Sleep is important to my happiness. One of the medications I take for fibromyalgia helps me sleep. It is necessary, if not sufficient, for my happiness. In that sense this article seems relevant but Mr. Coughlin's comments on women seem ludicrous to me. Do you agree?

by Robert Coughlin

Condensed from Life magazine, April 3, 1950

A Gallup Poll of eight North Atlantic nations in 1948 showed that Americans are the champion insomniacs: 53 percent said they had trouble part or all of the time going to sleep at night. They and their friends, the people who wake up in the night and the people who can’t sleep past a fixed hour in the morning, are the sleeping-pill customers. In one recent year they bought 3,360,000,000 pills, an average of 24 for every American.

Insomnia has never killed anyone. But to the people who suffer from it, insomnia is as debilitating as anemia, as nagging as an ulcer, uncomfortable as a leg in a cast. And chronic insomnia has the peculiar distinction of being its own cause. The advanced insomniac approaches his bed in a state of anxiety and spends the nest hours awake because he is fearful that he will do just that.

No one knows exactly what sleep is or exactly what causes it or exactly why it is needed. The process can only be described. [I think we know a lot more about it in 2013. More about that in my comments later…]

After a normal period of relaxation (up to 30 minutes) the prospective sleeper reaches a stage of semi-consciousness which is neither sleeping nor waking. It is a feeling of “floating” or being “disembodied.” If all goes well, sensation ends and the subject floats over the borderline to unconsciousness. The passage takes only a few seconds and is marked at the end by an abrupt shift in the origin of brain waves (minute electrical charges) from the back part of the head to the front. This shift was discovered some years ago by Dr. Mary A. B. Brazier at the Massachusetts General Hospital, but there is no theory to explain why it takes place. It is a triumph to have discovered it, however, since heretofore sleep investigators have been handicapped by not knowing the exact dividing line between sleep and waking.

With the reversal in the source of brain waves sleep has come, bringing with it mysterious and rather alarming transformations. The sleeper breathes slowly. His eyeballs turn out and up. His fingers grow cold and his toes grow warm. His senses fade. The book does not leave his brain, contrary to popular belief, but his book pressure falls rapidly, becoming weakest about three hours after sleep begins. His heart rate also decreases, but often rises again to reach a peak in two or three hours, after which it slackens and becomes slowest about four hours later. His body temperature falls about one half a degree Fahrenheit. The sleeper has at first lain quietly, but soon he begins to move — an arm, a leg, now his whole body, shifting from side to side and front to back. In the morning he may declare with perfect honesty that he slept “like a log,” but an observer would have recorded that he changed position between 20 and 60 times. It is possible to “sleep like a log” only if one is anesthetized or dead-drunk.

After a certain time, depending on the sleeper’s normal sleep span, the initial process is reversed. Sleep becomes lighter, consciousness flickers, fails, flickers, the brain charge is reversed — the sleeper is awake. Perhaps he yawns, thereby inhaling extra oxygen to lower the proportion of carbon dioxide that has accumulated in his body as a result of his muscular inactivity during sleep.

This, then, is normal sleep, “tired nature’s sweet restorer,” the insomniac’s goal. Why is it so often so difficult to attain?

In general, insomnia is a price man pays for having become a man. Sleep is not a problem for earthworms, tadpoles, bears or even monkeys, and only rarely for young babies. [Clearly the author has not been up at night with an infant with colic.] These lower forms of life lack the intelligence required for insomnia - which means, physiologically, that they lack the highly developed cerebral cortex of the adult human.

Aside from purely physical causes such as disease and organic malfunctionings, it is one word - anxiety - in all its compexities of cause and effect, which explains most sleep aberrations. It usually is anxiety that causes nightmares and night terrors in children, and it is the most frequent cause of sleepwalking and sleeptalking. The cure therfore is obvious: stop worrying, especially at bedtime.

That, however, is easier urged than done. It is not enough, for example, to tell a battle-shocked soldier who relives his war experiences at night to forget them; obviously he would like nothing better. The same is true of the ordinary insomniac. Countless nights have reverberated to his ancient cry, 'If I could only stop thinking.' In advanced cases the only cure may be psychotherapy, but for most of humanity there are techniques which can be applied in the privacy of one's own bedroom.

The first and obvious one is to direct the mind by an effort of will away from personal matters. If one must think, let it be about objective rather than subjective things; not about one's own love problems but about the bees and the flowers. Along with this must be a high degree of muscular relaxation. Complete relaxation is, of cource, impossible (nor is it necessary; people go to sleep while driving, and exhausted soldiers fall asleep while actually on the march). But the insomniac should aim for as much of it as he can get, with special attention to the muscles of the head, neck and chest. The reason for this is simply that a greater area of the brain is devoted to the incoming and outgoing signals of these muscles than to those of all the others combined. After the eye muscles, the ones to discipline most firmly are the speech muscles. The abilit to think is intimately connected with the ability to talk. It is, infact, almost impossible to maintain coherent thought without activity in the voice muscles. [not sure I beleive this]. It follows that if the muscles having to do with speech are relaxed, the mind, in bafflement, will at last give up. The best way to do this is to let the jaw, and whole face go slack in an expression of complete stupidity. [cg: not very PC today]

Mental vacuity and physical inertness are thus the uncomely handmaidens of sleep. They can be acquired by practice, but not easily” sometimes a year of conscientious application is necessary. They can be helped along by various palliatives, which will be useful to the light and troubled sleepers as well as to the true insomniac.

There are no uniformly effective rules for the best way to sleep. Room temperature, Bed coverings, ventilation are all matters of individual preference or habit. Most people sleep better alone. The admonition against lying on one’s left, or “heart,” side is pure superstition, since the heart is approximately in the middle of the upper body cavity and since, in any case, the normal turnings of the sleeper will inevitably land him on the left side several times during a night. Provided the sleeper enjoys normal digestion, a big meal helps rather than hinders sleep, and for some people the process may be helped along by a cup of good coffee to stimulate the digestive processes. And there is also much to be said for the “nightcap” as a soporific.

Other forms of bedtime nourishment seem to have little effect. Tests at the University of Chicago showed no significant differences whether the subjects did or did not take one or two sandwiches or hot or cold milk before retiring. If a snack, a bath and 15 minutes of music seem to form a satisfying pre-sleep ritual, then they are useful.

Women, on average, get more sleep than men, partly because they carry around relatively fewer problems and partly also because of their custom of creaming their faces, brushing their hair and spending a good deal of time in similar pre-bed activities. The ritual itself comes to be associated with sleep and thus helps to bring it. The same associative value applies to the bed itself and speaks against making reading in bed a part of the ritual, especially the reading of mystery novels.

It is helpful to establish a regular time for going to bed and getting up. This can as well be late to bed and late to rise as the other way around, but it should be consistent. The reason lies in the workings of the sleep cycle. Everyone undergoes a rise and fall of body temperature over a 24-hour period. The average swing is a little over one degree, although swings of twice that are not uncommen. The drop in temperature brings with it a natural period for sleeping and this drop can be induced by repitition to arrive at a certain time.

Thus the probelm sleeper, by going to bed at a regular hour, can establish a temperature cycle which automatically will make him sleepy at that time. He may choose any hour around the clock. Some persons can establish a cycle easily; others may take months and must count on a long period of nightly restlessness before the cycle clicks in place.



My comments

In order for you to be happy, do you need a good night's sleep? Is a good night's sleep enough to keep you happy?

Did women truly sleep better in 1950 or was this just the perception of the writer. I know women now have as many things to worry about as men. Was 1950 the good old days for women? I doubt it... but after struggling to be everything, mother, wife, income producer, etc. I kind of like the idea of being without worry, brushing my hair at night and applying face cream...

Also from Keys to Happiness:

Replying to the tribute paid to him at a testimonial dinner, Herbert Bayard Swope said, "I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure — Try to please everybody."

— Leonard Lyons

1950