The Sunday Times June 11, 2006

Focus: What price a good night's sleep?

Scientists are on a quest to develop a pill that replaces the natural kip. John Arlidge reports on how shuteye has become a multi-billion-pound lifestyle product

Dr Roger Stoll is an explorer. He is boldly searching for a mythical land where the living is easy. At his suite of laboratories, he proudly introduces his expeditionary team — a bunch of plucky human guinea pigs from Guildford and some rhesus monkeys. His map consists of a series of squiggly graphs.

The land Stoll is searching for is Nod. In this pleasant place, the days and nights are long and full because people need only an hour or two of sleep.

Many people believe they need eight hours’ sleep a night to allow their brains to recover from the rigours of the day. But, it seems, there is not the time. Modern life is too demanding — and exciting — to turn out the light for eight hours, or even six, in every 24.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were a pill that could replace sleep? There are illegal drugs that do so temporarily, but they leave you shattered later on. Stoll is trying to find the Viagra of sleep: a genuine shut-eye simulator that will make him a billionaire.

Stoll is the head of Cortex Pharmaceuticals, a US-based firm that is working with researchers at the University of Surrey to come up with the holy grail of behavioural medicine — a drug that mimics the effects and benefits of sleep.

He says brain scans on his monkeys and human guinea pigs suggest that the firm’s new drug, CX717, does just that — helping brains and bodies to recover without sleep.

“The potential is to help people to stay awake longer and sleep less,” he said.

Stoll is at the forefront of a growing army of medical researchers and entrepreneurs who are striving to make sleep a “new and improved” lifestyle product.

Pharmaceutical firms, which supply 3m prescription sleeping pills in Britain a year, are spending billions on research to win the race to develop the new simulated-sleep pill.

Drugs firms trumpet their success in creating pills that cure the need to sleep. Eli Lilly and Glaxo have joined the race with America’s Cortex.

There is more to this than just the hunt for a miracle pill. While we wait to be cured of the need for sleep, we have become obsessed with getting the best quality sleep that money can buy.

As a result, shut-eye — a subject that only insomniacs and sleepwalkers used to worry about — has become the fastest-growing sector of the £300 billion global pharmaceutical, leisure and wellbeing market.

In laboratories and boardrooms around the world sleep is being studied, graded, commodified, copied and packaged — and then sold as if it were a low-fat snack bar or a vitamin-enriched mineral water.

Mintel, the market research analyst, estimates that the sleep market has grown from £1.6 billion 10 years ago, when the height of slumber sophistication was a posturepedic bed, to more than £4 billion today, when even motels have their own pillow menu offering dozens of types of cover and filling.

Professor Jim Horne runs the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University and has just published Sleepfaring, a study of how we snooze.

“I’ve been researching sleep for 30 years and there has been more interest in sleep and sleep products in the past five years than in the previous 30 put together,” he said.

Throughout the animal kingdom, sleep ranks right up there with food and water for the survival of the species. Everybody does it from fruit flies to homo sapiens. It is pretty easy to get the hang of.

Why are we all suddenly so hung up about it? Why are we losing sleep over sleep?

EVEN for most of us who rarely feel drowsy, it is hard to get through the day without feeling that we should be getting more sleep. Like a virus, sleep is all around, which may be why some people go slightly batty about it.

Caroline Owen, 35, works for a development agency and lives in west London. “I’ve become obsessed with getting a good night’s sleep — everything hinges on whether I’ve slept properly,” she said.

“If I haven’t, my whole day is blighted from the moment I wake up. It’s not so much a question of how many hours I get, but the quality of sleep and whether I wake up feeling refreshed.”

Owen has a bedtime routine that would put the most regimented nanny to shame. “It begins with a bath with essential oils prescribed by my aromatherapist to help me wind down.

“I’ve also read that raising your body temperature in the hot water induces sleep. Then I drink a cup of Sleepytime herbal tea, which I order on the internet from America. Obviously, I don’t drink caffeine after lunchtime,” she said.

“Next I write down everything that is bothering me, to clear it from my mind, and then I sprinkle my pillow with lavender oil, pull down the special blackout blinds and shut the curtains.”

On waking, Owen’s first task is to chronicle her night’s sleep so that she can pinpoint patterns. Long-term, she hopes to solve her problems.

“My therapist has led me to see that my sleep issues began at the age of six, when my parents divorced,” she said.

“I hope that as I resolve the insecurity that stems from that, I’ll sleep more soundly.

“Until then I’ll try anything to get a better night’s sleep — I’ve just booked in for a course of hypnotherapy. It’s supposed to really work.”

Therapists offering to guarantee us “the best eight hours” of our day — at up to £500 an hour — are springing up from Harley Street to the high street. Celebrities, including the rather unlikely figure of the rapper Eminem, swear by them.

