Daily Training

by E. F. Benson; Eustace Miles

He is, therefore, you will conjecture, a naturally good sleeper. Naturally, no—that is to say, in early life he was a persistently bad one, who used to adopt all kinds of means to go to sleep, of which presently. But for the last six years his record is this: he has, as far as he remembers, through good and ill report, through such anxieties as are inseparable from life itself, through one attack of typhoid fever, and two of influenza, in spite of hard work up till the time of going to bed (in fact, particularly then, since he finds he works best when the small hours begin to grow bigger), lain awake for never more than one complete hour on three occasions. Once he had coincidently a bad cold, on the other two occasions he failed then, and fails now to account for so extraordinary a proceeding. All told, then, in six years he has been awake for three solid hours when he meant to be asleep. Otherwise, he extinguishes his light—and is called.

Now the secret of this is, as far as he knows, the complete conviction that he is going to sleep, a conviction not expressed at all, but an acquired instinct. Yet he does not—he says all this at the risk of being accused of egotism, but hoping it may be useful—bother about the matter at all. Once he used to bother about it: that was in the days when he slept rather badly; now he does not. Nor does he go to bed in the hopes of going to sleep; he does not go to bed till he feels, instinctively again, that it is time. Thirdly, if he has gone to bed early, and is not going to be called till after he has had his fill of sleep (this is rare, since he is a glutton at it), he instantly reads or gets up instead of trying to go to sleep again (which in itself would do no harm), or instead of wondering why he has awoke. This would do harm, for it partakes of the nature of “bothering about it.” He avoids sleep during the day, this also he thinks is crucial, and if he feels sleepy (sleepy, not to be compared with inclined to rest) he gets up and does something.

To return for a moment to his bedroom. The windows are open, there is no carpet, he has blankets which vary according to the time of year, but whatever the time of year he has an extra thickness over his feet. In his rare moments of semi-consciousness he sometimes (this is towards morning, always when the world is coldest) draws the extra covering over him, and without really waking sleeps again. He also invariably goes to sleep on his right side and invariably wakes lying on his left.

We have spoken about this enviable slumberer at some length, because he seems instinctively to have got hold of (no credit to him) some of the points which will be of use to the moderately bad sleeper, whose condition, we maintain, is wrong. If sleep is required, it is as pitiable not to get it as not to be able to eat without indigestion when hungry; if sleep is not required, it is as foolish to try to induce it as to eat when one is not hungry, also with indigestion. But to draw the lesson from this enviable slumberer, though much that he does would murder sleep like Macbeth (witness his odious habit of working immediately before going to bed), still much that he does is sensible. Pre-eminently sensible, for instance, is his acquired habit of not bothering about it, for the wondering whether one is going to go to sleep is in many cases quite sufficient to keep one awake. Go to bed assuming naturally, not with insistence, for that would spoil it all, that you are going to sleep, or to use a phrase from hypnotism, make the suggestion that you are. You will not succeed in capturing this attitude the first time you try, nor yet the second, but before long you probably will; probably, also, when you have done so, you will become a good sleeper. But if this fails, what then? You will lie awake, that is all, and you will not die of it. But if you fret about it you will lose all the benefit of the act of resting, which is very great. To lie still with twitching nerves, agonising for sleep, will not only not bring sleep, but it will deprive you of rest. You lie awake. Be it so—at any rate, rest.

Here innumerable complications enter. You may think it is a noise that is keeping you awake. Someone, who ought to be in bed, is moving about directly above you. Do not get irritated and think over the biting things you will say to-morrow. The morrow will take care of itself. Supposing there was a gale blowing, you would acquiesce in the Natural Law, and in consequence would go to sleep sooner, because you were not irritated. And irritation, it must be remembered, should be wholly within our control; in this case to get it in control is an essential preliminary to sleep. While you are cross you will not sleep. Therefore, cease to be cross. A greater distraction would calm your irritation; let the desire for calmness calm it.

