My wife has always suffered from insomnia. The pattern was to go to sleep as late as possible, 11 or 12, so as to sleep through the night, but then she’d wake up around 4. To “sleep”, she would put on TV. We both recognized that that was not the best sleep. Recently, she began reading instead when she woke up and found she goes back to sleep after a while. This fits with several things: diaries from earlier times indicate that it was normal for sleep to occur in two chunks, people waking up for an hour or so, getting something to eat, having sex, talking, or whatever before going back to sleep. That fits with the nightfall to sunrise pattern in the days before electric lighting. The other was an article I just read in the NYT, prompting this blog entry, that an on-line program for insomnia counsels just this very approach.
A major item for her was that pre-election she watched a lot of news, much of it angering her. Now that a large number of Americans have thrown people like us under the bus, we can shrug and plan for survival. So no more news (except A.M. Joy on the weekends) and little TV. I hope my wife continues to gain hours of sleep.
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
