I Learned This Stress-Management Trick When I Was 3 (Published 2020) (2024)

I’ve taken the deep breaths, the warm baths, the Xanax. I’ve tried candles and crystals and sitting cross-legged. But nothing can calm me quite like rocking. Here’s what that looks like: An adult man, mid-30s, finishes work and climbs into bed. It’s early evening still, the shades are drawn, he has yet to cook dinner. The day has been hectic — deadlines, dog to the vet, a leak beneath the sink — but that’s all behind him now, a soft quiet settling in. His head rolls on the pillow, with intention and control, from side to side, each ear touching down like the taps of a metronome. Tap. Tap. Tap. His hips follow suit, and soon his whole body is in one smooth kinesis. He feels his pulse slow and his breaths even out. He’s free, dreaming of other worlds, worlds with many moons, with humming tides. Twenty minutes pass, and something brings him back to Earth — a car alarm, or his partner asking from another room what he’s making for dinner. He climbs out of bed, lighter, less burdened. Spaghetti, he thinks.

To the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, this scene might ring a bell, summoning a term that sounds like something you may see at a remarkably boring jazz show: “sleep-related rhythmic movements,” or SRRMs. Characterized by repetitive and rhythmic motor behaviors, these movements occur mostly during quiet wakefulness or the early stages of sleep. For me, they include head and body rocking and rolling, but other movements are possible as well. And if they go so far as to disturb one’s sleep or daytime function in a profound way, or even cause an injury, a disorder diagnosis is made. SRRMs are typical in infants and children, and become less prevalent with increasing age, usually disappearing spontaneously before adolescence. Rarely are they seen in adults — but somehow here I am, approaching 40, still rocking to the beat.

My earliest memory is as a 3-year-old, when I graduated from crib to training bed. My parents tucked those guardrail bumpers beneath both sides of my mattress — a drowsy toddler in a stalled spaceship. I would rock up on my hands and knees, and then somehow fall awkwardly onto my back and into a sound sleep. My parents never thought of it as worrisome or something that needed fixing. “You were such a cute Martian in there,” my mother said to me once.

Rocking eventually became its own end, my own personal form of meditation. In high school, I could put a day’s worth of typical teen angst behind me and rock in my water bed to Ani DiFranco or Jewel on repeat, dreaming of a future as a folk singer, of crisscrossing the country in my VW van, the first boy to headline Lilith Fair. In college, I would spend time honing the practice when my roommate was in class or out drinking. I would even turn on his black-light lava lamp to really curate a mood. When he joined a frat, I was overjoyed at the idea of his scarcity — that sweet, sweet rhythmic “me time.” It was something to look forward to, and still is. The gentle to-and-fro lowers my heart rate, my muscles loosen, the clouds part. It puts me in a trancelike state, a place of freedom where the body shifts into autopilot and the spirit can wander to a distant place, safely and without fear.