Chapter 28: How To Keep From Worrying About Insomnia
Do you worry when you can't sleep well? Then it may interest you to know that Samuel Untermyer-the famous international lawyer-never got a decent night's sleep in his life.
When Sam Untermyer went to college, he worried about two afflictions-asthma and insomnia. He couldn't seem to cure either, so he decided to do the next best thing-take advantage of his wakefulness. Instead of tossing and turning and worrying himself into a breakdown, he would get up and study. The result? He began ticking off honours in all of his classes, and became one of the prodigies of the College of the City of New York.
Even after he started to practice law, his insomnia continued. But Untermyer didn't worry. "Nature," he said, "will take care of me." Nature did. In spite of the small amount of sleep he was getting, his health kept up and he was able to work as hard as any of the young lawyers of the New York Bar. He even worked harder, for he worked while they slept!
At the age of twenty-one, Sam Untermyer was earning seventy-five thousand dollars a year; and other young attorneys rushed to courtrooms to study his methods. In 1931, he was paid-for handling one case-what was probably the highest lawyer's fee in all history: a cool million dollars-cash on the barrelhead.
Still he had insomnia-read half the night-and then got up at five A.M. and started dictating letters. By the time most people were just starting work, his day's work would be almost half done. He lived to the age of eighty-one, this man who had rarely had a sound night's sleep; but if he had fretted and worried about his insomnia, he would probably have wrecked his life.
We spend a third of our lives sleeping-yet nobody knows what sleep really is. We know it is a habit and a state of rest in which nature knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, but we don't know how many hours of sleep each individual requires. We don't even know if we have to sleep at all!
Fantastic? Well, during the First World War, Paul Kern, a Hungarian soldier, was shot through the frontal lobe of his brain. He recovered from the wound, but curiously enough, couldn't fall asleep. No matter what the doctors did-and they tried all kinds of sedatives and narcotics, even hypnotism- Paul Kern couldn't be put to sleep or even made to feel drowsy.
The doctors said he wouldn't live long. But he fooled them. He got a job, and went on living in the best of health for years. He would lie down and close his eyes and rest, but he got no sleep whatever. His case was a medical mystery that upset many of our beliefs about sleep.
Some people require far more sleep than others. Toscanini needs only five hours a night, but Calvin Coolidge needed more than twice that much. Coolidge slept eleven hours out of every twenty-four. In other words, Toscanini has been sleeping away approximately one-fifth of his life, while Coolidge slept away almost half of his life.
Worrying about insomnia will hurt you far more than insomnia. For example, one of my students-Ira Sandner, of 173 Overpeck Avenue, Ridgefield Park, New Jersey-was driven nearly to suicide by chronic insomnia.
"I actually thought I was going insane," Ira Sandner told me. "The trouble was, in the beginning, that I was too sound a sleeper. I wouldn't wake up when the alarm clock went off, and the result was that I was getting to work late in the morning. I worried about it-and, in fact, my boss warned me that I would have to get to work on time. I knew that if I kept on oversleeping, I would lose my job.
"I told my friends about it, and one of them suggested I concentrate hard on the alarm clock before I went to sleep. That started the insomnia! The tick-tick-tick of that blasted alarm clock became an obsession. It kept me awake, tossing, all night long! When morning came, I was almost ill. I was ill from fatigue and worry. This kept on for eight weeks. I can't put into words the tortures I suffered. I was convinced I was going insane. Sometimes I paced the floor for hours at a time, and I honestly considered jumping out of the window and ending the whole thing!
"At last I went to a doctor I had known all my life. He said: 'Ira, I can't help you. No one can help you, because you have brought this thing on yourself. Go to bed at night, and if you can't fall asleep, forget all about it. Just say to yourself: "I don't care a hang if I don't go to sleep. It's all right with me if I lie awake till morning." Keep your eyes closed and say: "As long as I just lie still and don't worry about it, I'll be getting rest, anyway." '
"I did that," says Sandner, "and in two weeks' time I was dropping off to sleep. In less than one month, I was sleeping eight hours, and my nerves were back to normal."
It wasn't insomnia that was killing Ira Sandner; it was his worry about it.
Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman, professor at the University of Chicago, has done more research work on sleep than has any other living man. He is the world's expert on sleep. He declares that he has never known anyone to die from insomnia. To be sure, a man might worry about insomnia until he lowered his vitality and was swept away by germs. But it was the worry that did the damage, not the insomnia itself.
Dr. Kleitman also says that the people who worry about insomnia usually sleep far more than they realise. The man who swears "I never slept a wink last night" may have slept for hours without knowing it. For example, one of the most profound thinkers of the nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer, was an old bachelor, lived in a boarding house, and bored everyone with his talk about his insomnia. He even put "stoppings" in his ears to keep out the noise and quiet his nerves. Sometimes he took opium to induce sleep. One night he and Professor Sayce of Oxford shared the same room at a hotel. The next morning Spencer declared he hadn't slept a wink all night. In reality, it was Professor Sayce who hadn't slept a wink. He had been kept awake all night by Spencer's snoring.
