A sleep survey

My mother, Margaret Stoppel, who died in 1991 at the age of 85, wrote a weekly column for her local newspaper, the Sequoia Sentinel. In the year that she died she wrote a column that describes her own sleep habits as well as those of her friends. I think they'll be familiar to many of you. Here’s the column:

"I recently asked a few of my friends about their sleep patterns—my women friends. It didn’t seem proper for me to ask my gentlemen friends.

The principal fact that surfaced was that not a great deal of sleeping was going on among my age group. Most of them sleep four or five hours, with wakefulness plaguing at different times.

A couple of my friends doze off around eight o’clock, just when they want to watch television and then are bright-eyed later when their favorite shows are over. All of them, with one amazing exception, make one or two trips to the bathroom during the night.

Some of them fall asleep promptly only to be wide awake later for two or three hours. Most of them read during their wakeful hours, some play solitaire, but one, who usually is awake between two and four o’clock finds that she does her best thinking at that time.

Some take naps in the afternoon, varying in duration from 15 minutes to two hours. I am a fifteen minute napper. I have been doing this for many, many years. It has become such a fixed habit that when I am socializing in the afternoon I yawn and my eyes glaze over.

When I was working and knew that I had to get up by six, hours of sleeplessness distressed me to no end, which, of course, compounded the problem.

At that time I read an article that suggested saying aloud, or in a whisper, over and over again, the word, “hemlock,” the theory being that the breathing required to do this would induce sleep. I tried it but it didn’t work. It only served to depress me, because the word evoked pictures of Socrates drinking hemlock and dying."

Next week: Blue light and sleep

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