About 60 million Americans regularly suffer from insomnia, either because they are taking medication, or experiencing pain, or not eating right. Or — according to Russell Rosenberg, who directs the Sleep Medicine Institute in Atlanta, Georgia — simply because they are living in the modern world.
“It’s a 24/7 society now. That is, you have Internet 24 [hours], 7 [days a week], television, radio. Everything can keep you distracted from the time you need to sleep. Plus, people are working harder, working more jobs, trying to squeeze in more family-time, more leisure-time and so forth, and so there’s only so much time to do all the things we want to do in one particular day.”
According to an annual poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, in 2005, 75 percent of Americans experienced sleeping problems ranging from minor and transient to severe and chronic. That is up from 62 percent in 1999, when the NSF first conducted its poll.
The number of Americans turning to prescription sleep aids for help has gone up even more dramatically: nearly 60 percent over the past five years. American pharmacists filled about 42 million sleeping pill prescriptions last year, and most of them were for either Ambien or Lunesta, two recent additions to the sleep aid market.
These drugs are not believed to be habit-forming, and they don’t seem to have the same liver-damaging side-effects that earlier sleep aids had. At the same time, there is some evidence that these new sleeping pills may not be completely harmless.
Sleep experts also recommend their patients with what is known as “cognitive behavioral therapy,” or CBT. It is a form of psychotherapy that tries to change the way a patient thinks, feels, and acts about sleep.
It doesn’t yield immediate results, though, and in many parts of the country, it is unavailable. There are only about 200 clinicians worldwide who have extensive CBT training in the area of sleep. That is part of the reason prescription drugs have become so popular.
But the biggest reason, says Gregg Jacobs, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is marketing. “You’ll see their ads every night on television now. They’re the most frequent drug ads on TV. As a result, people around the United States — and soon around the world — are being given the message that you can take a sleeping pill, and it will cure your insomnia. And when people hear that, they rush out to buy this pill.”