I love taking care of sleep patients. If push came to shove, I'd probably do it for free (and with the ever declining reimbursements physicians get for their services, I might get to prove it in the near future). Every patient is a new experience and for as much as I help them, they always seem to teach me something as well.

Every new patient I see is typically greeted with my standard opening question, "Hello, I'm Chris. How can I help you?" I like this simple question. I stole it from one of my neurology professors during residency. The open nature of the question sets a nice tone of me being ready to serve my patient.

Recently I had a nice young patient answer my question in a shocking way. "You can help me with my sleep...it is hellish." There was absolutely no hint of sarcasm or hyperbole in his tone.

When I think of something as being hellish, I don't know why, but my mind always goes to the same situation: I have been abducted and I'm being kept against my will in the basement of some creepy individual's house. I'm sure everyone has their own definition of a hellish scenario. I was anxious to hear my patient's story. Here's how it went.

"Sometimes I wake up and it takes me an hour or two to go back to sleep."

That's it. I kept waiting for him to add the fact that it took him an hour or two to fall back to sleep while locked in a basement, but that was not a part of his story.

I'm not here to pass judgement. Patients occasionally tell me that the experience during their sleep study was "the worst night of their life." I do think that when it comes to our sleep, and our feelings about it, we need to dig deeper and ask why is not sleeping for an hour or two such an awful experience for some. I've been up today eight hours so far as I write this blog...feels okay to me. Is it a feeling of failure? Is it a dread of what will happen tomorrow (which is usually much less of a problem than expected)?

The last time I was at Universal Studios Park in Florida, I went with my family to see the new Harry Potter theme park. We went during a time of what was promised to be enormous crowds and endless wait times, so going in, I was braced for the worst. When the first ride only took an hour to get through, I was thrilled. Expectations in action!

Tonight, when you go to bed, if it takes you a while to go to sleep, you can consider going to bed a little later, or you can just prepare for your two hours. Use the time to plan a fun event for your partner or a friend. Think about a celebrity crush (I think about eating my way across Italy with Giada). Think of all of the things in your life you are thankful for (strangely, again for me it's Giada). Maybe something as simple as planning for a difficult night can move that needle from hellish to just slightly terrible. It's a start!