As a lifelong sloth and connoisseur of comfort, routine, and having “everything just so,” I have to be wary of infantilization, the habit of soothing myself by disengaging from the world until I enter long stretches of mindless inertia.
I am not particularly vulnerable to this dangerous habit in the morning. I write, play the piano, and work out with kettlebells in the garage. But after lunch and my fitful post-workout nap, I am drawn to the couch and my true crime shows. That is where I can become lizard-eyed and begin checking out from life.
Part of my afternoon retreat is owed to my lifelong inability to sleep well. I haven’t gotten eight straight hours of sleep in more than forty years. I wake from disturbing dreams that are all different and all the same. I’m often traveling in a caravan of people. We are walking or driving along the coast, embarked upon some vague quest. The leader, generally speaking, is not happy with me. I am too grumpy. I am moving too slowly or too quickly. I am going down the wrong path.
Invariably, I get lost and have to find my way back to the group. I am in a state of great distress. The harder I try to rectify the situation, the worse it becomes. Eventually I wake up and try to process another haunting narrative featuring me as the stray sheep. I go to the bathroom, return to the bed or the couch, where I probably migrated around midnight, put in my earbuds, and hope a podcast will lull me back to sleep.
My nights of tumultuous, broken, tormented sleep point to the fact that I am a restless, anxious person. Letting go and giving myself over to the moment is difficult, not just when sleeping but in other endeavors.
Reading can be a challenge, especially when I find myself getting irritated because a book seems padded with fluff. It should have been an essay or a short story, but instead it has been inflated into a 300-page monstrosity of repetition and tedium.
Sitting through a two-hour movie can prove almost impossible. If the movie features a detective wearing a turtleneck sweater in a balmy climate, I experience vicarious heat exhaustion and have to turn off the television or flee the theater before I suffer a nervous breakdown. When characters eat at a dinner table during a TV show or movie, I lose interest in the plot and start wondering what they’re eating. Soon I am getting an apple from the refrigerator.
I can relax in certain circumstances. I can sit down at the piano for twenty minutes. Piano is a reliable source of anxiety release, especially when I play for an imaginary audience in which I am the hero. There is something wonderfully relaxing about playing a sonata before imaginary admirers who are being lulled into the same state of relaxation by my piano playing that I am.
Another reliable source of relaxation is the afternoon consumption of television droning in the background while I descend into a blissful half-sleep condition I call the Womb State.
An African animal documentary narrated by my trusty guide David Attenborough can put me into the Womb State. A true crime series in which detectives are waiting to learn whether ballistic evidence matches the casings used by their suspect can lull me into the Womb State.
My deepest, most blissful descent into the Womb State in recent memory occurred when I put on my noise-cancelling headphones, opened Netflix on my phone, and listened to The Big Picture podcast. Listening to the gregarious Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins speculate for two hours about which movies might produce the year’s Best Actor was a euphoric state of relaxation more potent than Xanax or Valium.
As I am only a few weeks from turning sixty-five and know that my sleep will probably become lighter and lighter, I realize I may depend increasingly on these Womb State pastimes. Opening a streaming app on my phone, putting on my noise-cancelling headphones, and listening to animal documentaries, crime shows, and movie-review podcasts may add fifteen years to my life.
The problem, of course, is overdoing it.
When I like something, I tend to overdo it, and the relentless pursuit of the Womb State can result in infantilization.
As someone whose anxious personality denies him a good night’s sleep, I crave the Womb State as a counterbalance. I crave the soothing sounds of a podcast or documentary while giant cushioned headphone cones surround my ears and I lie on a Beautyrest with diamond-infused memory foam and microcontouring pocketed nano-coils while a Tempur-Pedic pillow cradles my neck. In the proper dose, this afternoon ritual gives me the rest I need.
Taken to extremes, however, the ritual becomes part of the dark arts.
The nap with headphones is no longer about rejuvenation. It is about extinction.
Think of the 1973 movie Soylent Green, a dystopian nightmare in which citizens can choose voluntary euthanasia. They listen to soothing music while immersed in wraparound projections of beautiful landscapes. The government controls these citizens in part through the power of infantilization. There is a fine line between wanting to let go and becoming a helpless, malleable citizen whose self-agency has disappeared forever.
I therefore need to remain wary of the temptations of infantilization. Napping may provide necessary rest for a man who can’t get a good night’s sleep, or it could be the precursor to the Nap of No Return.
Just as David Attenborough adds extra gravitas and poignancy to his voice while describing an old alpha lion leaving its pride to die in isolated dignity, I can imagine the fabled naturalist shifting his commentary to me:
“And here lies a man for whom the nap crept up on him and would not let go. Here in the suburbs, the greatest threat is not a natural predator. It is infantilization.”
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