apart from rhythm, tends to
make one sleepy, and this leads us at once to the third fact, that
getting to sleep is nothing but a healthy form of concentration.

If true concentration is dropping everything that interferes with
fixing our attention upon some wholesome object, it means merely
bringing the brain into a normal state which induces sleep when sleep
is needed. First we drop everything that interferes with the one simple
subject, and then we drop that, and are unconscious.

Of course it may take some time to make ourselves willing to submit to
an unusual noise if we have the habit of feeling that we must
necessarily be disturbed by it, and, if we can stop the noise, it is
better to stop it than to give ourselves unnecessary tasks in
non-resistance.

Then again, if we are overtired, our brains are sometimes so sensitive
that the effect of any noise is like that of being struck in a sore
spot, and then it is much more difficult to bear it, and we can only
make the suffering a little less by yielding and being willing that it
should go on. I cannot go to sleep while some one is knocking my lame
arm, nor can I go to sleep while a noise is hitting my tired brain; but
in such cases we can give up expecting to go to sleep, and get a great
deal of rest by using our wills steadily not to resist; and sometimes,
even then, sleep will come upon us unexpectedly.

With regard to the use of the will, perhaps the most dangerous pitfall
to be avoided is the use of drugs. It is not too much to say that they
never should be used at all for cases of pure sleeplessness, for with
time their power to bring sleep gradually becomes exhausted, and then
the patient finds himself worse off than before, for the reactionary
effect of the drugs leaves him with exhausted nerves and a weakened
will. All the strengthening, moral effect which can be gained from
overcoming sleeplessness in wholesome ways is lost by a recourse to
drugs, and character is weakened instead of strengthened.

When one has been in the habit of sleeping in the city, where the noise
of the street is incessant, a change to the perfect silence of the
country will often keep sleep off quite as persistently as noise. So
with a man who has been in the habit of sleeping under other abnormal
conditions, the change to normal conditions will sometimes keep him
awake until he has adjusted himself to them, and it is not uncommon for
people to be so abnormal that they resist rh