Why the sleep problems in the U.S.?
- sciart0
- Jun 30
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "I like to tell people that the night before I stopped sleeping, I slept. Not only that: I slept well.
Years ago, a boyfriend of mine, even-keeled during the day but restless at night, told me how hard it was to toss and turn while I instantly sank into the crude, Neanderthal slumber of the dead. When I found a magazine job that allowed me to keep night-owl hours, my rhythms had the precision of an atomic clock. I fell asleep at 1 a.m. I woke up at 9 a.m. One to nine, one to nine, one to nine, night after night, day after day.
As most researchers can tell you, this click track is essential to health outcomes: One needs consistent bedtimes and wake-up times. And I had them, naturally; when I lost my alarm clock, I didn’t bother getting another until I had an early-morning flight to catch.
Then, one night maybe two months before I turned 29, that vaguening sense that normal sleepers have when they’re lying in bed—their thoughts pixelating into surreal images, their mind listing toward unconsciousness—completely deserted me. How bizarre, I thought. I fell asleep at 5 a.m.
This started to happen pretty frequently. I had no clue why. The circumstances of my life, both personally and professionally, were no different from the week, month, or two months before—and my life was good. Yet I’d somehow transformed into an appliance without an off switch.
I saw an acupuncturist.
I took Tylenol PM.
I sampled a variety of supplements, including melatonin (not really appropriate, I’d later learn, especially in the megawatt doses Americans take—its real value is in resetting your circadian clock, not as a sedative).
I ran four miles every day, did breathing exercises, listened to a meditation tape a friend gave me. Useless.
I finally caved and saw my general practitioner, who prescribed Ambien, telling me to feel no shame if I needed it every now and then. But I did feel shame, lots of shame, and I’d always been phobic about drugs, including recreational ones. And now … a sedative? (Two words for you: Judy Garland.)
It was only when I started enduring semiregular involuntary all-nighters—which I knew were all-nighters, because I got out of bed and sat upright through them, trying to read or watch TV—that I capitulated. I couldn’t continue to stumble brokenly through the world after nights of virtually no sleep.
I hated Ambien. One of the dangers with this strange drug is that you may do freaky things at 4 a.m. without remembering, like making a stack of peanut-butter sandwiches and eating them. That didn’t happen to me (I don’t think?), but the drug made me squirrelly and tearful.
I stopped taking it.
My sleep went back to its usual syncopated disaster."