Learn Japanese Today

You know the feeling when you KNOW you have to go to sleep, either because you need to get up early the next day or you just stayed up to late.

You get in your pajamas, you wash up, you brush your teeth and you get in bed. There’s just one problem.

Your eyes are still open.

They’re wide open.

You’re body may be tired, but your mind is still going on about that attractive new co-worker that just learned your name or that term paper that your have to write sometime in the next 36 hours. Your mind keeps going and your eyes can’t close.

This is a feeling insomniacs and workaholics are quite familiar with, always thinking about something else so you can’t get any sleep. That’s why they turn to NyQuil or sleeping pills, which give them the luxury of falling asleep the second their head hits the pillow.

Waking up is another story. They wake up groggy and drowsy, and they can’t drive or do anything until they get some caffeine in their system. Then, when it’s time to go to bed, they need to take another sleeping pill to fall asleep. This makes them constantly dependent on caffeine and sleeeping pills to get through the day, which can have all sorts of stressful consequences, especially when one of the drugs isn’t in stock. Not ideal.

There was a period towards the end of last year when I had a pretty bad cold, so I started taking NyQuil every night so I could get to sleep. Once I got better, I found myself still taking NyQuil for another week. It was great being able to fall asleep so easily, but then I was totally worthless in the morning. I had trouble focusing in class (assuming I didn’t sleep through it) and I couldn’t really get anything productive done until at least 3 PM. That’s what made me decide that I needed a chemical-free way of falling asleep at night.

I’ve always been a big supporter of reading before bed. It’s a good, relaxing time to read, and more importantly, it settles down your mind and tires out your eye muscles so you can go to sleep. Of course, some books are much better for bedtime reading than others. For example, The Cantos of Ezra Pound knock me out after a stanza and a half, but the one time I was dumb enough to try reading just a chapter of the 7th Harry Potter book, I was up until 3AM.

This is where the whole point of this post comes in: Keep something written in Japanese on your bedside table.

It can be a book, magazine, newspaper, anything really. You should also probably have a kanji/regular dictionary on hand as well so you can make it through. All you have to do is just read as much as you can before you fall asleep. And believe me, you will fall asleep.

You know that feeling you get sometimes when you’re studying, when you feel like the scale of knowledge you must know to be fluent is just too massive and you just want to take a break and close your eyes? Yeah, that’s the feeling I’m talking about. And it can work for you.

This gets some of your daily studying out of the way, and helps you get to bed faster. That’s two birds with one ishi. Tell your friends.

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