College Insomniacs Resort to Sleeping Pills

SYRACUSE, N.Y., Feb. 19, 2009 -- Alexandra Moore goes to bed when most people are fast asleep—around 4 in the morning. She wakes up at noon the next day and usually naps again at 6 p.m.

"I can get up if I know I have to be somewhere," said Moore, a senior at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. "I can definitely get up, but as soon as I come back, I need to nap. Or I'll just drink a Red Bull."

Moore says she has had insomnia and other sleeping problems throughout her life, and now takes sleeping medication to help her relax and fall asleep at night.

Jeffrey Newell takes a sleep medicine, too, to cope with the stresses and everyday pressures he faces in school.

"The major problem I was having was not just that I couldn't sleep, but that I couldn't stop my brain from thinking," said Newell, a senior at Onondaga Community College. "It's something a lot of college students go through: stress with their studies. You're reading all day and you're writing all day and it's hard to turn your brain off."

They're not alone. A recent report by the health care business of Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Reuters News, reveals that hundreds of college-age students across the country are turning to sleep meds to get some shuteye. The study found that use of prescription sleep aids has nearly tripled among 18-to-24-year-olds over the last 10 years.

Few know this better than Newell. After transferring to Ithaca College last year, he didn't get a good night's sleep for weeks.

"There is just a lot of anxiety with taking your classes, meeting new people, making sure you know where you're going, making sure you have the books that you need, that you're prepared for all of your classes," he said. "It's almost as if every single class is your life."

He made the tough decision to take sleep medicine when it was clear that his problem wasn't going away.

"As long as I was healthy, I was happy," he said. "But it gets to a point where insomnia and lack of sleep can be crippling. You have a real disadvantage in your life -- you have a lack of energy and your brain just works overtime.