30 જુલાઈ, 2026
"After kissing my husband and dog good night and putting them to bed in a separate room, I put magnesium lotion on my feet, do my Duolingo lesson, pull up my meditation app and, of course, go to the bathroom one last time."
From "The Little Rituals That Prepare You for Sleep/Origami, cleaning countertops, talking to plants — here are some ways readers wind down for the evening" (NYT gift link).

38 ટિપ્પણીઓ:
That sounds classier than my "take a blood pressure pill and watch 'Murder Tapes' on the DVR."
Normalizing sexual dysfunction from the New York Times.
Does anybody else's ritual include unbridled sex? I find it really helps with getting to sleep...eventually.
“After kissing my husband and dog good night and putting them to bed in a separate room…”
So she’s not into bestial threesomes. That’s OK, some people just aren’t as open-minded as we are. No need to get all judgy.
I thought all sex was "unbridled"? I know the world's become a strange place (especially with social media), but are there really people having Bridled Sex? I'm NOT googling that....
I've shared a lot about myself in comments here over the years. Some of it was actually true. But sleep rituals is a very personal topic and as such I won't share my most intimate details other than to say it involves papier-mâché, amber essential oil, and resistance bands. And it works.
If I didn’t do the Sam Harry’s waking up meditation, I do it before going to sleep. It’s better in general to do it on waking up. But if I have an Amazon Flex gig, it feels like I’m up against the clock, it's in the back of my mind, distracting. It’s better to do it when there’s no internal interference of any kind. I’ve tried doing it without any aid before but the app works like a coaching motivator or a drill Sargent. Sam’s voice is not a drill Sargent but the effect of taking the action to meditate is what I needed. Sam is my Lee Armey and Louis Gossett Jr.
"I thought all sex was 'unbridled'?"
Not if it involves vegan leather harnesses. Takes longer to get to bed after 'bridled' sex though. Save that horse, ride a BDSM insomniac.
Chewing down an Indica strain cannabis CBD gummy to knock my old hippie ass out. I have Parkinson's Disease and the gummy allows 8-10 hours of restful sleep with a tamper on the wild acting out PD dreams that accompanies the malady.
I feel fortunate that I put my head on my pillow, put my two hands overlapping beneath my pillow, and sleep happens. Hello Morpheus.
I've been recently experimenting with a home TENS device. Nuff said.
Telling the world that she and her husband sleep separately is obviously a choice. Presumably she thinks her friends will all think it's great.
It's not clear, though - do the husband and the dog also sleep separate from each other, or is she saying goodnight to them both in the same place? Is the husband literally in the doghouse?
Are there medical reasons for applying magnesium lotion to the feet or is it some sort of liquid metal fetish?
Duolingo was free during COVID. It's a lousy program that doesn't teach you much. Also, the COVID era was when they introduced "his husband" and "her wife." Regardless of the politics involved, it doesn't make language learning easier.
The magnesium is for her husband, he has a toe fetish
Fred & Wilma slept in separate beds but in the same room.
What gets me is not the separate room. It's the phrase "putting them to bed."
Bridled sex involves horses.
Meditation is my full metal jacket that hopefully makes me an honorary gentleman.
NYT's audience is a lot of boomers, I reckon.
Well, she apparently kisses the husband first, so at least he has that going for him.
Cutting out the news at night would probably help with sleep. Politics is agitating, in my experience.
My "best sleeper" thesis is that people who are not engaged with politics at all have the best sleep at night.
On the other hand, they are most likely to be beheaded for saying the wrong shit out on the streets.
So my "best sleeper with the longest life" thesis is that you only consume news in the morning, and try to forget it as the day goes along.
Separate sleeping rooms is about all sorts of things that have nothing to do with sex. Just to list a few: 1. snoring, 2. waking in the middle of the night and needing to spend some time awake, 3. wanting to play music/spoken word while going to sleeping/sleeping, 4. talking/screaming in your sleep, 5. wanting different temperatures/covers/open windows, 6. turning over too actively, 7. one person is much heavier than the other making the bed uneven, 8. somebody wants pets in the bed and somebody doesn't.
The kiss-off.
"What gets me is not the separate room. It's the phrase "putting them to bed."
Well men are children.
Heartless Aztec--Sorry to hear that. God be with you man. And whatever it takes.
AlbertAnonymous: There are several former highly placed officials in the Biden administration who can provide some guidance on those issues.
Reading on kindle either the 20-book Aubrey/Maturin series or some Robertson Davies, all of which I have previously read three or 4 times, generally works for me. About 15 minutes in I'm out. If not, I go down the hall and toss and turn in one of the guest bedrooms. It preserves marital harmony.
The great thing about Kindle is that the lights are already out. You just nod off.
The husband is better off sleeping with the dog anyway. Dogs actually like you.
Bridled sex involves horses
And unbridled sex is wild horseplay.
Frank Drebin Jr. line: "I have an old Bon Jovi T-shirt for that."
"Duolingo was free during COVID. It's a lousy program that doesn't teach you much."
There's still a free version (though we pay for the premium version), and while gamifying language learning is (I think pretty clearly) not the BEST nor the fastest way to teach a language, I can keep up with at least B1, maybe B2 Spanish now after an embarrassing 4 years of Duolingo and nothing else (other than a LITTLE bit of practice with our former Argentinian neighbors). And as for my baby French after about 2 months of Duolingo French starting at the very first lesson, I can pick up a little bit of even what we hear at present in Quebec. (I'm looking forward to trying it out in France one of these days!)
The Duolingo podcasts are very helpful, and entirely free. And the true stories are interesting.
But I agree about the woke stuff. When my Spanish instruction taught me how to say "I have a lot of great lesbian friends in Berlin," I had to use my fingers to get my eyes to stop rolling back in my head.
Jamie, I can only hope that one day, I will have occasion to tell Spanish-speaking listeners, truthfully, that I have great lesbian friends in Berlin. While using my Matteo Sunami road alias. CC, JSM
Retirement and a sleep study really helped me with a 35 year insomnia issue. I was prescribed a CPAP mask after a diagnosis of severe sleep apnea.
Of course, there are all kinds of stressors that still interfere with sleep, such as having to wake up to an alarm clock for an early morning flight.
Sex helps with my deepness of sleep, but the better the sex, the more it energizes my mind and makes it take longer to initiate sleep.
Typically, I read for 30-45 minutes at night before going to bed. No internet or TV before sleep.
I fall asleep to the Fox News primetime lineup. It makes me comfortable, and when I'm comfortable, fatigue catches up with me. I angered my ex-wife and girlfriends because I would get all excited about going to a movie or concert or lecture, then fall asleep at it. Just the idea of finally seeing the thing I wanted to see would relax me so much. I even bobble-headed a bit when I attended the Prof's talk at GWU Law about 20 years ago.....sorry....CC, JSM
Exercise, no matter how mild (but a three mile walk in the morning is perfect). Vagus nerve devices. It all comes down to that. From sleep to digestion, which is very related to sleep.
Seventeen people's answers to the question, chosen from the 1,100 people who responded. One person was from New York, none from New Jersey and Connecticut. I would think that the people from the New York City metropolitan area would be more interesting and would make up a larger percentage of the responses chosen by the editor, but apparently that was not the case.
Falling asleep is often a separate skill from getting back to sleep during the night. Listening to Greta Van Susteren always worked well for me when she had her late night crime analysis show on TV. For getting back to sleep I follow the advise of Coach Bobby Knight. Sometimes all you can do is just lack back and enjoy it.
Jamie, I had ambitious plans to learn some difficult languages with Duolingo during COVID. Eventually, I retreated to Spanish and then gave up entirely.
One problem is that there was little connection between the lessons, so by the time I finished one lesson I had already forgotten the words from previous unit and if one appeared in later lessons I wouldn't know what it meant.
IIRC, another problem is that Duolingo isn't that big on grammar and doesn't drill you on it. If you learn the grammar, you can eventually use that to form sentences on your own, instead of trying to remember random sentences that don't have much connection to each other. Duolingo reminded me of the look-say or sight reading method learning to read, when phonics and sounding words out is more useful and productive.
I moved on to spanishdict.com and worked my way through their lessons and some vocab drills. I can't say that I speak Spanish, but I did learn enough tenses and constructions to aid me in reading. Unfortunately, after I stopped the lessons, my knowledge started to regress.
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