The Walking Dead

"Did you get enough sleep last night?" asked Maria Konnikova in her article, "The Walking Dead" (The New Yorker, July 9, 2015). "This, unfortunately, is a pipe dream for the majority of Americans. 'Most of us are operating at suboptimal levels basically always,' the Harvard neurologist and sleep medicine physician Josna Adusumilli told me.

"In a series of conversations with sleep scientists…I learned that the consequences of lack of sleep are severe. Many of us have been experiencing the repercussions of inadequate sleep since childhood. Judith Owens, the director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital, has been studying the effects of school start times on the well-being of school-age kids—and her conclusions are not encouraging.

"As schools have pushed their start times earlier and earlier…the health effects on students have been severe… Executive function and emotional responses get worse, hurting everything from judgment to emotional reactivity… In fact, the rise in A.D.H.D. diagnoses may, in part, be the result of inadequate sleep: in children, symptoms of sleep deprivation include hyperactivity and impaired interpretation of social cues."

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