Chapter 38 don't worry about insomnia

If you often suffer from insomnia and cannot fall asleep, it is because you are so "worry" that you have insomnia. If you often don't sleep well, do you worry about it?Then you might like to know that internationally renowned barrister Samuel Untermeyer hardly ever got a good night's sleep in his life. When Samuel Untermeyer was in college, he worried about two things—asthma and insomnia.Both of his ailments seemed refractory.So he decided to take a step back and make the most of his waking hours.He no longer tossed and turned in bed, no longer allowed himself to worry to the point of a nervous breakdown, and whenever it did, he would get out of bed and read.What was the result?He topped his class in every subject and became a CUNY prodigy.

His insomnia was not cured even after he started practicing law.Yet Untermeyer has no qualms, saying, "Nature will take care of me." And it did.Although he sleeps very little every day, his health has always been very good, and he can work as hard as all the young lawyers in the New York legal field, and even more than others-because when others are sleeping soundly, he Still sober. By the time Samuel Untermeyer was only 21, he was making $75,000 a year, so many other young lawyers went to court to study his methods. In 1931, he was paid for a lawsuit that may have been the highest ever paid by a lawyer-at that time, he made a total of one million dollars, all in cash.

Still, he couldn't get rid of his insomnia.He spends half his evenings reading, then wakes up at 5 a.m. to dictate letters.When most people just started working, he was almost halfway through his day's work.He lived until he was 81, but seldom in his life did he sleep soundly at night one night.If he had been worrying about his insomnia, his life would have been ruined long ago. In our lives, 1/3 of the time is spent on sleep, but no one knows what sleep is all about.We only know that this is a habit and a state of rest, but we don't know how long each person needs to sleep, or even whether people have to sleep.

Is it hard to imagine?During World War I, a Hungarian soldier named Paul Kern had the front lobe of his brain pierced by a bullet.After he recovered from his injuries, a strange thing happened—he could never sleep again.No matter what the doctors tried, they used all kinds of sedatives and anesthetics, even hypnotism, but Paul Cohen couldn't sleep, or even feel sleepy. All the doctors thought he had a short life to live, but to his surprise, he managed to get a job without telling anyone, and lived for many years in very good health.Sometimes he would lie down and close his eyes to rest, but he could never really fall asleep.His case remains one of the unsolved mysteries of medical history and has overturned many of our ideas about sleep.

Some people have to sleep longer than others.The famous conductor Toscanini only needs 5 hours of sleep every night, but President Coolidge needs twice as much sleep as Toscanini - 11 hours a day.In other words, Toscanini probably only spent 1/5 of his life sleeping, while President Coolidge slept almost half of his life. Worrying about insomnia can hurt you far more than insomnia itself.Take one of my students, Ira Sandler, who nearly killed herself because of severe insomnia.Here's the story he told: "I really thought I was going to be insane because I used to be a heavy sleeper and wouldn't wake up even when the alarm clock went off, and ended up being late for work every morning. I was very worried about it - fact Last night, my boss warned me that I had to be on time. I knew if I overslept like this again, I would lose my job.

"I told my friends about it, and one of them suggested that I should focus on the alarm clock before I went to bed, and that's what caused my insomnia. The ticking of the damn alarm clock haunted me and made me sleep. I couldn't sleep, I tossed and turned in bed all night. In the morning, I was almost too tired to move, tired and worried. This went on for 8 weeks, and the torment I suffered was beyond words. I was convinced that I would Insane. Sometimes I'd walk around for hours and even think about jumping out the window and dying. "Finally, I went to a doctor I knew. He said, 'Ira, there is nothing I can do to help you, and there is no one who can help you, because you made it yourself. Every night when you go to bed, if you can't sleep If you don't, just ignore it and say to yourself: I don't care if I sleep, it doesn't matter if I lie there awake until dawn. Close your eyes and say to yourself: As long as I lie here and don't move , don't worry about it, and get rest.'

"I did what he said," Sandler said, "and within two weeks I was actually falling asleep. Within a month, I was sleeping eight hours a day, and I His spirit has returned to normal." It wasn't his insomnia that afflicted Ira Sandler, but the anxiety it caused. Dr. Sanil Kritman, a professor at the University of Chicago, has done a lot of research on sleep problems, and he is also an expert in sleep problems all over the world.He said he had never heard of a single person dying from insomnia; in fact, someone might suffer from insomnia anxiety, weaken their strength, and be attacked by germs, but the culprit of that injury was the worry, not the insomnia disease.

Dr. Klitman also said that people who worry about insomnia often get a lot more sleep than they think.The person who swears, "I didn't even close my eyes last night," may have actually slept for hours without knowing it.For example, Mr. Spencer, the most famous thinker of the 19th century, lived alone in a boarding house in his old age. He talked all day about his insomnia, making everyone around him nervous. I'm so bored.He would even wear earplugs in his ears to block out the noise outside and calm his nerves, and sometimes he took opium to hypnotize himself. One night he shared a room in a hotel with Seth, a professor at Oxford University.The next morning, Spencer said he didn't sleep all night last night, but in fact Professor Seth didn't fall asleep at all-because Spencer's snoring kept him awake all night.

