Sleeping problems can be avoided: Wrong sleep expectation

Our expectations or demands concerning health and the smooth and undisturbed functioning of our organism are presumptiously high. We are hardly prepared to make concessions in any area. For example, a headache seems to us to be an imposition, and we reach for pills whenever we have the slightest physical ailment. We can as a matter of course fill our stomachs at any moment with any kind of nourishment. We won't tolerate being thirsty. We can protect ourselves against heat and cold and against any threatening dangers. The level of development of technology in our civilization enables us

to afford the incredible luxury of permitting our instincts, which were developed for a life struggle, to atrophy. We have light whenever we need it and a solid roof over our heads, and we seemingly lay claim to solid, deep sleep. We cannot only permit ourselves sleep as a result of our living conditions, we evidently can even buy it at the drugstore.

In fact, no animal sleeps as deeply and firmly as the human. No animal could afford to indulge in such sleep. The neurophysiologist, Jung, even came to ask whether such deep sleep stages as occur among humans, from which people can be awakened only with difficulty, might not be a special by-product of our civilization, since such deep sleep would be extraordinarily risky for an animal living in nature or for a correspondingly unprotected human, as can be confirmed by any war veteran who had to learn to adjust his instinctual sleep behavior to the dangers of the night and of the environment.,/

Consciously having increasingly estranged ourselves from the biology of our organism and from its basic physiological functions by making night into day, by exercising too little, eating too much, and being overstimulated by the environment, we appeal with high indignation to medicine and the drugstore whenever we are confronted with the consequences of our wrong behavior.

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