Recover Your Natural Rhythm : Wide Awake at 2 A.M.? Get Up, Do Some Chores

It’s 2 a.m., you’re still tossing and turning and the sandman is nowhere in sight. What to do? Chores, says an insomnia expert at the Stanford University Medical School.

“The worst thing to do is to try hard to go to sleep,” said Richard M. Coleman, author of the just-published “Wide Awake at 3:00 A.M.: By Choice or by Chance?”

“Get up and do some chores,” Coleman said in an interview.

Coleman, a psychologist and member of the clinical faculty at the Stanford Sleep Disorder Center, said that many people afflicted with insomnia can be cured.

‘Natural Rhythm’

“The whole treatment is to get them back on their natural rhythm,” he said. “Anxieties overcome natural rhythm--you don’t see too many dogs or cats with insomnia.”

The natural rhythm of the human body, researchers have found, is a 25-hour cycle, not a 24-hour period as is commonly supposed. Scientists in France put volunteers in underground caves for prolonged periods of observation, and in the United States, tests were conducted at Stanford and elsewhere in closed rooms where the volunteers could not tell the time of day.

The researchers discovered that as the days passed the volunteers invariably went to sleep later and later and their awake-sleep cycles developed a 25-hour pattern, said Coleman, who has been studying insomnia and animal rhythms since 1973 and also serves as a consultant to industrial firms that employ shift workers.

“In reality, almost nobody lives a 25-hour day,” he said. “So, we are constantly adjusting. In the modern world, our schedules are totally irregular and the problems that result can range from the trivial to quite serious.”

Children Best Sleepers

Children 10 to 12 years old generally are the best human sleepers, he said, probably because they are on a regular schedule and don’t use drugs, alcohol or caffeine. “This lets their natural rhythm take over.

“But if you look at the sleep of adults, you see they have more insomnia because they have more problems. And most insomniacs get more and more worked up, more worried, as soon as it gets dark. They wait until the lights are out and everybody has gone to bed before they start worrying.”

One way to deal with the difficulty, he said, is to deal with the anxieties in the daytime. “We advise patients to start a worry log and to sit down for 20 minutes during the day and work on the problems, try to find solutions.”

Coleman said another technique involves advising insomniacs to keep a diary of their sleep patterns. If the patient goes to bed at 10 p.m. but stays awake until 4 a.m., the therapist “starts with the success” by instructing him to stay up until 4 a.m.. As the nights pass, the time of sleep expands, with the patient falling into slumber earlier and earlier.

Drugs Bring Problems

“We’ve been very successful in using non-drug techniques,” Coleman said. Drugs, while sometimes useful for short-term problems such as jet lag, can create unnecessary dependencies and destroy a patient’s confidence in the effort to achieve natural sleep patterns, he said.

In general, he said, there are “no major distinctions” between men and women with insomnia except “a little more stress problems are reported among females and apnea is more common among males.” Apnea, a momentary halt in breathing that awakens the sleeper, also afflicts elderly people, as does leg-twitching, Coleman said. These physiological problems can be treated, he added.

Irregular sleep can have a profound impact on the way a person sees the world, the psychologist said.

“When people aren’t sleeping well, they tend to feel things are not good in their lives,” Coleman said.

7 Hours of Sleep Best

He also noted that an American Cancer Society study turned up a significant fact about sleep. The researchers asked a number of San Francisco Bay Area residents about their health habits and then conducted a follow-up survey nine years later.

“They found that people who got seven hours of sleep a day did the best,” he said.

Coleman’s book, an $11.95 paperback, is published by W. H. Freeman & Co.