More than once in the last month, I have come into work feeling tired, bleary-eyed, and foggy-headed. My morning muzziness wasn’t because I had an actual hangover. It was because I have become hooked on the audiobooks my library makes available through Overdrive. I thought about what it was that kept me listening past midnight, past one o’clock, even on nights when I knew that I had to go to work the next day. The narrators were good, but not magical. The stories were similarly very good, but I didn’t think that was the answer either—not entirely at least.
As I thought about it, the more I started to think it was because audiobooks are just too easy to consume. With books, it’s easier to listen to signals that I’m too tired to keep going. It’s hard to keep going when your eyes just slam shut, after all. But with audiobooks, I can get comfortable, close my eyes, and keep resetting the sleep timer on the library app until I start doing bad math about how much sleep I need to make it through the next morning.
Thankfully, there’s caffeine.
one of the great pleasures when I catch a cold is not lie in bed under lots of warm covers, with a water bottle, and listening to an audiobook until i fall asleep. I guess somehow you can relate. Also, caffeine: how did people live before it was discovered?