Low Tech Solution to Sleeping Problems
Low Tech Insomnia Cure
Insomnia can be cured with the use of an electric oil burning lamp heating household salt in water. (A candle heated oil burning lamp is not recommended for safety reasons.) The burner should be switched on in the bedroom half an hour before bedtime. The sleep that is attained is solid and refreshing. I got the idea one sleepless night. I remembered having a conversation with a World War 1 sailor. I had asked him what the point of having a night shift during a battle was when no one could sleep due to the noise. He replied that he put his dirty socks under his pillow at night and this somehow made him sleep better. I thought of the possible ingredients of a dirty sock that could keep him sleep in battle and decided to experiment with salt first. I was soon asleep, and for a long time. I have found that on the first night one is asleep for a long time as you are catching up on lack of sleep. Several more nights of breathing in artificial sea air and sleep patterns begin to return to normal, and a loud alarm clock is recommended.
This explains why people sleep sounder at the coast when the wind is blowing in from the sea.
In New Scientist No2696 Emma Young in 'Sleep Well, Stay Sane' investigates the idea that insanity could be caused by poor sleep patterns rather than insanity causing poor sleep patterns. The evidence is around that turns conventional wisdom of psychiatrists on their heads. She says: "The good news is that sleep treatments could help or even cure some of these patients."
The article goes on to say that Doctors studying psychiatric disorders noticed long ago that erratic sleep was somehow connected. Adults with depression, for instance, are five times as likely as the average person to have difficulty breathing when asleep, while between a quarter and a half of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suffer from sleep complaints.
The evidence for poor sleep being the cause of mental illness goes back a long way. In 1987 Patricia Chang and colleagues at John Hopkins University in Baltimore reported a study of 1053 male medical students and studied them for 34 years after graduation. Those that reported suffering from insomnia were twice as likely to develop depression as those with no trouble sleeping. Likewise, there are four categories of severity of sleep apnoea, and
Paul Peppard and his team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that each increase in a person's category doubled their chances of getting depression. Although my experiment numbers are small, I concur with Emma Young and find that both mental illness can be cured, and also the amount of sleep that sleep apnoea suffers receive is improved with this method.
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, about 40 million people in the United States suffer from chronic long-term sleep disorders each year and an additional 20 million people experience occasional sleep problems. This is a staggering total of 19.75% of the population and significant inroads into this figure can be made with a simple invention.
Latest research reveals that having good sleep patterns improves the looks of people, and perhaps this reason will lead more people to use my Insomnia Cure, and thus improve their mental health as well.
David Levine wrote: 'Treating Sleep Improves Psychiatric Symptoms'
in 'Scientific American.' In it he writes. "A study by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention strengthens that connection. The
CDC analysed the medical records of nearly 10,000 American adults
with sleep apnoea. Men diagnosed with this disorder had twice the
risk of depression-and women five times the risk-compared with
those without sleep apnoea. Writing in the April issue of 'Sleep'
lead author Anne G. Wheaton and her colleagues speculate that in
addition to interrupting sleep, the oxygen deprivation induced by
sleep apnoea could harm cells and disrupt normal brain functioning.
Treating this disorder shows promise for reducing symptoms of depression, a recent study at the Cleveland Clinic
suggests. In the experiment, patients went to bed wearing a mask
hooked up to a machine that increases air pressure in their throat.
The increased pressure prevents the airway from collapsing, which is
what causes breathing to cease in most cases of this disorder. Using
this machine, psychiatrist Charles Bae and his colleagues treated 779
patients who had been diagnosed with sleep apnoea. After an average
of 90 days of sleeping with the machine, all the patients scored
lower on a common depression survey than before the
treatment-regardless of whether they had a prior diagnosis of
depression or were taking an antidepressant. The data were presented
in June at the SLEEP 2012 conference in Boston.
An August study in 'Medical Hypotheses' reported that about 25 to 50 percent of children and adolescents with attention-deficit hyperactivity
disorder experience sleep problems. A few months earlier in the
journal 'Paediatrics', researchers found that of the 11,000 children in the study, those with disordered breathing in sleep (as reported by their parents) had 40 percent more behavioral difficulties at four years old and 60 percent more at age seven. Sleep disturbances affect moods, too-and not simply by producing crankiness. Adolescents who reported daytime
drowsiness were also more likely to experience sadness, according to
a March study in the 'Journal of
Mental Health Policy and Economics.'
Steven Y. Park, assistant professor of otolaryngology at the
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has long been advocating that
sleep disorders are an underlying cause of many psychiatric
disorders. "The way I see it," Park says, "you can't consider a
psychiatric disorder without thinking about a sleep-breathing
problem.""
I have two pages on alternatives to this Insomnia Cure, namely The Kadir-Buxton Method, and the British Space Administration