Help for the Sleep Deprived

So you envy people who can climb into bed and drop off to sleep in five minutes or less, right? You shouldn't, says a Stanford University psychiatry professor, those people may be severely sleep-deprived and paying the penalty for the "sleep debt" they have accumulated.

Professor William C. Dement says you can discover how much sleep debt you have by lying on a bed, holding a spoon over a metal plate on the floor and starting a stopwatch. When you fall asleep, the spoon will fall from your hand and wake you up, at which point you stop the watch.

If it took you one to five minutes to fall asleep, Dement says, you are suffering from extreme exhaustion and you probably need to catch up on 60 hours or more of lost sleep. Five to 10 minutes, he says, means your energy is low during dips in the day, 10 to 15 minutes and you have a manageable amount of sleep debt and more than 15 minutes means you have no sleep debt at all and are very alert.

"It is best to take 10 minutes to fall asleep, because this will mean you are still tired enough to sleep deeply, but will not feel tired during the following day," Dement says. But you don't want to clear off your sleep debt entirely, he adds, "because then it will take you more than 20 minutes to get to sleep, and you may wake up during the night." For more information about the psychology of sleep, click several times on the "next" arrow at the bottom of the site.

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