![]() “But it’s already been listened to half-a-million times and is our most popular non-fiction story. “This cure might strike some folks as strange”, says Alex Tew. Modesty prevented us giving a place on the poll ballot to arguably the strangest of our own 23 new Sleep Stories – one offering the chance to hear Ben Stein, the actor who played the boring economics teacher in the Eighties teen movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, read a long extract from The Wealth of Nations, the classic 18th economics text by Adam Smith, the Scotsman known as the father of economics. The American folk remedy of eating a fried onion before bed (38%) came next and eighth – one place ahead of “pointing your bed northwards” (28%), which the great Victorian writer, Charles Dickens believed the best cure for his own insomnia. “Who knew”, says Michael Acton Smith, Calm’s other co-founder, “that lettuce had loomed so large in the history of insomnia cures?” So, in joint sixth place came two such cures involving lettuce (39%) – the French folk remedy of eating fried lettuce before bed and the ancient Egyptian cure of consuming lettuce opium, extracted from wild lettuce stems and drunk in brew. ![]() Most cultures have their own folk cures for insomnia, usually involving a particular food or drink. It owes its place in the roll-call of odd insomnia cures to Scotland’s Glasgow Herald newspaper, which advised insomniac readers in 1898: “Soap your hair with ordinary yellow soap rub it into the roots of the brain until it is lather all over tie it up in a napkin, go to bed, and wash it out in the morning. ![]() Lathering your hair with yellow soap (46%) was voted the fifth strangest cure in the list of 12 insomnia cures shown to the respondents of Calm’s poll. Burton also advised his insomniac readers to “anoint the soles of the feet with the fat of a dormouse”. It proved popular enough that Robert Burton, English author of the 1621 medical work, The Anatomy of Melancholy was still recommending it as a cure almost 50 years after Cardano’s death. The idea that smearing your teeth with the earwax of a dog would cure insomnia is credited to Gerolamo Cardano (1501-1576), a doctor and mathematician in Renaissance Italy, whose other credits included being a founder of probability theory. The 23 initial sleep-inducing tales have been listened to five million times in their first three months. Indeed, we at Calm recently launched our own new natural sleep aid, in the form of bedtime stories for grown-ups called Sleep Stories. “Everyone from the ancient Egyptians to our medieval ancestors had their own cures.” “Insomnia may be a modern epidemic but it’s far from a new problem,” says Alex Tew, co-founder of Calm. There was little to separate the top four cures in the poll, with dog’s earwax gaining a 60% vote, slug entrails 58%, castrated boar 57% and mouse fat 55%. The medieval European cure of drinking a brew made with the bile of a castrated boar came third, just ahead of rubbing the fat of a dormouse/field mouse on the soles of your feet, as first advocated by the Romans. The Japanese folk remedy of eating sea slug entrails before bed ranked a close second in the survey of 4,279 Americans and Britons conducted for us as at Calm by pollsters, YouGov. Rubbing dog’s earwax on your teeth has been voted the strangest insomnia cure ever, heading a strong field of bygone and present cures in an international poll. Next come: drinking bile of castrated boar rubbing mouse fat on your feet lathering hair in yellow soap. Dog’s earwax, slug entrails top Calm’s international poll
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |