Geoff Long was having trouble getting the words out. It was an easy question and he knew the answer right off. But Long, press secretary to the chairman of the state Assembly Ways and Means Committee, was astonished to find himself tripping over his tongue and tumbling into long, embarrassing pauses when he tried to reply. "I knew what I wanted to say but the words just wouldn't come," he remembers.
Long's boss, Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), had a different problem after a string of 16-hour days at the Legislature. As soon as he would get on the road for home, his eyes would start to close. But years of late-night political huddles had led Vasconcellos to develop a system: He opened all the windows and put the top down on his convertible to get maximum wind in his face. Even so, he had to slap his cheeks repeatedly to stay awake.
Long's wife, Joyce Terhaar, wasn't working 16-hour days. Hers ran closer to 24 hours, if their son, Connor--a newborn at the time--felt like staying awake. One afternoon after four nights up with a fussy Connor, Terhaar could think of only one way to amuse him: pulling a string on a musical toy over and over for 45 minutes. "I couldn't even smile or talk to him," she recalls.
Welcome to the world of the sleep-deprived. They are normal and, for the most part, healthy people who--because of work, social obligations, new babies, maybe an addiction to late-night TV--repeatedly get less sleep than their bodies need.
The problem is growing, researchers say, so much that Congress has created a commission to study its dimensions, causes and consequences and to recommend a sleep policy for the nation.
Inadequate sleep shows up in more than yawns and smudged eyes. A tax auditor may be more prone to making errors, a teacher more likely to explode at rambunctious students, an artist or writer or composer more apt to grope for inspiration.
There are safety considerations as well.
"What is the contribution of sleepiness to auto accidents? How sleepy is the night-shift at the local nuclear power plant? How many people get insufficient sleep because of their lifestyles, and what are the important public-health issues related to lack of sleep?" asks Andrew A. Monjan, executive secretary to the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research. "These are some of the questions we will try to answer."
Babies have always kept new parents awake, and even a century ago someone as key to hammering out a state budget as Vasconcellos might have worked his staff into the night. So these events alone do not explain the burgeoning numbers of sleepy Americans.
Researchers blame cultural, sociological and economic factors for turning what used to be transient episodes of sleepiness into a chronic condition for many Americans.
David F. Dinges, a sleep scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, cites the modern drive to "have it all."
"Today we are told you can have a career, you can have leisure time, you can have quality time with your kids and, of course, you have to have your health time, which is the daily workout at the club," Dinges says. To squeeze it all in, many people resort to setting the clock's alarm to an earlier hour or to staying up later. The consequence is a sleep deficit that grows through the week, affecting job performance, personal relationships, creativity, alertness and general enjoyment of life.
Added to this is the growing number of "shift" workers in the American economy, who work something other than a 9-to-5 schedule. In the most recent study (1985) by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 11.6 million people, or 16% of the labor force, fit into that category. Another more recent study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 7.3 million Americans work a true night shift, reporting for work when most people are going to bed and leaving at sunrise.
Shift work hardly existed before Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb. Most people arose with the sun and went to sleep when it was too dark to do anything else, a rhythm of life that roughly complemented the biological or circadian rhythms that control the body's sleep/alert sensations.
The circadian clock programs the human system to be alert and active usually between the hours of 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., and reduces that stimulation during the hours when people are most likely to be asleep, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.
