4. How To Treat Sleep Insomnia

The ultimate purpose of every exercise and every tech­nique in this book is to provide relaxation, which, starting in the mind, releases the nerve tension and thus relaxes the muscular strain, and ultimately helps you avoid sleep insomnia. When that has been accomplished, the eye difficulties are corrected.

There is nothing so maddening to a tense person as the cheerful advice, "Go home and relax."

"But how," he demands irritably, "am I to relax? Heavens knows that I would if I could."

The average person does not know how to relax. In fact, he is often unaware of his own tension until it is revealed by its influence on some body function. The stomach "tightens" with nerves and an upset stom­ach develops. If the nervous condition persists, stomach ulcers appear. The heart muscle becomes tense and strained and grows fatigued from the extra work put upon it. More people die of heart trouble than from any other cause, and yet the basis of most heart "dis­eases" lies in tension that could be prevented by learn­ing how to relax.

When the tension becomes obvious to family and friends, someone remarks light-heartedly, "Just relax."

And you try it. Perhaps you unclench the hands thatwere twisted tight in your lap and let your arms hang loose.

"See," you exclaim triumphantly, "I am relaxed."

But your shoulders are still tense, there is a frown between your eyebrows, your lips are tightly pressed together, your feet grip the floor, the back of your neck aches with strain, there is a knot in your stomach, your eyes are staring.

You are relaxed only when the mind is at rest, and the mind is at rest not when it is idle but when it is thinking of one thing best.

This point has proven over and over, in my own experience, to be hard for the average person to grasp. A mind at rest, they believe, is the idle mind, the mind emptied of thought. Nothing could be further from the truth. The mind thrives on activity, if it is the right kind of activity. In fact, research has shown that when the brain cells do not receive stimuli they become pre­maturely aged.

Now there is one thing we must remember about the cells of the brain. Unlike the body cells, they do not have the capacity for reproducing themselves. Therefore, when a group of brain cells becomes in­active, the body function for which that group was responsible also becomes inactive.

In other words, the brain, like other organs of the body, was made to be used. Strap up one arm for a period of weeks and the muscles grow flabby; so with the brain. It too needs exercise, and its cells keep young and healthy through stimuli.

We are going to discuss this at great length later on because it is the heart of the whole subject, but at this point we are dealing with relaxation as it applies to that bugbear of nervous people—sleep insomnia.

In Physiology and Anatomy, Esther M. Griesheimer relates that, "By means of experimental studies in young animals, the loss of sleep has been found to be more damaging than starvation." Yet when the person suffering from chronic insomnia realizes that he has tired, strained eyes with consequent defective vision, he rushes to an oculist who fits him with glasses. He has donned the national badge.

It is estimated that 25,000,000 Americans, or one out of every five persons, wear glasses. In no other country is there so monstrous a percentage. Nor is this due, as one might believe at first thought, to the fact that our people are getting superior care. Much of it is due to the kind of salesmanship to which we are subjected, from the advertisements of pretty girls pre­sumably made more lovely by the addition of a pair of spectacles, to the campaign of a year or so ago to beautify American womanhood with glasses, by the slogan, "Sex with Specs."

Matthew Luckiesh in Light, Vision and Seeing, ex­claimed: "With unconscious irony, the increasing per­centage of persons wearing glasses is sometimes hailed as proof that more persons are paying attention to their eyesight!"

Our victim of insomnia has, by attempting to re­lieve his tired eyes with glasses, fixed his temporary eyestrain while the cause has remained untouched. And the sleepless one is saddled with glasses for the rest of his life and just as wakeful as ever.

What causes insomnia? You do. Insomnia is delib­erate wakefulness, and the real villain of the piece is in your own mind. Whether the insomnia is predicated on fear, or the night hours are a time that you uncon­sciously set aside for daydreaming, or sleeplessness is a bad habit you have acquired, its cause lies in your own mind.

It is not the purpose of this book to analyze the hidden motives that lurk behind your behavior. For each of you the reason may be, and probably is, a different one. I can say with confidence that, reluctant as you may be to accept the fact of your own responsibility for the condition, you cannot improve without doing so, and a genuine determination to overcome it and to get at the root of it will be the first step toward regaining sleep and breaking a bad habit. Most of our habits, many of them so ingrained that we have long since ceased to be conscious of them, are merely nerv­ous tricks that can be overcome if we make up our minds to do so. Behind nearly every failure to show improvement is a lack of genuine desire to improve.

"If you knew what I suffer from my nerves," you retort indignantly. "If you knew what I go through! Do you suppose I can help it?"

Well, frankly, yes, I do. A nervous person does not have diseased or sick nerves; he has a sick mind. His helpless nerves merely carry the messages which he is sending over them; they are not to blame if the re­sult is uncomfortable.

If you are reluctant to observe or acknowledge this process in yourself, watch it in someone else. Study the mother of young children, keeping an eye on them all day, growing more and more irritated by their be­havior, getting more and more tense, so that she drops the bowl in which she is mixing a cake, knocks over a glass of milk on the rug she has just cleaned, slaps Johnny when he gets under foot, and finally bursts into tears.

"It's my nerves!" she cries.

But the trouble is in her own mind, in her inability to achieve what is called "the hygiene of a quiet mind," to attain a mental relaxation which would pro­vide physical relaxation so that the poor abused nerves would no longer be the offenders.

All this digression has taken us away from our theme of sleep insomnia. Behind insomnia there is generally a fear, conscious or unconscious. Sometimes there is a sub­conscious fear of death which the sufferer associates with the loss of consciousness that comes with sleep. Therefore, he is actually struggling to keep awake even when he believes most sincerely that he longs for sleep.

People are frequently amazed when they unearth the true reason for their insomnia. In many cases they must seek the cause far back in their childhood. For some it is a deep-rooted fear of the dark that springs from some forgotten moment in childhood. Perhaps oftenest of all, what keeps people awake is simply the fear that they will stay awake!

Sometimes a busy person rushes through his day, unconsciously filing away in his mind odds and ends of problems which he has no time to handle. When he gets into bed he begins to grapple with them, worrying about one and then another, although he realizes that he is too tired to think them out properly and that, when his energy is at its lowest ebb, his judg­ment is unreliable.

Because he is tired, each problem looms bigger and bigger; he does not know how to cope with it. Because his energy is temporarily reduced, he tries in vain to measure himself against the task and feels inadequate to handle it. All the feeling of inadequacy that he hides so successfully from others, and often hides even from himself, comes rushing to the surface, stirring illogical fears—

Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Sometimes there is a fear of insomnia itself. There is considerable misunderstanding about this business of sleep. People believe that you must have eight hours of sleep to maintain good health; that chronic insomnia can upset your nerves and eventually even lead to in­sanity. And this is nonsense.

There have been times when all of us have been forced to lose a night's sleep, perhaps several nights' sleep, because of illness in the family or of an unusual pressure of work or of an emergency. As a result, we were exhausted, as the young animals, mentioned earlier in this chapter, were exhausted by enforced sleeplessness.

The mistake we make is that we... [Chapter Incomplete]

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