Salt, Insomnia

Evening Round-Up
by William Crosbie Hunter

(Page 11 of 14)

Salt

It's a Drug; Too Much Is Bad for You

Don't eat too much salt. Salt is a drug; it carries with it lime and magnesia and they tend to clog up things.

Too much salt will likely cause gall stones or gravel.

Some persons sprinkle salt over potatoes, beef and everything they eat; it's a bad practice.

You get enough salt in your bacon, and in the meat you eat. The food as it comes from the kitchen has plenty of salt in it.

Those who eat too much salt must suffer.

People have told me that the craving for salt was a natural thing; it isn't so, it's a cultivated taste. You didn't like salty olives the first time you tasted them.

Because deer and cattle greedily lick salt is no proof salt is natural and good, and needed in quantities. Cattle and horses will eat loco weed and when they get the habit they will eat and eat until they get crazy.

Man will crave tobacco; it isn't a natural taste, it's merely a cultivated taste.

The desire for excess salt on everything you eat is a habit and a bad habit.

It tends to make calcareous deposits in your system, and it will affect the blood and the muscles and the bones.

Nature puts practically enough salt in the food and cooks certainly add enough salt in their seasoning to furnish all the system needs.

Excess salt eating dulls the finer sensibilities of taste just as excess pepper or Worcester sauce or mustard does. It kills the fine natural flavor.

There's enough salt in butter to season the eggs you eat. Try your eggs next time without putting pepper and salt on them.

Learn to get the natural flavors and you will enjoy your food more.

Remember again excess craving for salt is simply evidence that you have a drug habit, not as dangerous as other drug habits, but bad for you just the same.

Check yourself every time you reach for a salt cellar.

Watch the children; don't let them eat too much salt.

Insomnia

It's Caused By High Mental Tension

Sleeping, like breathing and digesting, is controlled by the subconscious brain centers. Natural sleep requires no positive mental impulse; it's just relaxing and nature takes care of the process.

That is natural sleep, but when you start your dry cell battery, the brain, and commence to worry and fear, you are going to stay awake; then the conscious mind dominates the subconscious mind and you banish the very comforter you seek to woo.

Business men who keep up high tension all day on business matters, and high tension all evening in threshing all over again the business of the day, are almost sure to suffer from insomnia.

The continuance of the day and night habit of thinking of business brings on the insomnia habit and that starts the auto suggestion that you are fighting for your natural sleep. This produces worry, the demon that kills and maims.

To have an occasional wakeful night is natural; it is an evidence of intelligence: the mental dullard never has wakeful nights.

Unless the fear of sleeplessness becomes a full grown phobia no anxiety need be felt. The fear of insomnia, the over anxiety to go to sleep, is to be more dreaded than insomnia itself.

To get refreshing sleep you must get physical tiredness. Take exercise. Walk in one direction until the first symptoms of becoming tired appears, then walk home. Take a hot bath, then sponge with cold or cool water. Put a cold cloth at the head, rub the backbone with cold water.

Open your windows wide, then relax. Don't worry; you are going to sleep.

Lie on your back, open your eyes wide, look up as if you were trying to see your eyebrows, hold your eyes open this way ten to twenty seconds, then close them slowly. Repeat this several times. Soon the sandman will come.

Concentrate your mind on auto suggestion like this: "I am going to sleep - sound heavy, restful, peaceful sleep. My eyelids are getting heavy - heavy. I am going to close them and go to sleep."

Don't try counting imaginary sheep jumping over fence rails. Don't count numbers. It is a bad habit.

If these suggestions do not help you the first night say, "All right, my brain was too active, so then tomorrow I will let down a bit."

Next night eat one or two dry crackers, chew them slowly, masticate them thoroughly until you can swallow easily.

This little food will draw the blood pressure from the brain and help you to go to sleep.

Drive out business and worry thoughts. Think faith and courage thoughts.

Published by Hunter Service Kansas City, Mo., USA
Copyright 1915 by WM. C. Hunter