Payton Place

Before you reach for the sleeping pills when you’re having trouble grabbing some shut-eye, Yahoo’s Healthy Living weblog suggests six effective all-natural herbal sleep inducers you may want to try. Photo by Joi.

A couple of the suggestions probably won’t surprise you (namely chamomile and lavender, which are always among the first recommendations of this kind), but there are several you may not have seen before. They are:

• Valerian root
• Chamomile Tea
• Celery
• Lemon balm
• Lavender
• Hops

Before you get too excited about hops, keep in mind that a pre-bedtime beer can actually disturb your sleep according to the FDA. Instead, the post suggests a bag of hops under the pillow can be a great sleep inducer, particularly for women. Be sure to check the Yahoo post for details on how to use each. (Hint: Apparently valerian root is the most potent of all.)

On a similar sleepy food note, we’ve also heard that a lettuce-filled sandwich can help you sleep like a log.

Did you ever hear the joke about the dyslexic guy who couldn’t sleep? He was certain that others had similar issues and decided to form a support group. On the bulletin board at work he posted his first meeting invitation with the giant page title, “Insomniacs Untie!”

Ok, so maybe it’s a little cheesy but it seemed like a great opening paragraph for a topic that is oh so apropos this evening. Insomnia. It will suck the life out of you. And although I’ve been resting much more regularly these days, tonight I just can’t switch off the ol’ noodle long enough to doze. I cannot stop thinking about portions of the movie we just watched!

My wife Becky and I watched “The Family Stone” this evening on DVD. It was definitely entertaining and had an amazing cast. It was an interesting story with one of those “home for the holidays” flicks. You know the type. Multiple lives and story lines converge for a few days and eventually result in the happy ending so many of us crave. It was certainly better to see this movie after our own holiday experience for 2007.

One of the concepts within this flick was that of a Matriarch with a terminal illness. And it was interwoven a little too late into the movie for me to simply bail out on the whole cinematic experience. I had invested approximately eighty-five minutes into the crazy thing and simply had to see it through!

Silly me. Such themes are just too close for comfort for me these days. And even though I made a pact with myself long ago that this blog would be about technology and not personal matters, this evening’s post diverges from geek themes a bit. That’s what insomnia will do you . . . it warps your perspective.

So tonight (or is it morning already?) I’m making a new year’s resolution. This blog will contain themes from any topic or category of information that suits me at the moment of inspiration. It’s time to crank up the music and sing to the tune of “It’s My Party,” It’s my web log and I’ll write what I want to!

~SP