Sleep in the News

Ellen Vincenti went through a two-and-a-half day stretch she wil never forget. She spent that time stuck in aremote swamp in the woods about 15 miles from her home in Tuftonboro, New Hampshire.

“I managed to get up on a tiny piece of land, but the water was waist-deep around me,” said Vincenti.

What was worse was the fact that she has no idea how she got there.

The effects of lack of sleep go beyond an occasional yawn at work. A recent study found persistent insomnia can shorten your life. Author and insomniac Patricia Morrisroe found some answers and a lot of mystery surrounding sleep.

Sleeping used to be one of my favorite activities– until I got lousy at it. I started having trouble with it last year when I found myself feeling more tired when I woke up than when I went to sleep. I practically fell asleep at my desk. (Okay, I did fall asleep on my keyboard.) My once respectable memory took a precipitous decline into the “I can’t remember my own telephone number” range. And then there was a problem, for my husband and anyone within a three-room radius, of the snoring.

One of Charles Lindbergh’s challenges in flying the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 was keeping his eyes open for 33.5 hours. “My mind clicks on and off,” Lindbergh wrote in his detailed account of the first solo transatlantic flight. “I try letting one eyelid close at a time when I prop the other open with my will. But the effort’s too much. Sleep is winning. My whole body argues dully that nothing, nothing life can attain is quite so desirable as sleep.”

Experts are also concerned about the bad habits being formed, like using media as a sleep-aid for babies and toddlers. They are also looking at whether the light from the TV or computer screen is delaying the onset or if they stay up late watching, playing, or texting, when they should be sleeping.

Among the many blessings parents seek to pass on to their children, a life of good sleep habits is an unglamorous but important one. Sleep is the subject of some confusion and considerable anxiety among parents of infants, but fades gradually to an afterthought among most parents of older children, who struggle to maintain busy schedules, enforce homework, and endorse healthy social lives. In the effort to balance these needs, children’s sleep often takes a back seat. Short-changing sleep has serious adverse consequences. American children get too little sleep, with major adverse implications for their cognitive ability, judgment, behavior and physical health.

Anyone who has ever been a teenager knows well the horror of early awakenings during those heady years. For years, school administrators have known about research that bolsters the argument of teens who sleep till noon, yet most school systems insist that bus schedules and the convenience of parents and staff make it imperative to cling to school hours created when we were a nation of farmers and factory hands.

Now, after many months of rigorous study by a task force of parents, teachers, students and others, the Fairfax County school board is poised today to decide whether to overhaul school starting times and let teenagers sleep an hour or two later each morning. As someone who has never quite gotten past his teenage predilection for sleeping from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m., I can only stand and cheer at the mere possibility of such a reform.

Go to school, do homework, help the homeless, go to swim practice, eat, study, and do more homework. With a schedule like this, sleep does not rank high in a typical Whitman student’s daily life. Teenagers need about nine hours of sleep each night to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Studies, however, show the standard teenager gets an average of only seven hours. To convey the importance of sleep and help students improve their sleep schedules, sleep doctor Helene Emsellem spoke to a full audience of Whitman and Pyle parents Feb. 5 in the Whitman media center, while her assistant spoke to students in the chorus room.

Some 60% of Americans say they have driven while drowsy, and 37% admit to nodding off at the wheel, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Lack of sleep is a factor in one-fifth of motor-vehicle accidents and near accidents, studies conducted for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found. It’s also to blame in one-third of fatal truck accidents — equivalent to alcohol and drugs combined.

A little snooze can be a refreshing break—except when it leaves you feeling more groggy than when you started. Set an alarm clock to wake you after 20 to 40 minutes—that way you’ll have just enough time to rest without entering deep sleep. And log your pillow time optimally between 2 and 5 p.m.—any later and you may jeopardize your nighttime sleeping, says Helene Emsellem, M.D., author of Snooze…or Lose! If you can’t fall asleep right away, don’t stress. Lying down and clearing your mind is a precursor to Stage 1 sleep, which is similar to meditation.

And for years, sleep scientists thought they knew what was going on: sleep starts to deteriorate in late middle age and steadily erodes from then on. It seemed so obvious that few thought to question the prevailing wisdom.Now, though, new research is leading many to change their minds. To researchers’ great surprise, it turns out that sleep does not change much from age 60 on. And poor sleep, it turns out, is not because of aging itself, but mostly because of illnesses or the medications used to treat them. “The more disorders older adults have, the worse they sleep,” said Sonia Ancoli-Israel, a professor of psychiatry and a sleep researcher at the University of California, San Diego. “If you look at older adults who are very healthy, they rarely have sleep problems.”