Nearly every day my mom reports to me that she hasn’t gotten enough sleep.
She’s constantly talking about her insomnia and the difficulty that she has going to bed every night. Apparently, she lies awake for hours and even once she falls asleep she struggles to stay asleep. I’ve been telling her for months that she needs to watch her caffeine intake and start settling down for bed much earlier than she could possibly imagine. Unfortunately, I get the sense that she is ignoring my advice and continuing to make her life miserable. I caught her red-handed the other day and realized that she was leveraging the central cooling system to hide her obsession with coffee. This necessity for caffeine was essentially shooting her in the foot every night, yet she was trying to hide the habit through the AC unit. I thought it was strange that my mom kept adjusting the thermostat lower and lower when the indoor air temperature already seems pretty cool and fresh to me. Still, I noticed that she was modifying the indoor air quality control settings on a regular basis before scampering off to the kitchen. Yesterday I happened to walk into the kitchen behind her and found her making a brand new cup of coffee as the central cooling device kicked into gear. She timed the use of her little Keurig machine to line up with the air conditioning unit as it began pumping ice cold air through the vents. The sound of the AC system effectively drowned out the loud hum of the tiny coffee maker. At the same time, the indoor air circulated so that her coffee fumes were quickly sucked up into the air return vent and filtered out from our breathing air. When I caught her red handed, I simply smiled and motioned like I was peacefully asleep.
