Next door to where I am sitting and writing there is a little girl seven years old. She cannot go to sleep unless her mother sits in the room with her and unless the gas is burning. If her mother is not there, she lies awake and screams.

Just across the road in another house is a boy five years old. Every evening when bedtime comes his mother says, "Now for bed." Generally he looks unhappy because he likes to play; but he trots along. His mother puts him in bed, tucks him in, says good night, turns out the gas, and goes away, and in five minutes he is fast asleep. He never lies awake to scream for his mother, and he cannot sleep if there is a light in the room.

Some mothers hold their babies, and rock and sing them to sleep. They do this so regularly that after a while it turns out that such babies cannot sleep unless the mother does hold and rock and sing to them. Other mothers put the baby into a comfortable bed, give him a little pat, smile at him, and go away; and these babies fall asleep just as soon as the others. It almost seems as if there must be different kinds of babies in different families. But this is not so; the real secret of the sleeping is that we get used to things and then we find it hard to change.

That is why the little girl next door needs her mother and the light to help her sleep. She is used to them. It is the same with the boy, with the baby that needs to be rocked, and with the baby that goes to sleep quietly on the bed. Their mothers have trained them, and each has his own particular habit. Older people train us when we are babies, but when we grow older we must train ourselves.

You might try this plan. Go to bed every night at exactly the same hour and see whether you don't fall asleep more quickly each night.

Captain Barclay was a man who walked a thousand miles in a thousand hours. Of course every moment was precious and he did not want to waste any time getting to sleep. So he trained himself until he found that he could fall asleep the moment he lay down. As soon as he wakened he began walking again.

We can help ourselves to waken in the same way. In some families the first thing you hear in the morning is a loud call at the foot of the stairs: "Children! Children! It's time to get up." Then after a while somebody says: "I don't see what's the matter with those children. I suppose I must go up and shake them all out of bed."

Some children have to be spoken to and shaken and called over and over again before they are awake enough to get up. Other children waken at the first call and get up without any trouble. Perhaps one child has not slept enough, but very often the real reason is that they have different habits of waking. If anyone gets into the habit of hearing the first call and getting up at once, he will always hear it; but if he pays no attention to it, and stays in bed, and takes another nap, after a few days he will not hear it at all.

It is easy for any man, woman, or child gradually to form this habit. I have done it myself. Every winter when our man Crosby goes to the basement and shakes the furnace with all his might for the first time, I waken with a jump and think that the world is coming to an end. Then I remember what is happening and go to sleep again. The second morning I am not so frightened, and I fall asleep at once. The third morning I only half hear the noise in my dreams, and after that I sleep through all his shaking and poking without so much as turning over.

Now if I had stayed awake those first few mornings, I should have started the habit of waking at five o'clock, and this would have kept me miserable all winter; but instead, I made myself go to sleep, until now that is my habit and I like it. I trained myself to it.

It is the same with an alarm clock. If you go to sleep again each time after the alarm has sounded, in a few mornings you will train yourself not to hear it at all. In that way children train themselves not to hear the first call to get up. If they have slept long enough, they ought to get out of bed at once. Still, all I am trying to show just now is that we can make our own sleep habits. We can train ourselves in the opposite way too.

If we heed the alarm clock, and stay awake, and get up, it will always awaken us.

It is strange, but we can train ourselves to hear some noises and not to hear others. The things we attend to are the ones that awaken us. A good nurse may sleep through a thunderstorm, or a dreadful fire alarm, but when her patient groans, or when she only whispers her name, the nurse wakens in an instant. She has trained herself to listen to that one particular sound.

Some people are trained by the place where they live. I have a friend who cannot sleep when she goes to the country. She said one day, "You see it is so awfully quiet out here in the country, that it keeps me awake." In Boston she sleeps soundly, but her home is on a noisy street. She misses the noise just as a baby misses his mother's singing.

A man once lived near a noisy mill that ran at night, and after a while he could not sleep unless the mill wheel was going.

It is the other way with most of us. We need the quiet for our sleep. When country people go to the noisy city it is often many nights before they sleep well.

From all this we learn that after doing a thing in one way for many times something within us seems to decide that we shall do it in the same way every time. That is why it is so important for us to start our sleep habits in the right direction.

Albert S. Lyons

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