July/1998
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NO MORE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS:
A PROVEN PROGRAM TO CONQUER INSOMNIA Peter Hauri and Shirley Linde New York: Wiley, 1996 286 pages, paperback, $14.95
Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg
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This is the gold standard for insomnia self-treatment manuals.
It is the second edition of a book first published in 1990. Hauri,
director of the Mayo Clinic Insomnia Program, and Linde, author of a
dozen other popular books on medical topics, go well beyond
insomnia to provide an extensive overview of illnesses that disrupt
both sleep and waking life. They include step-by-step guides to aid
coping with these problems.
"No matter what originally caused poor sleep," the authors
note, "over the years of chronic struggles with sleep, most patients
develop poor sleep habits. The worst habits are (1), trying too hard
to sleep, and (2), being conditioned against your own bedroom."
Hauri empowers readers to become partners in their own
care. He teaches them to become "co-scientists," so that they can
devise theories about causes for their own poor sleep and try
different tactics to effect change. Does taking a nap, for example,
help or hurt nighttime sleep? What about evening exercise? "If you
want to know," Hauri tells them, "try it for a week."
He shows readers how to get in the right frame of mind for
sleep, how to use bedtime relaxation techniques, how to manage
daytime stress, how to tailor diet and exercise to benefit sleep, and
how to reset one's sleep clock. In a long chapter on sleeping pills,
he explains the benefits and limitations of such medication on a
short-term and long-term basis. He also reports on the advantages
of behavioral therapy.
Other chapters describe medical conditions that may
undermine sleep, such as pregnancy, and discuss sleep disorders
such as sleep apnea (a sleep-related breathing disorder),
narcolepsy, periodic limb movements, sleep walking, and
nightmares. --These are only a few of a long list.
Finally, the book tells when to go to a sleep laboratory and
what to expect there. The book includes a list of sleep centers, an
index, and a glossary that ends with "ZZZZs: What we want you to
get plenty of, in peace and tranquillity."
This book could make that happen.
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