Chris Dalto is an affable fellow, a happily married father of two and a lawyer-turned-financial planner. Normally, he sleeps like a baby.
But last fall, when Lehman Brothers tanked and the stock market fell apart, Dalto began waking up at 3 a.m. "You take on the clients' stress, which made it impossible to get back to sleep," he says. He would spend the wee hours fretting and checking on the already-open Asian markets. Then, come 6 a.m., it was off to work again.
Even in normal times, an estimated 40 million Americans have trouble sleeping, according to the National Institutes of Health. Sleep troubles are more prevalent now because of the economy, some psychologists and psychiatrists say. A third of all Americans are losing sleep worrying about money, according to a poll done last fall and released last week by the National Sleep Foundation, a nonprofit research organization.
Uncertainty - and especially the fear of job loss - are precisely the kind of worries that makes for sleepless nights, says Carol Kauffman a McLean Hospital psychologist. "A hypothetical emergency is often harder to deal with, and can cause more insomnia, than an actual one," she says; the worst place to be is "in limbo, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and there's a millipede up there raining shoes."
So what are the stressed out masses supposed to do to get some sleep? Sleeping pills, once frowned upon by doctors, are now increasingly prescribed if non-drug treatments don't help.
Stress management, meditation, exercise, nighttime habits more conducive to sleep, and, of course, talk therapy, should be tried first, says psychologist Cynthia Dorsey, director of behavioral sleep medicine at the Sleep Health Centers, a for-profit network of sleep disorder clinics
But for those who need more - and many do; doctors wrote more than 56 million prescriptions in 2008, according to IMS Health, a healthcare information company - sleeping pills are an acceptable alternative.
What changed? For one thing, it's clearer that extended use of some sleeping pills can be safe. Until relatively recently, doctors advised patients to take sleeping pills for no more than two weeks, partly out of the "concern that nightly use of sleeping pills would lead to 'tolerance' - the need to increase doses to get the desired effect," says Dr. John Winkelman, medical director of the Sleep Health Center affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital.
