It's that time of year again for students. Finals, term papers, and job searching all at once, along with the occasional late-night party leave students burning the midnight oil in their dorms and nodding — or sometimes snoring — in their classes. In some cases, it may be the teacher who is at fault; in other cases, it's part of a more pervasive problem: sleep deprivation.

According to the National Institute of Health, about 70 million Americans aren't getting enough sleep on a nightly basis. It can cost work hours — and productivity — and in some cases, it can cost lives.

The British Medical Association in a recent report indicates that sleep deprivation can cause stress, anxiety, and depression. But for drivers, the results are of course more ruinous. A recent survey by researchers in Australia and New Zealand indicates that staying awake for 17 to 19 hours straight has about the same effect as .05 level of blood alcohol — the legal limit for drunk driving in most European countries. The study indicates that up to 60 percent of all road accidents involve sleep-deprived driving.

Major environmental and technological disasters have been attributed partially to sleep deprivation: investigations into the Challenger, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill all indicated that employees had been working long hours with little sleep, and that this condition may have played some role in each.

Students who think all-nighters are going to boost their GPAs should consider this evidence. A team of researchers from the UCSD School of Medicine in 2000 monitored activity in sleep deprived subjects performing simple verbal and mathematical learning tasks. While activities in various regions of the brain were affected to varying degrees; sleep deprivation resulted in reduced scores for patients in the area of mathematics and memory.

Although this news comes as no surprise to anyone who's taken an exam while pinching himself to stay awake, according to Christian Gillin, professor of psychiatry at UCSD, though, we're just beginning to realize what a problem sleep deprivation is.

"Only in recent years have we begun to realize the prevalence and severity of sleep deprivation in our population, with a significant number of people doing shift work, suffering from jet lag, and so forth¿These findings are just a beginning, and as we learn more, perhaps we will be able to devise interventions to alleviate the behavioral impairments associated with lack of sleep."

At the moment, the "cures" chosen by most students and employees is pretty simple. Grin and bear it, drink coffee, or find some stronger —and often more dangerous — stimulant.

According to Dr. William Dement of Stanford University — one of the world's leading authorities on sleep deprivation — these are short-term and ineffective solutions.

Lost sleep, according to Dr. Dement, accrues as a "debt", and eventually the piper has to be paid. Coffee, as a stimulant "camouflages" that debt, as does early morning excitement, or physical activity. Usually it creeps on the debtor in early afternoon, when the pace begins to slow. A student walks into his/her class chattering with his peers, stimulated with coffee and the excitement of a brand-new day. Fifteen minutes later, deep sleep threatens again. An employee goes out for lunch, returns, falls asleep on his keyboard. There are more dramatic instances: in his book Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle, Peter Troob describes a fellow investment banker falling asleep while walking and crashing face first into a wall.

In the online economy, where sleep deprivation is considered part of the experience, and many employees bring their pillows to work with them, there are indications that the desire to stay on top by staying awake longer has been self-defeating. Stories abound of employees who spend entire weeks fixing bugs in software, until they are so exhausted that they create new problems. An article in CNN describes an employee (anonymous) erasing his company's Web site server, including the operating system, after staying up for two straight days. "I know at least five other people who've done the same thing," he says in the interview.

These anecdotes are backed up by the results of a National Sleep Foundation study, which indicates that employees working more than 60 hours a week tend to make 10 percent more mistakes on the job than people who work less.

If that's the case, then, one wonders how much overwork costs us in worker productivity. According to the National Sleep Foundation, drowsy workers cost U.S. employers $18 billion in lost productivity. And that doesn't include the cost in health problems, caused both directly by sleepiness and indirectly because of a reduced immune systems among employees. In environments where long working hours are the norm, doctors say, colds and flu tends to spread like wildfire.

In a survey by the Sleep Foundation, 51 percent of American workers surveyed said that sleepiness on the job interferes with their work. As sleep clinics begin to spring up around the country in response to the problem, people are beginning to become more familiar with some of the symptoms of severe sleep deprivation: ·Narcolepsy: A pervasive and recurrent need to sleep when you want to be awake, often in the middle of a meal, or in a car. ·Restless legs syndrome: Tingling sensations in the legs, and an urge to stretch, bend, or rub them. ·Sleep apnea: Brief pauses in breathing during sleep, accompanied by snoring or choking sensations. ·Insomnia: Waking up frequently in the night, having trouble falling asleep again, waking up and not feeling rested.

But that doesn't mean they're doing anything about it. Ritalin has become the drug of choice on college campuses, as many students not really afflicted by attention deficit disorder (ADD) find themselves nodding in class and losing their power to concentrate.

Some of them assume it's a built-in inability to concentrate; for many it's simply lack of sleep that makes it so difficult to read a page from bottom to top. Ritalin is a short-term cure for a problem that will dog students as they move out into careers in business and medicine and high-technology which equate success with long hours and retirement with sleep.

According to Dr. Maas, author of Power Sleep, a book championing our biological need to snooze adequately, this high-powered lifestyle may bring about retirement earlier than desired:

"We know that sleep deprivation does two things," he says, "it slows you down mentally and it shortens your life."

Links:

National Sleep Foundation: http://www.sleepfoundation.org/

National Sleep Foundation Report: Less Fun, Less Sleep, More Work - An American Portrait, (Mar. 2001): http://www.sleepfoundation.org/PressArchives/lessfun_lesssleep.html

British Medical Journal: Editorial (which reviews the medical literature): "Fatigue: Time To Recognize and Deal With An Old Problem" http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/322/7290/808

Dr. Maas' "Power Sleep" Homepage: http://www.powersleep.org/