I am sitting in my room on the couch. The lamp’s yellow light filters through the red cloth (a scrap piece from an old bed-sheet or something) that I’ve draped over it and fills the room with a dim reddish orange hue. The computer screens are on night light mode but still brighter than the lamp. Which means that overall the room is pretty dark but I like it like this.

I like the darkness at night and not just because it helps me fall asleep quickly. It just feels calming. Especially if I stop watching videos, suddenly the room becomes super chill. I can hear the rain outside when I stop watching videos. I can hear the television in the hall where mom is watching videos as well. We all watch so many videos now. I don’t like that. (Especially when we watch them alone. But what to do when you can’t watch the kind of videos the other person wants to watch?)

I want to go back to the time when watching a show was only allowed in the evening till dinner time. I Dream of Genie or Small Wonder or Silver Spoons. And movies were a special treat on a Sunday afternoon when it was too hot to go outside and play. I want to go back to the time when we played outside. Of course, that could be as much about missing childhood as about wanting to escape this tsunami of visual content.

What this habit of keeping the room dark at night has done (I turn off the white tube light and turn on the lamp as soon as the sun sets) is that I have started to fall asleep very quickly. This used to be such a big problem for me. I just couldn’t stop my train of thoughts and it would take at least an hour to fall asleep. And if I became conscious that I wasn’t falling asleep, then I would not fall asleep till 3-4 am. I would look at the time and be like, “I haven’t fallen asleep in 2 hours,” then, “I haven’t fallen asleep in 3 hours.” But this doesn’t happen to me anymore and I hadn’t even noticed it. A few days ago, as I was falling asleep, I suddenly realized that I can’t remember the last time I struggled to fall asleep. This thought jolted me awake but even that night I fell asleep soon after.

If you are as big a F.R.I.E.N.D.S fan as me you could quote Joey and say, “You know what you should have done? You should have told yourself that little story.”

Which brings us back to content consumption. What is the meaning of life? Apparently, it’s to watch as many great shows and movies as you can before it’s night night forever. And yes that’s an Impractical Jokers reference.

To summarize: light exposure has improved sleep but I still need to control content consumption.

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Cover Photo by Wasath Theekshana on Unsplash