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The art of natural sleep

Chapter 12: SECONDARY AIDS TO SLEEP
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About This Book

A practical manual for treating sleeplessness that reviews prevailing theories and characterizes sleep as the resting time of consciousness while identifying common physical and psychological causes of insomnia. It favors drugless remedies, detailing removal of physical contributors, relaxation techniques, rhythmic breathing, auto-suggestion, and a faith-informed Emmanuel clinic method, with concrete step-by-step directions and secondary aids. The author offers guidance for physicians and lay workers, stresses patient cooperation, and presents illustrative clinical cases and results. Interspersed commentary examines the value and limits of medication and aims to restore wholesome, natural sleep.

SECONDARY AIDS TO SLEEP


When the sleeplessness is due to mental strain alone the cure can be effected through the quiet mind. This is, I know, not always easy to obtain. Conditions do not always favour it. Economic pressure does not disappear at will with prices rising and with factories operating on half-time. When the heart aches for

the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still,

grief is scarcely to be put away without some seeming hurt to the best in us. For many a subject to insomnia the most that can apparently be done is to stand cheerfully and confidently between him and the temptation to grow morbid and melancholy, to keep the house as quiet as circumstances will allow, to provide for the bedtime hour a glass of hot milk with its pinch of salt in it, the hot malted milk unsweetened, the clam bouillon, the beef extract, or a cup of cocoa which every insomniast should take before he goes to bed, and by day and night to soothe, sustain, and cheer the troubled spirit.