Things to Keep You from Sleeping

I need to stop reading. Like a morbid goth, I gravitate to books about all the things that can hurt me, and once I've frightened myself enough, I can't sleep, I close the shades, and then I refuse to go outside. Then I have nothing to do but read more books to terrify me.

I try to sleep, I really do, but what if a nuclear bomb accidentally explodes? You didn't think of that, did you? With the Cold War long dead, it turns out we're left with quite a few atomic weapons in less-than-ideal repair. Command and Control tells the long story of America's nuclear arsenal, punctuated by a blow-by-blow account of one of the many accidents that could've killed untold amounts of innocent bystanders.

But that's probably a long shot. I might not die in my sleep from an atomic bomb, but when I wake up, I might wake up in a coffin. Buried Alive contains story after horrifying story about people across history, all the way up to the present, who were confidently declared dead only to wake up at their funerals, underground or spread out on cold slabs in the middle of organ donation.

The worst part is, I know I haven't been built to correctly guess what's going to get me in the end. Atomic bombs? Premature burial? I'm more likely to slip in the shower or die of a stress-induced heart attack. The Real Story of Risk demonstrates how evolution has left us ill-equipped to see the real danger in the world, making us terrified of airplanes but perfectly fine behind the wheels of much more accident-prone cars.

I clearly haven't gathered enough information. I think I should spend the next eight hours propped up in bed, reading into it.