Sleep is for Sissies

The difference between night and day is not what it used to be for Tony Warren. After a couple of years of steady shift work, the 27-year-old Atlanta resident--a part-time waiter and full-time graduate student in computer engineering-- has embraced an existence of almost nonstop wakefulness that would turn most normal human beings into drooling, hallucinating zombies.

"My shifts are from 5 p.m. until 3 or 4 in the morning," he says. "When you get home late like that over and over again, then you just can't fall asleep as easy. So you stay up an hour. Then an hour becomes two hours. Then the next thing you know, the sun's coming up as you're going to sleep." Eventually, Warren says, "you start to realize it's daytime and you could be doing something with your time, like schoolwork or whatever. Now it's easy to stay up. I can go a day and a half without sleep as long as I keep my mind active. Sleep becomes annoying once you realize how much you can accomplish."

The inability to sleep is called insomnia, but what do you call the unwillingness to sleep, as in Warren's case? "Somnorexia"? Perhaps it's time this condition had a name, because in this age of flexible work schedules, all-night dining, round-the-clock cable news and home espresso makers, it may be far more common than people suspect. For certain restless, overscheduled Americans intent on squeezing more labor, more fun, more family time and more sheer activity from their lives, the traditional 24-hour day has become an anachronistic inconvenience, much like the sit-down evening meal. Though early-to-bed Ben Franklin might not approve, the famously sleepless Thomas Edison probably would. Why else invent the lightbulb?

Joanne Gonzalez, a suburban Dallas stay-at-home mother and Martha Stewart-- like domestic perfectionist who worries about the darkness or lightness of the toast she serves her two young daughters, starts her days at 5:30 a.m. and ends them ... well, when the stimulants wear off. Immediately after waking, she starts the first of several loads of laundry, sees her husband off to work, fixes breakfast for her kids (she calls them "very high maintenance, very demanding") and then herds them into her Volvo station wagon for a long day of lessons, camps and therapies. At night, she makes dinner for the family but not for herself. She says she's just too harried. Not until 10 p.m. or so, when the children are in bed and the house is finally quiet, does the speedy Gonzalez relax--if you define relaxing as mopping the floors, doing yet more laundry and reading e-mail until 2 a.m.

The secret to Gonzalez's freakish stamina is the triple grande vanilla latte. "I'm totally a coffee junkie," she says. "If I can smell coffee around me, I must stop and have one. And now there are Starbucks inside Target stores and supermarkets, which makes it harder to resist." Gonzalez estimates that she consumes a pot of coffee a day, but she refuses to speculate about the sums of money she drops at the Seattle-based coffee chain. So dependent is Gonzalez on caffeine that she says she can't remember conversations until she has had her morning cup of joe.