HOW LONG TO SLEEP by The Lancet

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 14, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 15.

HOW LONG TO SLEEP.

By The Lancet

PRACTICALLY a man should sleep till he is refreshed. The mistake many persons make is in attempting to govern what must be a matter of instinct by volitional control. When we are weary we ought to sleep, and when we wake we should get up. There are no more vicious habits than adopting measures to "keep awake," or employing artifices, or, still worse, resorting to drugs and other devices to induce or prolong sleep. Dozing is the very demoralization of the sleep function, and from this pernicious habit arises much of the so-called sleeplessness—more accurately wakefulness—from which multitudes suffer. That day is not the time for sleep is evident upon the face of the fact that nature has provided the night, wherein no man can or ought to work.

The difficulties about sleep and sleeplessness—apart from dreams—are almost uniformly fruits of a perverse refusal to comply with the laws of nature. Take, for example, the case of a man who cannot sleep at night, or rather who, having fallen asleep, awakes. If he is what is called strong-minded, he thinks, or perhaps reads and falls asleep again. This being repeated, lays the foundation of a habit of waking in the night and thinking or reading to induce sleep. Before long the thinking or reading fails to induce sleep, and habitual sleeplessness occurs, for which remedies are sought and mischief is done. If the wakeful man would only rouse himself on waking, and get up and do a full day's work, of any sort, and not doze during the day, when next the night came round his sixteen or twenty hours' wakefulness would be rewarded by a sleep of nine or ten hours in length; and one or two of these manful struggles against a perverted tendency to abnormal habit would rectify the error and avert the calamity.

The cure for sleeplessness must be natural, because sleep is a state of natural, rhythmical function. You cannot tamper with the striking movement of a clock without injuring it, and you cannot tamper with orderly recurrence of sleep without impairing the very constitution of things on which the orderly performance of that function depends.—The Lancet.