Word: insomnia
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Though sleeplessness, usually dignified by its Latin (and medical) name, insomnia, is now an even commoner complaint than the common cold, few doctors recognize it as a disorder. Lack of sleep, they say, is self-curing, and no one ever died of it. The complaint, "I tossed and turned all night and didn't sleep a wink," is a myth. (Dr. Kleitman has heard it from a man who had just been observed sleeping soundly for seven hours.) The most that these hard-headed doctors will concede is that anxiety about not getting to sleep is itself upsetting...
There are various ways in which girls show their feelings of estrangement. According to doctors at the University Health Services, for many girls the sophomore year is one of overeating, oversleeping, insomnia, and depression. Health Center statistics reveal that over a two-year period, 2.4 per cent of the sophomore class at Radcliffe was treated for insomnia, as compared with a maximum of one per cent in any other class. Four per cent of all sophomores were treated or hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a third more than any other class...
...goal of Yoga is "molding the body and harmonizing its movements," Moynahan repeatedly urged his students to be conscious of the internal movements of their body as they rested. Incidental benefits of the exercises, he said, are "ellimination of fat and sag, peak beauty, peak health, so colds, no insomnia, no constipation, etc." "Peddle air--it up the old leg muscles and firms up these thighs," Yogaman Ted Moynahan advises one of his young pretages in Cabot Hall, Moynahan also had the girls looking like limpid pools and cobras "Some of them are just marvelous--they catch on so awfully...
...said Dr. White. "And this is a fact that our clergy and psychiatrists should pay more attention to: our brain is nourished by our heart and our heart is aided by active muscles." Bicycling was the answer for both mind and body: "The best antidote for nervous tension and insomnia is some sort of physical fatigue. The muscles become tired and relaxed. If more of us exercised like this, we'd have a sharp reduction in the amount of tranquilizers and sleeping pills in use today...
Shriver had cause for insomnia-as one event swiftly proved. Hardly had the Peace Corps put its feet on foreign ground than there was a major flap: a corps girl named Margery Michelmore, stationed in Nigeria, dropped a home-addressed postcard that seemed critical of life in that shoeless African nation; it was picked up, put in anti-American channels, and screechingly publicized.*Shriver is convinced that the subsequent success of the Peace Corps has been such that there will be no repetition of that incident. "It won't happen again -not like that," he says...