Sleepy, Sleep Pilots A recent Sleep In America poll found that a quarter of pilots feel sleepy on the job. Another 60% nap on the job, and 20% feel they have made serious errors as a result of sleepiness. Why Is This Happening? Shift work. Similar problems occur with train drivers. Only about half of […]
Noisy, sleepless hospitals (and how to rest in them – 1/25/12)
When You’re Ill You Really Need Rest Rest is as necessary to life as food. Without it the body does not restore and regenerate. Hospitals don’t seem to fully understand that connection. A new study of noise in hospital rooms, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, was not good news. The average hospital room […]
Rebound insomnia (1/13/12)
When You Can’t Stop Using Sleeping Pills You can’t sleep and you must. You start to take sleeping pills. They work – for a while. Then you find you need more. You try some nights without those pills. You can’t sleep at all – until you take the pills again. You’ve got rebound insomnia. Join […]
Overcoming a bad night’s sleep (12/7/11)
Bad Night Who’s a perfect sleeper? Gaze in a mirror and you’re probably not looking at one. In Gallup polls, perhaps only 5% of the population says they sleep well every night. Yet lots of people have bad nights, with perhaps one third of Americans complaining of insomnia that goes on and on and on. […]
Confessions of an air traffic controller (10/28/11)
Asleep in the Tower What caused a senior air traffic controller to fall asleep at Reagen Airport in Washington, D.C. this April, causing two planes to land unassisted and provoking a national transport scandal? Travel – his own. In a report by Rebecca Ruiz at MSNBC, the unnamed supervisor last remembered thinking he should splash […]