This first appeared in the Nov/Dec 2006 issue of Science & Spirit.

In a nation flooded with artificial lights, artificial stimulants, and, perhaps, an artificially inflated drive toward productivity and excitement, a simple good night’s rest can be surprisingly hard to find.

As you gulp your latte while driving to work, grateful for the caffeine because, once again, you didn’t get enough sleep last night, ask yourself what the tragedies on this list have in common: the run-aground Exxon Valdez gushing oil into Prince William Sound; the chemical leak in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands; the space shuttle Challenger disintegrating in the blue sky; and the radioactive horror of Chernobyl. According to published reports, official inquiries determined that all of these disasters occurred, at least in part, because someone involved was sleepy.

If that doesn’t grab your flagging attention, maybe some numbers will. For starters, some studies have estimated the total cost of treating sleep disorders at close to 16 billion dollars per year. The 100,000 vehicle accidents each year that, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, are the consequence of drowsy driving, result in approximately 48 billion dollars per year in damage. How about the 150 billion dollars American businesses lose each year due to fatigue-related mishaps and lost productivity? On a more personal level, consider your teenager who stays up until all hours sending text messages to friends or surfing MySpace.com so that you have to drag him out of bed every morning and nag him about his once excellent grades. Might insufficient sleep have something to do with that?

We are indeed a sleep-deprived nation: As many as 70 million Americans are afflicted by chronic sleep disorders, according to a study released earlier this year by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, and upward of 30 million of those poor souls suffer specifically from chronic insomnia.

Sleep disorders are one of the most prevalent health concerns in the United States and probably throughout the industrialized world, according to psychologist Rubin Naiman, a sleep and dream medicine specialist at Doctor Andrew Weil’s Program for Integrative Medicine in Tucson, Arizona, and author the book Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening. Suffering from ongoing sleep deprivation, we live, as Naiman describes it, in a state of “chronically dazed waking consciousness.”

We can blame, to some extent, Thomas Edison for the onset of our lack of Zs. While humans once followed ancient, evolutionary sleep patterns that sent them to bed shortly after dark and kept them there until dawn ten or twelve hours later, the widespread use of electric light at night has allowed us to undercut our biological imperative for adequate rest. Naiman characterizes light at night as “counterfeit energy” because it gives us a phony boost, masking fatigue or sleepiness. Sugar and caffeine, he says, also are counterfeit energies, as are unconscious thought and behavior patterns that spike adrenaline. “We’re a culture that’s very attracted to hyperbole and drama and excessive excitement,” Naiman says. “I think we’re unconsciously drawn to these because they compensate for our chronic lack of healthy rest.”

Beyond that, our twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, industrialized, technology-soaked culture—the outgrowth of ubiquitous electricity—has made production king and normal rest a sign of sloth. “We overvalue productivity and devalue sleep. It’s not OK to have downtime, according to the cultural ethos,” explains Philip Eichling, a doctor and director of the Executive Health Program at Canyon Ranch in Tucson. He’s only half joking when he says culturewide sleep deprivation is “all the fault of cable TV.” And then he adds, in all seriousness, “Some cartoons are on when no one of the age to watch them should be awake.”

Naiman believes there also may be a deeper, psychological reason behind our tendency to be so sleep-leery. We’re afraid of darkness, he explains—“not darkness per se, but the darkness within us, the shadow. When we allow ourselves to have a relationship with the literal darkness, it invites us inward, and we can confront our own shadows. But rarely do we do that anymore. I think our dismissal of night and darkness is symptomatic of our dismissal of the shadow.”

Amazingly, the physiological reasons for sleep are still unknown, according to Michael Breus, a clinical psychologist and author of Good Night: The Sleep Doctor’s 4-Week Program to Better Sleep and Better Health. Sleep science has produced many theories about why sleep happens—restoring the body, integrating memories, allowing neurocognitive structures to rest and reboot—but “studies prove that all of these are right and all of these are wrong,” he says.

We do know that consistently adequate shut-eye is necessary for optimal functioning. For most adults that means around eight hours every night, even though more and more Americans report getting less than six. Adequate sleep is as necessary for good health as are diet and exercise, says Breus. Without it, we are at greater risk for maladies,

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