Astronauts in space have trouble sleeping because of work conditions, the stress of their missions and the feeling of weightlessness can also make it quite difficult to fall asleep. As a result most of them take sleeping pills for some rest. A study was conducted in 2011 when the last US Space Shuttle flew, to calculate the sleeping patterns of astronauts. The results showed that astronauts in the space shuttle had less than six hours of sleep on average and astronauts at the International Space Station had a few more minutes of sleep. About 75% of the astronauts took sleeping pills which, more often than not, was Zolpidem (Ambien).
Laura Barger, a research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School in Boston confirms that sleeping less than six hours is associated with performance deficits. Apart from the lack of sleep, the high use of sleeping pills is quite alarming as well. Laura Barger suggests that if the astronaut had to be awakened in case of an emergency in the middle of the night their performance could be impaired because of the sedative effect of the drug. Apart from that, even the drowsiness caused by the drug the next morning holds some risks to missions and to astronauts themselves. Furthermore, Zolpidem is also associated with sleep-driving. This is a condition similar to sleep walking, except the person starts driving and has no recollection of the following events the next day. In the case of astronauts, this could be alarmingly dangerous considering that they have to deal with such expensive equipment and work in such a precise manner.
While the researchers in the study did not collect data on the performance of the astronauts, they claim to have evidence for the astronauts being sleep deprived because once they got back to Earth, they slept more, like many sleep deprived workers on weekends. Christopher Winter, a sleep medicine specialist who was not involved in the research points out that the methods for quantifying sleep were not as precise as they are in lab studies and says that people in new and stressful environments have a tendency to underestimate their sleep. This obviously doesn’t mean that the study is wrong about astronauts being sleep deprived, it merely points out a methodological flaw which challenges its validity.|
NASA rules say that 8.5 hours of sleep must be included in the astronauts schedule. Working conditions obviously get in the way like noise and heat or cold. Barger says that solutions need to be found for these problems especially as future missions will be longer, including an eventual trip to Mars.
Michael Turner
