First, an acknowledgment: Insomnia bites.
S. Bliss, a reader from Albuquerque, comments that even taking Ativan, he or she awakens at 4:30 a.m., can’t get back to sleep and suffers “a state of sleep deprivation and eventually a kind of walking exhaustion.”
Molly from San Diego bemoans “confusion, anxiety, exhaustion, depression, loss of appetite, frankly a loss of will to go on,” all consequences of her sleeplessness. She memorably adds, “Give me Ambien or give me death.”
Marciacornute reports that she’s turned to vodka (prompting another reader to wonder if Medicare will cover booze).
After several rounds of similar laments here (and not only here; insomnia is prevalent among older adults), I found the results of a study by University of Chicago researchers particularly striking.
What if people who report sleep problems are actually getting enough hours of sleep, overall? What if they’re not getting significantly less sleep than people who don’t complain of insomnia? Maybe there’s something else going on.
It has always been difficult to ascertain how much people sleep; survey questions are unreliable (how can you tell when you’ve dozed off?), and wiring people with electrodes creates such an abnormal situation that the results may bear little resemblance to ordinary nightlife.
Enter the actigraph, a wrist-motion monitor. “The machines have gotten better, smaller, less clunky and more reliable,” said Linda Waite, a sociologist and a co-author of the study.