I’ve never been able to sleep. I’ve tried everything. Really everything. Tea and meditation, lavender oils, vitamins, exercise, weird yoga music, and, yes, all the drugs.  But now I have two kids. And they make it… so much harder. Sleep is elusive. And my anxiety about my insomnia kicks in right when I should be chilling the hell out. It sucks. And I know there’s a lot of us out there in the same boat. It was one night, looking around the kid’s room at the stacks and stacks and PILES of books that it occurred to me how critical bedtime stories are and how that importance has transcended cultures, geography, and hundreds if not thousands of years.  People way smarter than me clearly all agree that there is something about bedtime stories that work. Or else there wouldn’t be five trillion of them.

 

My girl's room was filled with books from my own childhood because my mother throws NOTHING away. Books from Africa and Argentina, Ireland, and China. Because everyone, everywhere wants their kids to go the F to sleep. And children need help switching off their daytime brains so they can be in night mode and leave us alone to reclaim some semblance of sanity at the end of the day. If that worked in our younger years, why did we stop this routine as we got older? And, we all know, we replaced it with something that actually totally screws with our sleep: phones.

 

We can’t get off of them. We doom-scroll through countless videos of puppies befriending tortoises, of a guy pulling a tablecloth out from under a tower of precariously balanced objects, of someone making a cake that looks exactly like a bunch of asparagus. Why? Because we’re desperate to turn off our brains. We tell ourselves just two more minutes and then, before you know it, an hour and a half of sleep has been eaten away. We know, we know, we should read a book. But, for so many of us, that too feels like work.

So here we are, in bed, repeating the same cycle night after night. We need to get back to the days when we closed our eyes and let someone tell us a funny, inconsequential story, to get our mind off of our day, or mistakes, our to-do lists. And that’s where Anxiety Addicts Bedtime Stories comes in. Because the worst thing about insomnia and anxiety, other than the spiraling and the pit in your stomach, is the loneliness. And these stories remind you that you aren’t alone. 

 

And, when our writers get our hands on them, they become funny. They invite you into different places and time periods to shift your thinking. We transport you into silly worlds, ridiculous situations, dumb, embarrassing moments, and life lessons learned. We take you to someone else’s middle school or crossing the border into Canada in the 80s with some adult contraband. We take you to weddings where someone didn’t get the dress code memo or to a time when a group of teenagers lost an Uruguayan exchange student.

 

We’re a free download of levity. We’re a ten-minute vacation. We’re a silly but useful escape. We play just the tiniest bit of soothing music to slow down your heart rate. We pick stories purely to entertain you. And we tell them with love. We even play a little music at the end in case you’ve dozed off. We're here for you. Now, turn off your phone.

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Sweet Dreams,