“Do you have a sleep problem? Take this test to see if you could be affected by a sleep disorder,” trills the website of the London Sleep Centre. “If you feel that you may be affected, be sure to contact us for an appointment.”

Dr Irshaad Ebrahim, its director, said: “People spend thousands of pounds on specialist help but it’s worth it because we can teach them to sleep well and learn the skills to prevent a relapse.”

Big business, which would once have sacked staff for sleeping on the job, is now encouraging highly valued workers to boost productivity by sleeping during office hours.

“Recharge rooms” are commonplace in law and finance firms, where staff work long hours. Some are even building hotel-style en-suite rooms to help staff to nap on the job and stay overnight if they feel too tired to trek home.

New businesses are springing up selling pure sleep. New York-based MetroNaps rents out Star Trek-style sleep pods by the hour in airports and city centres from New York to Sydney. The first London pod will open soon. Half-an-hour’s kip will cost a tenner.

Sleep — rather than fine food — has become the selling point of luxury air travel. Airlines use glossy advertisements to tempt us to spend up to £5,000 on their flat beds because we need to arrive “feeling refreshed and ready to do business”, or simply to keep up with Colleen on our first morning on the beach.
Hotels, notably the Marriott chain, make us feel sleepy before we have even arrived by promising to pump sleep-inducing fragrances through the air-conditioning system at bed time. Travelodge has appointed its first director of sleep, Wayne Munnelly. He describes snoozing as a “21st-century luxury which we, as a retailer of sleep, want to sell”.

Sleep — a luxury? It sounds ridiculous but go to any dinner party and the three subjects that are bound to come up are how to buy a bigger house, where to go on holiday and how to get more kip. How did we get here?

CONSUMER trends analysts argue that sleep has been transformed from one of the bare necessities of life to a lifestyle accessory that we obsess over.

Crawford Hollingworth, executive chairman of Henley Centre HeadlightVision, said: “We live in an experience economy. Consumers are turning away from material goods as a source of happiness and are instead trying to maximise the feeling they derive from every moment.

“We strive to have the best sleep moments just as we strive for the best food or the best exercise. In a 24/7 society we also convince ourselves that a good night’s sleep will help us make the most of every single moment in the next day.”

The more we view sleep as just another service, the more marketeers and entrepreneurs are queuing up to exploit its potential. The latest “accessories du nuit” include feng shui pillows that create a magnetic field that promotes sleep and an iPod docking station for bedheads, so that we can listen to celebrities sing their favourite lullabies as we slumber.

All good fun — and, at £300 a pop, profitable for the manufacturers. But do we need any of these stylish aids? Rather than needing more sleep, are we being caught napping by sleep oil salesmen? Some experts say we are.

Most of us are working longer and sleeping for a shorter time and claim we suffer from a sleep deficit. A survey by Demos, the think tank, reports that 39% of adults say they suffer from sleep deprivation. The figure rises to 50% for those with children and those in managerial jobs.

Horne argues, however, that we are no more sleep deprived now than we were in Victorian times, when most people worked for six days a week, 14 hours a day, and then slept in overcrowded, unsanitary homes.

“There is no evidence at all that we suffer greater sleeplessness now than in the past. Around seven hours is perfectly adequate for most adults and most get more,” he said.

Horne accuses medical and leisure companies of creating the fear that we are sleep deprived and then flogging remedies to worried consumers. “The hype around sleep products is getting out of hand,” he said.

He dismisses hotels’ attempts to woo customers with in-room sleep aromatherapy as “marketing mumbo-jumbo”. Lying on the couch at work or going outside to catnap in a park is just as effective — and a lot cheaper — than going out to find a futuristic-looking sleep pod.

The most effective sleep aid, he says, is also the cheapest: doing a jigsaw puzzle.

What about reducing our need for sleep? Will scientists be able to create a pill that will cut our need for sleep to a few hours a night? Not according to Horne.

“In the brain there are around 100 areas and chemicals that regulate sleep and the idea of a single tablet to replace their effects is optimistic to put it mildly,” he said.

Back in his Cortex lab, however, Stoll denies that he is cheating nature in his hunt for the Viagra of sleep. “We are enhancing nature,” he said. “We are encouraging and strengthening the restorative effects of sleep. The benefits for alertness and mental health are huge.”

Will he — will we — ever find our way to the mythical land of Nod where the days are long and full and the nights are short but just as refreshing as a good eight hours’ slumber?

“That’s our goal. We believe it’s possible,” he said.

For those of us who really are sleep-deprived, Stoll’s pill could be a miracle cure. Until then, we will just have to sleep on it.

Sleep Disorders

Dyssomnias

Parsomnias

"It’s been a hard day’s night
I’ve been workin´ like a dog
It’s been a hard day’s night
And I’ll be sleepin´ like a log…. "

(John Lennon and Paul McCartney)