Painless Early Rising
FOR some time I have been nursing a discovery, fearing that the world might not be quite ready for it ; but the announcement that Mussolini is a milk drinker, following on the announcement that Gene Tunney, the conqueror of Dempsey, is a milk drinker, encourages me to go on. The world is at last being made safe for us.
My discovery concerns early rising. Is it not strange that mankind should feel sleepier after eight hours' slumber than before it ? Unless there is some agreement on this point I need not go on. The fact, I contend, is undoubted. Most people are at their wittiest at about midnight and develop gloomy views of life at the break- fast table. This, I suggest, is as paradoxical and un- natural as would be the spectacle of men walking on their hands. A night's sleep should refresh and reju- venate. We ought to open our eyes in the morning as easily and naturally as the flower unfolds its petals on the rising of the sun. For some years I have been doing it.
Yes ! In my unregenerate days I had to wait until Sunset or moonrise: now my brightest moments occur in the morning, when the maid brings the hot water. The change in the quality of my sleep took place when, like Mussolini, I gave up tea and coffee and took to milk.
I am aware that it is very bad form for people who write articles to have a private life and domestic details of any sort. Nevertheless, I am going on with details. I have ruled out have the milder stimulants from my dietary because I have come to see that they merely lift me up to-day in order to let me down to-morrow. I do not like to be let down. I prefer to be on solid ground all the time. I do not like to have to hurry my breakfast and miss my train. Instead, I begin the day full of hope and animation like the birds and other creatures that live a natural life. Until lunch-time I am capable of under- standing anything that Einstein or anybody else may desire to explain to me. My afternoons are not quite so good, but very suitable for playing golf or merely trying to make a living. My evenings are only good for going to the theatre and similar amusements, and I cannot always keep awake if the show happens to be a " dud." Taking the day as a whole, I estimate that my physical fitness, my capacity for mental work, and my temper, have been improved from twenty-five to fifty per cent. by drinking milk instead of tea and coffee. It is true that I am no longer hypnotized by sunsets, but I have acquired a new interest in the sunrise which I now think could give the sunset ten yards in a hundred as an emotional stimulus.
It is strange how custom takes the edge off mankind's curiosity. Endless generations before Newton's had seen apples and other things fall downwards without reflecting that there must be some reason for it. In the same way, sleepy mornings have come to be regarded as perfectly natural, although they are entirely unnatural. In the case of the thick head in the morning that follows the excessive drinking of stronger stimulants, everyone can relate the cause and effect ; but the connexion between the milder stimulants and the milder thick head has completely escaped attention, although precisely the same cause is in operation.
For the benefit of those who may think of following me and Mussolini and Gene Tunney in this affair of milk drinking, let me say that the first month without stimu- lants is a painful experience. That I am able to predict this painful experience so confidently is proof of the soundness of the theory. For a month, perhaps less, there will be steady mental depression. This is due to the accumulated tide of reaction from months of tea and coffee drinking expending itself. This reaction is not allowed to expend itself fully each morning. If one could lie in bed until the daily reaction had expended itself and go to business about noon, the effects would not be so disagreeable. But in order to catch trains and be at business at nine o'clock the morning tide of depression must be dammed up by further cups of coffee, with another at eleven o'clock and so on. This dammed-up tide of depression accumulates. In the ordinary way it breaks the barriers in May, when the warm weather returns. That is why May is the suicide month, a phenomenon that always puzzles statisticians. The depressed feeling that comes in early summer is akin to the drowsy feeling one experiences on entering a warm room after being out in the air on a cold night. Heat precipitates the reaction. The effect of giving up tea and coffee is to withdraw the barriers that have dammed up the tide. The depression that would have come in May comes immediately. But one gets over it in a week or two. Then one wakes early and bright and lives happily ever after. PETER F. SOMERVILLE.
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