30 Days, 30 Problems: Problem #29: Sleepless in America

Problem #29: Sleepless in America

Here’s another ironic problem for me to discuss: overscheduling. Me, the person who’s working a full-time job that often requires more than forty hours a week, has a side job fixing computers, is married with two kids, plays live guitar gigs in real life + Second Life, and is writing daily articles on how he’d fix the world. If anything, I’m a case study in overscheduling.

But it’s true: we Americans overload our lives with things, both in our working and leisure lives. This has negative consequences to our health, in both stress and lost sleep. While the Mayo Clinic recommends that adults get between 7 and 8 hours of sleep per night1, nearly 30% of American adults reported an average 6 hours or less of sleep per night between 2005 and 20072.

How do we deal with this lack of sleep? We consume copious amounts of caffeine. The average American consumes 300 mg of caffeine per day- that’s the same as 3 No-Doz pills. In the 1950s, the average cup o’ Joe was about 5 oz, containing between 70 to 100 mg of caffeine; today’s 16 oz. cup at Starbucks contains 330 mg. And, naturally, all this caffeine consumption during the day makes it more difficult to sleep at night; the “sleep market” was estimated at $23.7 billion in 2007, including $2.7 billion in sales for prescription sleep aides4.

My suggestion is a simpler one: rather than pumping ourselves up with stimulants and then slowing ourselves down using CNS depressants, we should try to practice better sleep hygiene. Not necessarily Ben Franklin’s “early to bed and early to rise,” but at least so that we can get an average of the 7 or 8 hours of sleep that the medical community says we need. Good sleep hygiene practices include:

Avoiding caffeine too close to bedtime (personally, I usually have my last cup of regular coffee before lunch)
Avoiding eating just before bed
Exercising
Establish a regular bedtime pattern. For me, this includes knowing when I want to be awake, and turning in 7 to 8 hours before then.5