Math is bad for your health

With the new school year, stress of a new job, and just life in general, sleep has been hard to come by for me.  Most nights I put a kid to bed, fall asleep in their room, and if I am lucky wake up before 10 p.m. and head downstairs to hang out with Jay, watch TV, craft, work, or whatever.

Then I start watching ridiculous shows on TLC like "I'm pregnant and so is my daughter" and before I know it, it's 1 a.m. and I'm wide awake.

The obvious answer to that issue is to not watch TV, so over the last few weeks I've made an effort to go lay in bed at bedtime, even if I don't think I'm tired.  I assumed my "insomnia" was self induced vs. real and if I just relaxed I'd go right to sleep.

I assumed wrong.

There's a LOT of noises that happen in a house at night when you are trying to sleep.  Is it the cat hiding his mouse from the other cat, or a burglar coming in to kill me?  Is it a kid coughing, or a kid about to barf?  Did I lock the windows?  Is the garage shut?  I know better than to wake Jay up for most of those, so usually I just lay there and try to drown out the sounds coming from the house.

There's one issue.  The sound keeping me up last week was my own heart beat, and shutting that off was kind of hard. It was SO LOUD... Like pounding out of my chest... And no matter how I rested, I couldn't get it to quiet down.  Finally I sat up, grabbed the iPad, and Googled "pounding heartbeat."

It suggested I take my resting heart rate, so I did.  I set the stopwatch on the iPad, located my heartbeat, and 20 seconds later did the calculations to see my heart rate was.... 130?

That seemed pretty high, considering I was laying down and not jogging in place, so I took it again.  135 this time, which I guessed was due to panic.  And the panic was easy to come by, because according to Google, "A healthy adult heart beats 60 to 100 times per minute when at rest. Anything over 100 beats per minute consistently is considered as having a high heart rate (tachycardia).  Tachycardia can seriously disrupt normal heart function, increase the risk of stroke, or cause sudden cardiac arrest or death."

Um... so not only was I missing the season finale of Hoarders, but I was going to die?

I tried to relax and slow my breathing, which seemed harder because my heart didn't feel that fast to begin with.  Finally after debating whether I should wake Jay up to tell him I was going to die or just drive myself to the nearest fire station, I was able to fall asleep.

The next morning I woke up and was thankful to not hear my heartbeat, so I went ahead and took my resting heart rate again so I had a baseline for the call I was definitely going to have to make to my doctor later that day.  And my resting heart rate after a full nights' rest was.... 115?

I decided to take it one more time before panicking Jay.  I set the stop watch for 20 seconds, counted how many times my heart beat, then multiplied by 5, just like I had each time before.

Then I realized that 20 times 5 is 100, which is NOT the number of seconds in a minute.  Once I multiplied 23 by THREE, I ended up with a much more reasonable, non-life-threatening number.

And this is why I don't do math for a living.