How to go to Sleep.

Te Aroha News, Volume XIV, Issue 2076, 8 February 1898, Page 2

How to go to Sleep.

At the recent meeting in Montreal of the British Medical Association, in the section of therapeutics, Dr. J. B. Learned gave his experience with the many methods of inviting sleep without taking drugs. He detailed the positions of the body after retiring, which he employed. He said the cause of delay in sleep coming is generally the brain running automatically without our consent, after we go to bed. He sets the brain to work at once on retiring—itis to direct the respiratory process. It is to count respirations to s9e that they are fewer in number, regular, deep, and somewhat protracted. In addition, certain groups of muscles are employed in routine order in silent contraction. By constant change other groups are brought into use. He has completed a systematised routine of contractions and relaxations. A slight elevation of the head from the pillow for a definite time by count of respirations is one of the many changes of position. All this is without any commotion, and need not be recognised by a sleeping companion. Brain and muscle and all parts of the body soon come into the normal state that precedes and invites sleep. A sense of fatigue soon overlakes one while thus employed, and before he is aware, the brain has forgotten its duty to regulate the breathing process, the muscles have ceased to expand to the call made upon them in the beginning, and sleep is in control of all the forces and all the organs. The details of this method of g nviting sleep will not be the same for the strong and the weak. The principle, however, is one and the same—namely, the proper direction of vital energy to brain and muscle, according to the condition of the individual. The effect of brain and muscles combined, under direction of will, counteracts the one-sided automatic whirl of a little portion of gray matter that has come to antagonise normal sleep and to make • night a source of gloom and unrest.