Junk Sleep

Reuters reported today on a London sur­vey that says teens do not get enough sleep because they are dis­tracted by high-tech gad­gets in their bedrooms.

The Sleep Council polled 1,000 teens aged 12 to 16 and found, on aver­age, they get from four to seven hours of sleep a night, less than rec­om­mended; and most fell asleep to the sounds of a tele­vi­sion or music player.

The study termed this “Junk Sleep,” the kind of sleep that has nei­ther the length or depth nec­es­sary for young brains. Yet only 11 per­cent of respon­dents said they were both­ered by their lack or qual­ity of sleep.

Maybe this is why I felt so tired through­out most of high school?

Seriously, do we really need a catch-phrase for this, espe­cially one that they felt the need to cap­i­tal­ize? I under­stand that peo­ple are more apt to remem­ber a catch-phrase, espe­cially when it describes some­thing that doesn’t nat­u­rally lend itself to short, easy descrip­tion. Add to that our culture’s obses­sion with invent­ing prob­lems for mar­keters and man­u­fac­tur­ers to solve (i.e. waxy buildup and, some believe, rest­less leg syn­drome). A catch-phrase about a med­ical con­di­tion (lack of rest­ful sleep) could eas­ily spawn a gen­er­a­tion of drugs to solve that prob­lem, drugs that are com­pletely unneeded.

I don’t want to min­i­mize the sleep prob­lem, but how many cul­tural ref­er­ences and catch-phrases can our lan­guage sup­port before we fall into an apoc­a­lypse of idioms?

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