But what is insomnia? The Oxford Dictionary states that insomnia means habitual sleeplessness. To the doctors, insomnia is only a symptom of underlying problems. Insomnia itself is not an illness. It is like a fever which is symptomatic of some underlying infection. If a patient has a fever, there is generally a cause for it. Both the fever and the cause should be treated.

However, there is a difference between fever and insomnia. Fever can be confirmed objectively by taking body temperature, and we can measure how high the temperature is. Insomnia is a subjective symptom and cannot be confirmed by measurement to assess how bad it is. Very often people complain that they never sleep a wink. Does this mean that they have the most severe form of insomnia? In other words, how reliable are people’s assessments of the severity of their insomnia?

With the help of the sleep laboratory we can now measure and objectively assess how much insomnia these people have. In Paris, Dr Betty Schwartz tested chronic insomniacs who insisted that they never slept. These people were monitored at night in the sleep laboratory. Since these people were convinced that they did not sleep at night, they agreed to press a button to signal that they were still awake whenever they heard a buzzer. It was found that, in most cases, they all had a normal sleep pattern on the EEG recordings. The buzzer sounded many times throughout the night, but none of these people pressed the button. These people, who insisted that they had insomnia, had in fact been sleeping soundly and could not hear the sound of the buzzer. In the morning, when they were questioned about their sleep, they still insisted that they had not been sleeping at all.

It has been reported that 95 per cent of healthy adults fall asleep within half an hour. Hence those who fall asleep within half an hour do not have insomnia. But is this true? People who fall asleep easily may wake up at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. in the morning and fail to go back to sleep. This is called early morning insomnia. What about those that sleep and wake at normal hours, but wake up very frequently throughout the night. Do they have insomnia? And there are people who need only three or four hours of sleep without feeling any distress at night, and they function well the next day. They never complain of insomnia, but are they experiencing insomnia?

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We use the trains of thought for the relief of symptoms in exactly the same way. The regression is the all-important factor. There is nothing new for us in this next step. We have already learned to present the idea of relaxation and then to experience relaxation. We can do this if we are tense, and our tension goes, because the positive feeling of relaxation will inhibit the negative feeling of tension by the process which we have already described as reciprocal inhibition.

I have mentioned the method of letting ourselves go as we breathe out. We let go our breath, and we let go ourselves. With each breath we will drift a little deeper into regression. This approach can be used very successfully by some people to enhance the effect of their sequences of thought. We are very relaxed and comfortable. The ideas of the train of thought come to us slowly and leisurely. An idea comes each time we breathe out, and we dwell on it a little. With the next breath follows the next idea. And all the time we are so relaxed that we are hardly aware of the things around us.

The trains of thought, which I have set out in relation to various symptoms, are intended merely as a guide. They are only suggestions. Each individual will modify them according to his own inner needs. Only the principle is constant for us all. The details, the approach, and the attitude are varied to suit the unique individuality which makes each of us different from anyone else.

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