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Drugs Eradicate the Need For Sleep
MattSparkes writes "New Scientist is running an article on lifestyle drugs that claim to help you function on little or no sleep. I'm dubious, but the interviewee in the article claims they work well. 'Yves (not his real name), a 31-year-old software developer from Seattle, often doesn't have time for a full night's sleep. So he swallows something to make sure he doesn't need one.'" But, sleep is where I'm a Viking!
Speaking as a scientist who used to study sleep and sleep disorders, I have to say this is troubling. Sleep has evolved for a purpose and a number of studies have shown that sleep is necessary or crucial to consolidate long term memories, stabilize mood and more. If you are a simple automaton in your job, then *perhaps* you might be able to get away with something like modafinil for short periods of time, but if your job requires thought and the use of memory and higher cognitive function, then you are doing yourself a disservice by taking these drugs. I worry that the long term effects will not become apparent until years later, like I suspect might happen with PDE inhibitors like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra.
Humans have evolved an organized architecture of sleep where we progress through a number of stages of sleep. In other words, sleep is an active state that is not homogenous in that there are five generally accepted states of sleep separate from consciousness. Stages 1 and 2 are light sleep whereas 3 and 4 are deeper, more restful states of sleep with lower brain metabolic rates and more cortical synchronization. Stage 5 or REM sleep is actually a very active stage of sleep with very high metabolic requirements rivaling that or exceeding wakefulness and its thought that REM sleep may be necessary for memory consolidation. The trick is that the architecture of sleep is broken up into various stages and you do not really approach the most intense REM periods until after you have progressed back and forth through some of the other stages including a more brief period of REM sleep earlier in the night. So, the most intense REM period is late into sleep and often early in the morning. If you short change yourself of the other sleep periods, you reduce the quantity and quality of your REM sleep period.
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This story appeared in the New Scientist in mid-February 2006.
I did sleep studies for a year. I was the guy that brought patients in, hooked up electrodes for brain activity, belts for breathing, electrodes on the legs for leg movement, etc -- then I sat in a small office staring at a computer screen for sometimes 12 hours on end watching them sleep making sure nothing went wrong, as well as making notes on potential sleep disorders. Apnea, Periodic Leg Movements, mainly. Obviously this job required that I work graveyards. After about 8 months on the job, my sleep schedule began to skip. I met my wife, I was trying to maintain a social life in the afternoons, etc. I started staying up when I got home until sometimes 2PM before going back to work at 8PM. Bad news. We obviously had a doctor on the staff, and he called us sleep techs into a room and we discussed the latest discoveries, etc. What came up was Modafinil. He mentioned that while he recommended Melatonin, Modafinil is approved for graveyard workers. Shortly thereafter I started taking Modafinil. I'll tell you, it works. Caffine is a terrible substitute. I used to drink so much coffee on top of caffine pills I OD'd more than once on it. Modafinil had 0 side effects (for me), other than the occasional slight bit of anxiety. It kept me awake, and it made me feel like I didn't even need sleep. When I'd get home, I could easily go to sleep because while it made you not FEEL like you didn't need to sleep, actually falling asleep wasn't difficult. When I would wake up I felt rested. I used Modafinil for about 4 months total -- and if I ever feel compelled to ruin my life with another graveyard shift, I'll be taking it up again. It's a marvellous drug.
I swear it's like you people are deliberately living in denial.
In WWII, the Germans and the US both used stimulants.
The US used Benzedrine (aka "Bennies") and the Germans used Methedrine (now called Methamphetamine.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Most people grow when they sleep. Then, their vertebrae compress during the day and they go to bed shorter. While horozontal the discs uncompress, resulting in "growth." Astronauts get about 2 inches taller in low gravity, but for us earthbound folk it is less, maybe 1-2 cm. Here is a link I found.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Humans, without a clock, visual cues such as the sun, etc. will adopt a 25-hour sleep wake cycle. Just wanted to point that out becuase the article suggests the body naturally has a 24 hour sleep wake cycle. That would seem appropriate given our 24 days here on Earth. But that's not the case.
