In many cases no local ailment would appear to be responsible for the insomnia, and yet in every instance attention must be given to the body’s entire needs. The habit of deep breathing from the diaphragm must be developed and be regularly practised both indoors and out. This alone sufficed in one complicated case to bring sleep every night. The diet must be carefully chosen and followed in the face of every importunity of a silly and capricious appetite. Tea and coffee, save at the morning meal, must be in almost every case eliminated from the menu. Constipation, which is responsible far oftener than we think for sleeplessness, must be, whenever possible, at once corrected without resort to purgatives and enemas.[10] The hot bath sometimes brings sleep by relieving the congestion of the brain, but contraction of the blood-vessels often follows with such promptness that the hot-water bottle applied to the feet or the back of the neck or both is likely to be of more service. If running up and down stairs or exercise in that wood-pile now imaginary in the average home leaves the sufferer as wide awake as ever, Doctor J. B. Learned’s provision for taking exercise in bed without displacement of the covering will sometimes relieve both the cerebral congestion and the psychical exhilaration and let the wakeful one drop off to sleep at the drowsy moment, which is apt to pass if the exercise is taken out of bed and even scanty preparations have in consequence to be made for retiring. FOOTNOTES [10] See Dubois’s _Psychical Treatment of Nervous Disorders_, ch. xxiii, for the drugless cure of constipation. 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. DR. LEARNED’S PLAN