Of great mental anxiety as a cause of insomnia, or of great physical pain, it is not our purpose to speak, for these are exceptional cases. But the ordinary person must, with an effort—until the act becomes automatic—put out of his mind when he goes to bed all interesting things, if he wishes to become a good sleeper. He must, at first anyhow, having definitely told himself that he is going to sleep, consciously let his mind dwell on monotonous affairs. Sheep going through a gap in a hedge is a recognised soporific, and no doubt an excellent one, only he must be absorbed not in each sheep but in the stupifying multitude of them. Similarly he may try to mark out a lawn-tennis court with as few possible liftings of the marking machine, without of course going over any line twice. Or he may say over and over again some passage of poetry, or some familiar form of words, which should be short, so as to procure the benefit of the tedious effect of mere senseless repetition. But, after he has wasted time—for these things are waste of time if one wants to go to sleep—in this manner, he must take into consideration methods even more simple than these. Cold feet, the least feeling of hunger will easily, especially in a nervous person, induce sleeplessness. If such causes are present, then additional covering, and some easily digestible food—biscuits, fruit, etc., will probably relieve him. Again, washing the face in cold water, also an awakening process, tends to send the blood anywhere but to the brain, which is desirable. A hot-water bottle to the feet serves the same object. Or again, failure of digestion is a common cause of sleeplessness; if there is a chance of this being the cause, drink hot water before going to bed, or cold water with a little bi-carbonate of potash.

Considering the incalculable benefit which a habit of sleep produces, we do not feel ashamed to write down aids, however tiny, to produce it. For that it is largely a habit is beyond question, and as a habit it is one of the entirely healthful habits—it is essentially good. But the contrary habit, that of lying awake, though largely remediable, is not fatal, and its ill-effects are immeasurably neutralized if the will is steadily exerted towards the grasp of that truth. To lie awake, fretting that one cannot go to sleep, is distinctly bad; to lie awake, if no remedy short of drug-drinking will cure it, does not appreciably matter, so long as one accepts “rest” as the best possible substitute.

A different variety of sleeplessness is that which attacks the sufferer early in the morning, say three or four hours before he wishes to get up. For this a somewhat heroic remedy may be tried, since it is always possible that natural awaking may mean one thing—namely, that you have had enough sleep. Therefore, it may be worth while, just once or twice, to try the effect, if you are really broad awake, of getting up instead of encouraging yourself to wake early again by letting this early waking dwell on your mind. You will probably be very tired by the next evening, you may even (in this case the remedy is clearly futile) be too tired to sleep. But it may easily happen that you will sleep that night exceedingly well, and wake at a normal time again. But if again, and yet again you continue to wake early, it is no use persisting in this treatment. Or you may awake, as stated before, owing to the airlessness of your room, and the fact that you have been breathing with an open mouth, or, and this is probably a frequent cause of early awakings, you may be engaged for weeks or months together on some absorbing occupation. You sleep at first because tired, and sleep deeply, but as the hours go by the sleep becomes lighter, and before your body regains consciousness at all, that strange part of the brain, the subliminal self, or the sub-conscious self, is awake, and begins thinking (gradually arousing the rest of you) of the engrossing occupation. Soon the whole brain is awake, and by the sub-conscious self is reminded, as it were, of the business. Then having once begun thinking about it, it is difficult for you to regain that passivity which is invariably the prelude to sleep, though it need be scarcely more than instantaneous.

It is here that the cause of sleeplessness and its remedy we believe largely lie, for it is within the power of all to put themselves into the control, more or less complete, of their sub-conscious self and develop the power of the sub-conscious self until it becomes a real potency. To take an example, how constantly does it happen that after wrestling with some mental difficulty, or trying to remember some name which one knows well, one by instinct dismisses the subject, to find in a few minutes that the difficulty is solved, or the name recollected. That is probably the work of the sub-conscious part of the brain. In the same way many people can wake themselves at any hour they wish, by telling their sub-conscious brain (this is what it comes to) to call them. They go to sleep, having ordered their sub-conscious self to call them, and at the appointed hour, it may be long before light, something inside them, which apparently knows the time, wakes the rest of the sleeping brain and body. And with a little training and practice the power of developing and using the sub-conscious brain increases very quickly. We believe that many early wakers could sleep comfortably on, by saying that they would not awake till a certain hour. One does not need violence or internal shouting, as it were, to communicate effectually with this sub-conscious self; a quiet determination of thought for a few moments before going to sleep does the work effectually. This also is invaluable to many who have found that going to sleep when getting into bed was difficult. One has to take it for granted that one is going to sleep, and cease to think about it, emptying the brain of conscious thought as far as may be. You cannot go to sleep in a rage, until the rage has given place to exhaustion.

To sum up, then, both for those who find it difficult to go to sleep, and for those who wake early, the following hints are recommended:—