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Tip of the Week

This week I’ve invited the writer Drew Grant to give us an unorthodox tip on falling asleep.

My Bubbe died a few months ago, and I flew home to Maryland for the funeral. After a long day of mourning and the subsequent shiva, my dad rubbed his eyes and herded my little sister and me to the car. “I just want to go home, order pizza and watch ‘Mandy,’ ” he said. Yes, he was referring to last year’s psycho-hallucinogenic revenge film starring Nicolas Cage.

I used to think my family’s habit of consuming horror as a form of self-soothing was an abnormality in our genetic trait, a strange adrenaline-deficit disease passed down from generation to generation. I thought about that a lot after returning home to L.A. after the funeral, when I bought “Hereditary” and watched it on YouTube every single night for two weeks the screams of Toni Collette lulling me to sleep.

As it turns out, my family’s counterintuitive obsession with mainlining terror before bed isn’t why we all have insomnia. It’s how we’re curing it.

Last October, a study found that people who voluntarily engage in high arousal negative experiences, such as being in an “extreme” haunted attraction, find their mood elevated and their stress lowered after facing their fears. There is something even called “Post-VANE euphoria” — meaning voluntary arousing negative experiences — which I colloquially referred to as that warm, sleepy feeling I get after watching “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

Indeed, psychologists have found that people who consistently watch horror movies are participating in a form of exposure therapy. It might be especially useful to those of us, like my family, already predisposed toward anxiety, shrinking down the vague, existential horror of everyday life into bite-size, manageable pieces. Whether nature or nurture, “home” will always be a place where you can scare yourself to sleep.

Now, excuse me, I have a nap to take, and this serial killer podcast isn’t going to listen to itself