Being bipolar, when my medication doesn't work I can go for days without sleep. This is not good. The brain starts doing strange things after day 3 or so. I can only imagine what would happen WHEN, not IF, people start abusing something like this. Sleep is incredibly important to anyone with an illness of any kind, be it physical or mental. Without it, the condition worsens.
Imagine what would happen if this became commonplace. There's a reason that they don't give anti-depressants to make everyone happy. In a small % of the population it can/will cause a psychotic episode. Severe sleep deprivation can do the same thing, set off things in the brain that a person only had a tendency for before. Your great grand-mother was a paranoid schizophrenic? Great, now that you decided to cram for a test for 3 days, you set it off. The chances are low, granted, but do you really want to play with something like that? Get your 8 hours and be happy that you can.
My brother is brilliant but couldn't concentrate on a book long enough to read 15 pages of it. Writing was similarly impossible. He figured he was a lazy and disorganized, and just couldn't concentrate due to insufficient moral fiber. So, despite being brilliant, he counted himself out of any kind of intelectually rewarding career. Then he learned about ADHD and tried some medication. It was like throwing a switch- now he can concentrate and work hard, and he does. ADHD meds made it possible for him to thrive at law school, where so much counselling, introspection, self-blame, and "lifestyle changes" did nothing.
Overdiagnosed as ADHD is, there are lots of cases out there like my brother's, and you cannot dismiss the reality of ADHD without considering them.
I am aware that Cephalon is spending a fortune on viral marketing.
Without the hype induced placebo this drug is nothing more than a MDMA/Ephedra mix without the bad music.
Stop buying into the hype.
Fed up of seeing the same exaggerated claims appearing repeatedly, recycled specially in Slashdot.
signed: An ex-modafinil user.
I have a diagnosed "sleep disorder", but the actual root cause is my job -- I run an OPS group, so insanely long and/or irregular hours are the norm ( guaranteed to have to work 48 hours straight about once every three months, and have to run on 2-3 hours of sleep pretty regularly ).
To "manage" this, I have a perscription for Ambien ( just switched to CR, `cause it makes it easier to go back to sleep after having to wake up and work for two hours in the middle of the night ) and a perscription for Provigil ( 400 mg/dy ). The pharma is what lets me cope with this schedule when I need to, otherwise I'd be jello.
I have nothing but good things to say about Provigil, it lets me do what I need to do without worrying about whether or not my body can keep up. Not to mention the newfound ability to drive from NYC to Miami with nothing but gas an bathroom breaks. However, there are a couple big things that get overrepresented, or that don't get considered:
1) This stuff lets you operate for long periods of time without sleep and more-or-less without accruing sleep debt, and it lets you function semi-normally on very little sleep. However, it does not keep extended periods of sleeplessness from taking a mental toll -- the longer you go without sleep the more your cognitive ability and short-term memory suffer, modafinil doesn't change that. So yeah, I can run 40 hours straight no problem taking 400 mg of this shit every 12-14 hours, but you get gradually dumber over that span even though you can stay alert and responsive. By the end of a 40-hour run I'm functioning at low-normal to low intelligence, my short term memory is basically nonexistant, and I'm extremely distractable...to the point where sometimes I trail off in the middle of a sentence. So if you do anything other than long-haul trucking, your work will suffer as time goes on.
2) Potential for psychological dependency is very high among the subset of the population likely to use it for its "lifestyle" effects. It improves your concentration by orders of magnitude and lets you run at that high level for quite a while before secondary fatigue effects (see above) start taking a bite out of your performance. For people who derive large portions of their self-worth from their mental abilities, this shit is anabolic steroids -- won't hook you physically, but it makes you *way* better at what you do. And you start to miss it if it isn't there.
3) It gives you headaches -- not all the time, but often enough. Since I started regular use, I get headaches at least 30% more than I used to. Also it can make you really nauseous -- although it also seems to have an appetite supressant effect, and an empty stomach combined with coffee consumption and smoking more heavily than normal could explain the nausea. Also, it makes your urine smell really bad, which has a nice synergistic thing with the nausea...
remember the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi: If enough peasants die horribly, someone will probably notice