If there existed a pill that could allow you to stay awake for three days with little side effect and risk of addiction, would you take it?
The U.S. government invested millions of dollars to attain this reality through modafinil, a drug originally intended to treat narcolepsy, but given to soldiers in Baghdad to stay alert for long patrolling shifts.
But staying awake is hardly only a matter of interest for national security. After oil, coffee is the second-largest traded commodity in the world, and the U.S. energy drink market is forecasted has been forecasted to reach $10 billion by 2010.
Duke students also have an opinion about staying awake. During Project Build, before I even started classes, an upperclassman told me the mantra that would come to define the attitude towards sleep that I and many of my peers have gradually adopted: You can sleep when you’re dead.
After all, if anti-sleep drugs are available for prescription—the FDA approved a variant of modafinil for prescription use in 1998—then what real need do we have for sleep?
Modafinil sounds like a good idea if you believe sleep can’t do a thing for you. On a college campus, this notion can appear pretty convincing. After all, sleeping means you have to unplug yourself from the fluidity of new experiences, and miss opportunities to see friends, attend shows, make money and study for classes. We take on myriad commitments and all of them take precedence to sleep. Somewhere along the way, we realize that we can stuff more events into the day if we sleep less at night, and thus we begin to assume that if we sleep less, we’ll accomplish more.
On many college campuses, sleeping becomes associated with negative connotations of laziness, selfishness and dispassion. The act devolves from a simple physiological necessity into a daily battle of self-control. Students talk about the number of hours they’ve stayed awake more often than John Kerry brags about his three purple hearts, and they resort to various outlets to stay alert—caffeine, binging and purging strategies, power naps and even more ambitious polyphasic sleep plans, all designed to trick our biological clocks into thinking we aren’t tired.
A large part of this trend, I suspect, comes from the perception that other people aren’t sleeping.
The average person needs about eight hours of sleep a night, but the popular media is inundated with profiles of famous self-professed low-sleepers. Madonna, Jay Leno and Martha Stewart claim to sleep only four hours a night. Bill Clinton sleeps for five to six hours a day (Although he is also known to have said, “Every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.”) Former Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, now dean of University of Carlifornia, Irvine School of Law, gets by on four to six hours sleep a day and reportedly published a new book on federalism during the extra time.
Are these people just lucky to need less sleep? In 2009, a group of scientists at University of California, San Francisco discovered a gene mutation associated with needing only around six hours of shut-eye a night. But Ying-Hui Fu, co-author of the Science article, admits that fewer than 5 percent of people tend to fall into this category. As for the Madonnas and Jay Lenos, Harvard sleep researchers and Thomas Roth of the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders Center agree that the percentage of the population who needs less than five hours of sleep per night, rounded to a whole number, is zero.
In fact, Harvard neuroscientist Robert Stickgold argues that a person who cuts back from his needed eight hours of sleep to four hours a night loses at least 20 percent of his efficiency. If in the 20 hours of wakefulness he can only accomplish 16 hours of work, he might as well have slept those extra four hours anyway.
Insufficient sleep habits can also lead to cognitive damage that later restful sleep can’t fix. For instance, scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that a week of eight-hour-a-night “recovery” rest was unable to completely reverse low performance on psychomotor and reaction tasks from when subjects were only permitted to sleep four hours a night for a week.
It appears then, that famous low-sleepers are more likely just exhausted and anxious than superhuman and accomplished. Ultimately efficiency, not less sleep, enables us to do more, and as research has shown, we need sleep to be more efficient.
Nothing, not coffee, energy shots, or even modafinil can compensate for the benefits of sleep.
The sooner we wake up and recognize we are cheating ourselves by sleeping less, the faster we can reclaim our right to a good night’s rest and recharge with no regrets.
After all, I can sleep when I’m dead, but frankly, I’d like to feel alive before I die too.
Courtney Han is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Monday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.