The first requisite for a good night's sleep is a feeling of security. We need to feel that some power greater than ourselves will take care of us until morning. Dr. Thomas Hyslop, of the Great West Riding Asylum, stressed that point in an address before the British Medical Association. He said: "One of the best sleep-producing agents which my years of practice have revealed to me-is prayer. I say this purely as a medical man. The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves."
"Let God-and let go."
Jeanette MacDonald told me that when she was depressed and worried and had difficulty in going to sleep, she could always get "a feeling of security" by repeating Psalm XXII: "The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. ...". But if you are not religious, and have to do things the hard way, then learn to relax by physical measures. Dr. David Harold Fink, who wrote Release from Nervous Tension, says that the best way to do this is to talk to your body. According to Dr. Fink, words are the key to all kinds of hypnosis; and when you consistently can't sleep, it is because you have talked yourself into a case of insomnia. The way to undo this is to dehypnotise yourself-and you can do it by saying to the muscles of your body: "Let go, let go-loosen up and relax." We already know that the mind and nerves can't relax while the muscles are tense-so if we want to go to sleep, we start with the muscles. Dr. Fink recommends-and it works out in practice-that we put a pillow under the knees to ease the tension on the legs, and that we tuck small pillows under the arms for the very same reason. Then, by telling the jaw to relax, the eyes, the arms, and the legs, we finally drop off to sleep before we know what has hit us. I've tried it-I know. If you have trouble sleeping, get hold of Dr. Fink's book, Release from Nervous Tension, which I have mentioned earlier It is the only book I know of that is both lively reading and a cure for insomnia.
One of the best cures for insomnia is making yourself physically tired by gardening, swimming, tennis, golf, skiing, or by just plain physically exhausting work. That is what Theodore Dreiser did. When he was a struggling young author, he was worried about insomnia, so he got a job working as a section hand on the New York Central Railway; and after a day of driving spikes and shoveling gravel, he was so exhausted that he could hardly stay awake long enough to eat.
If we get tired enough, nature will force us to sleep even while we are walking. To illustrate, when I was thirteen years old, my father shipped a car-load of fat hogs to Saint Joe, Missouri. Since he got two free railroad passes, he took me along with him. Up until that time, I had never been in a town of more than four thousand. When I landed in Saint Joe-a city of sixty thousand-I was agog with excitement. I saw skyscrapers six storeys high and-wonder of wonders-I saw a street-car. I can close my eyes now and still see and hear that street-car. After the most thrilling and exciting day of my life, Father and I took a train back to Ravenwood, Missouri. Arriving there at two o'clock in the morning, we had to walk four miles home to the farm. And here is the point of the story: I was so exhausted that I slept and dreamed as I walked. I have often slept while riding horseback. And I am alive to tell it!
When men are completely exhausted they sleep right through the thunder and horror and danger of war. Dr. Foster Kennedy, the famous neurologist, tells me that during the retreat of the Fifth British Army in 1918, he saw soldiers so exhausted that they fell on the ground where they were and fell into a sleep as sound as a coma. They didn't even wake up when he raised their eyelids with his fingers. And he says he noticed that invariably the pupils of the eyes were rolled upward in the sockets. "After that," says Dr. Kennedy, "when I had trouble sleeping, I would practice rolling up my eyeballs into this position, and I found that in a few seconds I would begin to yawn and feel sleepy. It was an automatic reflex over which I had no control."
No man ever committed suicide by refusing to sleep and no one ever will. Nature would force a man to sleep in spite of all his will power. Nature will let us go without food or water far longer than she will let us go without sleep.
Speaking of suicide reminds me of a case that Dr. Henry C. Link describes in his book, The Rediscovery of Man. Dr. Link is vice-president of The Psychological Corporation and he interviews many people who are worried and depressed. In his chapter "On Overcoming Fears and Worries", he tells about a patient who wanted to commit suicide. Dr. Link knew arguing would only make the matter worse, so he said to this man: "If you are going to commit suicide anyway, you might at least do it in a heroic fashion. Run around the block until you drop dead."
He tried it, not once but several times, and each time felt better, in his mind if not in his muscles. By the third night he had achieved what Dr. Link intended in the first place-he was so physically tired (and physically relaxed) that he slept like a log. Later he joined an athletic club and began to compete in competitive sports. Soon he was feeling so good he wanted to live for ever!
So, to keep from worrying about insomnia, here are five rules:
1. If yon can't sleep, do what Samuel Untermyer did. Get up and work or read until you do feel sleepy.
2. Remember that no one was ever killed by lack of sleep. Worrying about insomnia usually causes far more damage than sleeplessness.
3. Try prayer-or repeat Psalm XXIII, as Jeanette MacDonald does.
4. Relax your body. Read the book "Release from Nervous Tension."
5. Exercise. Get yourself so physically tired you can't stay awake.
