Happy Friday to you and your family. As you read this, I am on my way from a couple of speaking events in Dallas to meet Mrs. B in Tucson, where we will be doing a joint keynote for Lifesong for Orphans, a wonderful nonprofit dedicated to adoptions and supporting orphans around the world. This is a cause we are especially passionate about. We became adoptive parents in 2004 of a baby living in an orphanage in Jinjiang, China.

If you’re wondering how our adoption turned out, that baby grew up to graduate summa cum laude from college in 2025, and then accepted a commission to the U.S. Marine Corps, where she currently serves the nation she adopted. Here is Second Lieutenant Brooks with her older brother, Sergeant Brooks.

If you are a weekly reader of this missive, you might remember two weeks ago when I recounted the sad tale of several years ago, when I woke up after a candy bender, face down in half a box of Junior Mints. That elicited quite a stream of reader comments and jokes, as well as questions about whether this led to the appropriate behavior change on my part. (It did, though it took a few years.)

Anyway, I neglected to finish that story. Believe it or not, it gets worse, and in a way that bears on the topic of this week’s newsletter.

Late night candy bingeing does not come without cost, especially with respect to sleep quality and dental hygiene. The instance I recounted, as well as many others around that time, led to a few bad abscesses and root canals. One procedure on a back molar was particular agony, performed by an endodontist who possessed a gentleness and bedside manner more suited to taxidermy. I came away swollen and throbbing in pain, and—most unfortunately—on my way out of town for a series of speeches on happiness. So on the way to the airport, I stopped at the Walgreens and grabbed a big bottle of ibuprofen, of which I took the maximum safe dose every day for the next week.

Well, that’s when things got weird. The pills helped with the pain a bit, but I began falling asleep during the day—in cars, backstage, everywhere—which is odd because I am never sleepy in ordinary circumstances. The whole week I was strangely lethargic, could barely concentrate, and my talks were not going well at all. Googling around, I became persuaded that I probably had some kind of infection brewing due to Dr. Roadkill’s rough handiwork, so I headed to my regular dentist to see if he could fix it.

My dentist looked me over and found nothing amiss with my molar. He asked me what I had been taking for pain. “Just these Advil,” I said, showing him the bottle.

“Why are you taking Advil PM first thing in the morning?” he asked.

One side benefit of that mishap was that I slept well at night, though, which ordinarily is a big challenge for me. I’m a bit of an insomniac. And that’s our topic today.

  1. Quell the rebellion against your inner tyrant. The fact that we don’t recognize and correct the absurdity of revenge bedtime procrastination suggests that the whole conflict is governed by what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1”: our automatic, reactive brain.4 The trick is to move the bedtime decision from System 1 to “System 2”: our metacognitive brain, with which we can consciously reason, analyze, and manage our decisions. So, make some resolutions. Set a bedtime that is both realistic and sensible. Thirty minutes prior, tell yourself, I have control over my schedule, and I am choosing to go to bed at this time. Perhaps this self-talk sounds childish to you, but it’s really a way to deal with the situation maturely by quieting your inner squalling toddler.
  2. Go from physical to metaphysical. You might still dismiss sleep as an instrumental good—a necessary but boring investment, like eating your vegetables or paying into a retirement account. That’s a missed opportunity to understand sleep as an intrinsic source of wisdom and happiness, which spiritual teachers have done for millennia.

    For example, the late Pope Francis was known to have a special devotion to Saint Joseph, and when he had a problem, he wrote it on a slip of paper and placed it under his sleeping Joseph statue—and then went to bed himself. To apply this unconventional insight, before you retire for the night, try pondering for a few minutes the life puzzles you want to solve. Offer them up to sleep, and then see what your pure state yields. Before long, you might look forward to your voluntary nightly adventure—and you just might find yourself getting to bed on time.

One last thing: If you want more tips for a peaceful slumber, this week’s Office Hours episode is about this very problem—you can listen to it here.

Go to bed! And see you next week,

Arthur

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References‍
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​[1] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024, May 15). About sleep. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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[2] Kroese, F.M., De Ridder, D.T.D., Evers, C., Adriaanse, M.A. (2014). Bedtime procrastination: introducing a new area of procrastination. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 611.

[3] Suni, E. (2025, July 15). Revenge bedtime procrastination. Sleep Foundation.

[4] Kahneman, D. (2012). Thinking, fast and slow. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 6(2), 253-256.