The first necessary condition for a good night's sleep is to have a sense of security.We must feel that there is a power far greater than ourselves, watching over us until the morning.Dr. Thomas Hislop emphasized this point in a speech given by the British Medical Association.He said: "Based on my many years of experience as a doctor, prayer is one of the best ways to put you to sleep. I say this purely from the body of a doctor. For people who have the habit of praying, prayer must It is the most appropriate and most commonly used method of calming the mind and nerves." "Turn yourself over to God—and relax yourself," the famous soprano and movie star Jeanne Madonna told me, rereading Psalm 23 whenever she felt down and too worried to sleep. Come to let her get "a sense of security": "The Lord is my pastor, I will not want, he makes me lie down in green pastures, leads me by still waters..."

However, if you are not religious and cannot solve your problems this easily, there is another way you can try to relax yourself.One of the best ways to do this is to talk to your own body, according to Dr. David Harlow Fink, author of a book titled "Destroying Nervous Tension."Dr. Fink believes that language is the main key to all hypnosis methods. If you have been unable to fall asleep, it is because you "talk" so much that you have insomnia.The only solution is to free you from this insomnia.This is done by saying to the muscles in your own body, "Relax! Relax—release all tension!"

We now know that when the muscles are tense, the mind and nerves cannot be relaxed.Therefore, if we want to sleep peacefully, we must first relax our muscles.Dr. Funk recommends placing pillows under your knees to relieve tension in your feet.Then, with a few small pillows under our arms, our jaws, our eyes, our arms and our legs relax, and before we know it, we're falling asleep.I've tried this myself, so I know it works.If you have insomnia, you might as well buy a copy of Dr. Funk's "Nervous Tension", which I also mentioned earlier. It is the only readable book that can cure insomnia that I know. This is a very useful book. Another good way to treat insomnia is to let yourself do physical labor until you are tired.You can grow flowers, swim, play tennis, golf, ski, or do a job that requires a lot of physical effort.This is the practice of the famous writer Dreiser.When he was a struggling young writer, he also fretted about insomnia.So he went to the New York Central Railroad and got a job as a railroad man, and after a day of driving nails and shoveling stones, he would be too tired to even sit through dinner. If we are extremely tired, we will be forced to fall asleep even if we are walking.I can cite one incident to illustrate this point: When I was 13 years old, my father was going to take a truckload of pigs to St. Joe, Missouri, and because he had two free train tickets at the time, he took me with him.I had never been to any small town with a population of more than 4,000 before that.When I arrived in St. Joe, a city of 60,000 people, I couldn't express the excitement.I saw a 6-story building and a tram.I close my eyes now, and I can seem to still see and hear that tram.After one of the most exciting days of my life, my father took me home on the train.When I got home, it was already two o'clock in the middle of the night. We still have to walk 4 miles back to the farm.I was so tired that I fell asleep while walking, and even dreamed.I also often fall asleep while riding on horseback, these are things that I have experienced firsthand. When a man is utterly exhausted, he can sleep peacefully even in thunderstorms or in the face of the horrors and dangers of war.Dr. Foster Kennedy, a neurologist, told me that during the retreat of the British Fifth Army in 1918, he had seen exhausted soldiers slump down and sleep as if passed out.Although he opened their eyelids with his hands, they still would not wake up.He said he noticed that all of them had their eyeballs rolled up in their sockets. "After that," Dr. Kennedy said, "every time I couldn't sleep, I rolled my eyeballs into that position. I found that within a few seconds, I would start yawning and feel sleepy. It's an automatic reaction that I can't control." No one has ever killed himself by not sleeping.No matter how strong his willpower, nature will force him to sleep.Nature can keep us from eating and drinking for a long time, but it cannot keep us from sleeping for a long time. When it comes to suicide, I am reminded of an example mentioned by Dr. Henry Link in his book "The Rediscovery of Man".Dr. Link, vice president of Psychological Problems, Inc., has spoken to many people who have been depressed by worry.In the chapter "Elimination of Fear and Anxiety" he talks about a patient who wanted to commit suicide.Dr. Link knew that arguing with this man would only make the situation worse, so he said to the man, "If you have to kill yourself, you should at least be a hero. You can run around the street Until you die of exhaustion." This man really tried, not just once, but several times.What was the result?The result is that he feels better every time, but the feeling is psychological rather than physical.On the third night, Dr. Link finally achieved what he had originally set out to achieve—the patient, from physical fatigue, fell into a deep sleep.Then he joined some sports club, took part in various sports, and was soon so happy that he wanted to live forever.