Go to Bed!

Human Husbandry, Part 3

Welcome to Part 3 of Human Husbandry! In case you missed the introduction, you can read more about what human husbandry is here, but here’s the short of it: if animal husbandry is the care and keeping of the creatures around us, then human husbandry is the care and keeping of ourselves.

Over the next several weeks, we’re going to focus on how to take care of ourselves in gentle, compassionate, and healthy ways, particularly when that care-giving is hard. If you haven’t yet, make sure to check out Part 1: Go Play! and Part 2: Go to the Vet.

Today’s focus is on rest and sleep, and Pants is here to be a spectacularly bad example. Parts of this article were published in a previous DLG post.

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If a hammer will do the job, Pants is bringing a jack hammer. Once she understood that she would get a treat if she lay on the floor when I said down, she’d body slam herself onto the ground, front paws splayed wide, eyes wild, somehow scratching the bejezus out of my legs on the way, and then bounce up again for a treat. Jack hammer.

It’s the same with on: she doesn’t just jump on the couch when I say, “On!” Oh no. She leaps straight into the air (sometimes several feet from the couch), flails herself through time and space to land in some approximation towards the couch, and then immediately catapults off again in anticipation of me saying, “Off!” This is where she got the nickname Disaster Pants.

This is her trying to catch a treat. She failed.

But when Pants was diagnosed with heartworm a year after we got her, her energy level stopped being funny and started being life-threatening.

If you have a dog, you probably know about heartworm. If you’re not familiar, don’t look it up. I don’t want to be responsible for your nightmares. Let me just give you the lite version. Heartworm is a parasite that lives in a dog’s heart valves and feeds off its blood. It will kill the dog through heart failure, lung disease, and embolisms. It’s often asymptomatic until irreparable damage is done.

This photo is a coping tool.

Heartworm is a nightmare both because of the illness and because of the treatment to cure it. The dog goes through excruciating worm-killing injections (of arsenic) and strict bed rest while the parasites die and disintegrate. When I say bed rest, I mean Pants had to lie in her crate 24 hours a day. She couldn’t even be off leash in the back yard because a single frolic could kill her.

Our three-year-old jet-fueled chaos mutt had to be completely calm for six months.

Six. MONTHS.

Literally running up a mountain

No more play dates with her best friend. No more dog parks. No more walks or window feuds with the mailperson or even tug of war at home. Pants had to sleep for six months, or she might die.

Maybe you’re in the same boat. Not that you have heartworm. People can’t get heartworm. (Just kidding, they can. Don’t think about it.) Your body is telling you that if you don’t rest, you’ll experience some catastrophic system failure, but you can’t make yourself slow down. You might be in a position where if you don’t take care of all those tasks, no one will. Or you feel guilty every time you sit down. Your mind just won’t stop, and so neither does your body.

Resting is a hard thing to do. We gave Pants so many sedatives and she still managed to splat her body into the front window when she saw a fly. She went full battle mode at the front door when the FedEx lady delivered a package next door. (It wasn’t even our house, Pants!) And once, at 10pm, when she was supposed to be concentrating on peeing, she saw a rabbit run across the street and stood up on her back legs to yodel at it.

Pants, in short, was not good at resting. And sometimes, neither are you.

To be fair, the world doesn’t really make space for you to rest. The demands from work, home, family, your phone, and on and on never end. A language has sprung up around rest and recovery as though it’s an indulgence: “I deserve this day off,” or, “I earned that extra hour of sleep.”

Rest is not a luxury; it’s a necessity. Chronic lack of sleep, defined as less than seven hours a night, has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, depression, increased pain experience, alcohol misuse, dementia, and some cancers. Lack of sleep isn’t a badge of grit. It’s deadly.

You are entitled to rest.

Pictured: how to sleep with Pants on

It’s okay to slow down, to say no more often and yes more strategically. Seven to nine hours sleep are your right (dogs sleep up to fourteen). Feeling refreshed when you wake up in the morning is normal. Still feeling tired is not.

Pants is okay now. After six months of treatment, she was cleared to play again. A year later, she got a clean bill of health. These days, she’s learning to jump into my arms and do figure eights around my wife’s legs. She’s still Disaster Pants.

If you hear yourself in this article, it’s time to slow down. Consider setting some boundaries with the time thieves. My favorite book on this topic is The Book of Boundaries by

Melissa Urban

. If you’d like to learn more about why it’s so hard for women in particular to rest, pick up Burnout by Amelia and

Emily Nagoski

. Look at your sleep habits and see if you can make little changes that will give you big wins. And as always, take a page out of your four-legged friend’s playbook and sleep more. (Seriously. FOURTEEN HOURS.)