Sleeping Disorder & Insomnia

Why Can't We Sleep?

Staring at the clock's blinking red lights, tossing and turning until the sheets are tied in knots — some 40 million Americans are all too familiar with what a chronic sleep disorder feels like. In a quest to understand her own insomnia, journalist Patricia Morrisroe traveled from Las Vegas to north of the Arctic Circle and chronicled what she found in a new book, Wide Awake. Morrisroe talked to TIME about how sleep has evolved, how ancient Greeks went to sleep and why we need our z's.

So what happens to the body when it doesn't get enough sleep?
It depends on the amount of sleep you're getting. Researchers talk about impaired concentration and memory. Of the people who have gone on these long sleep-deprivation jags, one became a drifter and lost his wife and job. Another person [who set the Guinness World Record for sleep deprivation in 1965 with 264 hours, or more than 11 days awake] seemed to do quite well.

You say it's difficult to understand how sleep has evolved. What are some theories about why people sleep?
There's no "sleep bone" that people have been able to locate or find. So ultimately we don't know how people used to sleep.How many hours did people sleep then? How many hours are we sleeping now? Is it far fewer hours? That type of thing is hard to track.
A lot of people tend to wake up during the night. Every 90 minutes or so you'll sort of wake up as you go into another cycle. Insomnia patients may remember that they're waking up a lot longer. Or somebody may just feel unrefreshed.

In the '50s, sleep was in the domain of psychiatry. The first sleep labs were really dream labs. And then in the '60s, they seized on the topic of insomnia. But insomnia has always been a vague complaint, so ultimately sleep medicine couldn't get its hands around it. With the discovery of narcolepsy, sleep at least had a disease to call its own. And yet it affects such a small percentage of people that it really wasn't able to give any prominence to the field. The invention of the CPAP machine [used for the treatment of sleep apnea] in 1981 really put sleep medicine on the map.

Penning-off: (~_*)