Worry and Insomnia.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIC, Issue 13330, 6 July 1907, Page 2 (Supplement)

Worry and Insomnia.

•In " Cancel's Magazine" for June, Dr. C. W. Sakeby writes, on. tho 1 physical cure of worry, and says': : — ' /The man who realises that he has become, or ia becoming-, a victim to worry must be advisecf, consciously and resolutely, to direct himself to the question of his sleep. It. is safe to say that the worrying man cannot sleep- too much, and as a rule, he sleeps too little. If he would be cured, then lie must attend to this matter. Insomnia may well be the efficient cau;c of worry in life ca-e, and to remove the efficient cause is-to'cure the dkease. If the doctor's help is necessary it muct be obtained. There are very few cases of insomnia that cannot t»s relieved. This holds true even if we declare that hypnotic drugs are out of place in this connection. When used, they are all'false friends, as, we have already seen. It is worth recognising that the overwhelming proportion of cases of insomnia—including, of course, 'those which result in worry—are due to simple and easily remediable causes. By far thi most common of all the physical causes of insomnia is indigestion. This may bs such as to cause scarcely any of the. obvious symptoms of indigestion : but this is no reason for not making certain, in any casei of insomnia, that digestion is not it." cause. If the cause be looked for it will very often be fovnd ; and the mere lightening of the last meal of the , day, the exclusion of coffee after it, or the use of some simple, digestive drug for a short period, may suffice to relieve) the sleeplessness, and thus .the mental displace which it is causing. Why should sleep relieve worry and insomnia cause it? The answer i? that the man who sleeps well is, ipso facto, a practical optimist, while the victim of insomnia is, ipso facto, a practical pessimist—a man who worries. And why dors sler-p, or the lack of it, produce such result* in the sphere of the mind ? The answer is to be found in the study of the conditions which are necessary to what I have elsewhere called sensory, organic, or, if you like, gastric, optimism. Sensory or organic optimism I call that which is scarcely so much a state of mind as a state of the body. It is intimately dependent, on the health of digestion, and ia derived from the sensations transmitted by the nerves that run to the brain from th? internal organs. These, in health, combine to give us what is called the " organic sens© of well-being." In health, then ,as I have Said, "every man has an organic bias towards optimism;" and we must remember that the incalculable practical value of organic optimism is in itself an argument for rational optimism—the phil-

otojjhic creed that life ■ brings, on tho average, ,-i' surplus of happiness, and is therefore worth living. It is probably safe to assert thai, of the predisposing causes of morbid worry, none can be named for importance beside tha minor degrees of ill-health, and especially of indigestion, which affects J.uch a larga proportion of the citizens of any modern community. Eminent amongst tin physical cures of worry, then, will be attention to minor degrees of ill-health in every case of worry where this state of affairs can ba recognised. Chief importance attaches, to diionkr of any part of the digested tract, since there is to be found the 'distribution of those nerves, on the proper behaviour of which tlie organic sense.' of well-being depends. This is why I iise the phrase gastric opLimism, in order to indicate the importance of the stomach—the mere, plebeian stomach—in determining the emotional ton>. of its owners mind, and deciding whither he -shall bi> a practical optimist or a practical pessimist. It follow.v, for instance, that a man may worry because he upsets- or overloads his digestive: organs by eating too much. Now, it has lately been proved, by the : researches of Professor Chittsndon, in America, that those doctors were right who maintained, that the great, majority of well-to-do persona eat too much ; and here we have an explanation of much meaningless and unnecessary worry. Again, thwe facts explain the general relations of optimism—practical optimism —with good digestion, and of pessimism, such as. is evidence in much of the writings of Carlysle, with dyspepsia. They •also afford a testimony to what is in no need of further testimony, the supremacy of the reason over all its enemies in the case, of turli thinkers as Spenser and Darwin. Both of those, men were victims to chronic dyspepsia, and yet they.were op•limists. But theirs was a rational optimism, the reason defying those internal sensations, which, in ordinary men, would have inevitably led to pessimism. Yet, again, these facts explain the inconsistency to be found in the writings of many authors, who were artists rather than thinkero, in whom the reason was not supreme, and who had the artistic • temperament, which is ever at the mercy of organic sensations, leading to optimistic writing when the digestion was in order, or when alcohol had modified the organic sensations, and to an equally decided pessimism in writings produced when the digestion was out of order, or during tlie' period of depression that followed the transient stimulation of alcohol.Thj- foremost physical cures of worry, then, are, in the first place, such measures —varying, of course, according to circumstances—as procure abundant and normal sleep; and, in the fecond place, such'measure:— -imilarly various-—as procure easy, rapid, 'and complete performance of the functions of the digestive tract—the influence of which is always dominant in determining the presence, or absence of that intense of organic well-being which is the one- physical condition' that excludes the possibility of morbid worry; '