at a regular time each night. (And what? Be deprived of binge-watching reruns of Suits?)
- Avoid naps later than four p.m. (At this point in my life, naps are the only thing I like, everywhere at all times.)
- Avoid alcohol close to bedtime. (Strike me dead.)
On to ear-cleaning.
Earlier this month, Caroline Hopkins, in her Ask Well column in The New York Times, was solicited for ways to clean your ears with something other than Q-tips. I suppose you could try something a little more probing—a screwdriver, a drill, a jackhammer. Or you can stick with Q-tips and just hope they don’t get stuck by going too deep. In my experience, Q-tips in the ear are actually quite satisfying—one user on Reddit described it as feeling “better than sex,” which at my age would be true even if I still had sex.
So I vote for Q-tips.
Wrong!
According to experts quoted by Hopkins, earwax, despite being this disgusting goo that is like taking a dump in your ear, is actually our friend, “protecting the delicate inner ear by trapping irritants like dirt, dust, bacteria and fungi.” Cotton swabs can apparently endanger the delicate skin of the area. The best advice is to leave earwax alone. If you have to do something, wipe the outer ear, called the pinna, with a moist washcloth. A pinna? As if my head weren’t clogged with enough crap already besides earwax.
Experts also advise against ear-candling, in which you place the unlit end of a candle into the ear and light the other.
How could I resist?
Never underestimate the capacity for human idiocy. I actually imagine that there are some people who stick the lit end into their ears and wonder why they can’t hear anymore.
On and on it goes in wellness madness.
Maybe all of this does make you a better person. Maybe you will like yourself more, feel better, live longer. I guess I really am too cynical, although I have come up with my own foolproof method:
Buy a copy of Infinite Jest. Start reading it in bed. Before you doze off in the next 30 seconds, stick it in your ear.
Buzz Bissinger is the author of Friday Night Lights and a co-author of Shooting Stars with LeBron James