The most important thing for you to know about sleep is that it is absolutely impossible for you not to sleep! Not all the resources of modern science nor all the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition could keep you awake for, say, four days. In spite of everything, you would
Therefore, as we begin our lessons in how to sleep without pills, we know this about you: you can sleep! In fact, you can’t stay awake.
The person who says he “hasn’t slept for days” is dramatizing his lack of sleep. So is the person who says “I didn’t sleep a wink last night.” Hospital nurses overwhelmingly confirm this. Patients who complain that they have been awake all night have almost invariably slept at frequent intervals. Sleep tests conducted on students of Colgate University showed that students awakened after one hour of sleep were unable to guess within three hours the length of time they
Therefore, not only can you sleep, but you sleep at least a part of every night. So the problem is not that you can’t sleep, but that you can’t sleep enough!
Well, how much sleep is enough?
Edison is said to have slept an average of only 20 or 21 hours a week. Napoleon is said to have required equally little sleep. Coolidge, on the other hand, is supposed to have needed 9 or 10 hours of sleep every night.
Why do men vary so in the amount of sleep they need? Well, partly because they vary in the actual amount of expendable energy they possess. Perhaps the chief reason some people need less sleep than others is that they have perfected the art of remaining relaxed under the most trying circumstances. As a consequence, they are relaxed when they sleep and thus receive more beneficial sleep. Such people, too, have usually trained themselves to take short, rejuvenating cat naps during the day.
The person who is still tired after 9 or 10 hours of sleep is usually not relaxed enough. He is tense during the day and is unable to relax even in sleep. The quality of therefore, is much more important than its quantity.
The most dramatic demonstration of this occurs in hypnotism. A patient put to sleep under hypnosis will be told that as he sleeps all the nerves and muscles of his body are relaxing and that when he awakens he will feel completely relaxed, refreshed and happy. Since his conscious mind is asleep, it accepts the suggestion and the patient will awaken more rested after an hour of hypnotic sleep than after hours of his usual restless sleep. Why? Because when the patient was hypnotized to sleep he was not worrying about what the stock market was going to do, whether his girl loved him, his partner intended to cheat him, or his hair was falling out. He went to sleep concentrating on relaxing his body. Naturally he was refreshed when he awoke.
Remember this one simple scientific fact: you are never wholly asleep. Part of you, your subconscious, is awake and working. Your subconscious causes you to dream and to awaken in the morning when the alarm fails to ring at the right time. What your subconscious does during the night determines whether you enjoy restful sleep or nervous, restless, 50 per cent efficient sleep.
Sleep comes from habit, exhaustion or drugs. You may be put to sleep (in the sense of losing consciousness) by a hypnotist, a political speech, or a blow on the head with a baseball bat. You would not expect to recover consciousness from each of these with the same degree of refreshment. The restless sleep you are experiencing may be as far removed from good, natural sleep as the stab of a hypodermic needle is from the impact of a baseball bat.
So now you know this about yourself: your problem is not that you cannot sleep, or even that you cannot sleep enough. Your problem is that the quality of your sleep is below par. When you learn to sleep completely relaxed, the time element will be taken care of, for you will automatically sleep enough.