WORK AND SLEEP HABITS Nighttime: not just for vampires

Americans are taking advantage of more moonlight activities.
By JOCELYN NOVECK
AP NATIONAL WRITER
NEW YORK -- It is sometime between 3 and 4 in the morning. I wake up and stick my head out my apartment window. No car alarms, no sirens, no loud conversations. The only thing I can hear is the drone of dozens of air conditioners in the sticky July night.
But I don't feel lonely. I know that a few miles away, Jennifer Edson is likely surfing the Web and catching up on e-mail. Down in Texas, Wade Rayburn will be getting up for his nocturnal swim, and Ben Vizcaino is finishing his workout at the gym, perhaps heading for an all-night supermarket. In Connecticut, Dottie Smith will soon be rising to work on her house.
I am up at this hour to sample their theory: The only time to get some peace and calm and focus in this ever more hectic world is when most everyone else is sleeping.
Of course, thousands of Americans have no choice -- they work all-night jobs at hotels, diners, hospitals, news desks and countless other places. But the people we're talking about are those who actively choose to be conscious in the wee hours, who set their alarms or their body clocks to rise long before the rest of us, or sometimes never go to sleep in the first place.
Edson, a multimedia designer in New York, typically conks out at 9 or 10 p.m. when putting her two kids to bed. For a few hours, she's down for the count. But then she'll be up by midnight and at the computer. She catches a couple more hours of sleep later in the morning.
"I love it when I can hear that stillness in the night," says Edson, 47. "It's the only time I can truly think." Sometimes, she'll be sending e-mails and she'll get one back -- at 3 a.m -- from a friend or colleague, often a fellow mother. "So," it might say. "You fell asleep with your kid, too?"
Like-minded people
And once you venture outside, walking the dog or grabbing a middle-of-the-night takeout coffee, there's a kind of fraternity of off-hours souls. "You can be dressed half in pajamas, and it's OK. Nobody judges you," says Edson.
Vizcaino, 40, who likes to work out between 1 and 3 a.m. at a nearby 24-Hour Fitness gym, says "people get to know you better. They know your routine. It's a much friendlier atmosphere."
A former software engineer and now a full-time student of oriental medicine, Vizcaino says there's "something about the darkness" that makes him more creative, more focused, more engaged, more effective at studying. "When the sun goes down, I kind of come alive," he says. Not to mention the lack of traffic, or lines at the supermarket, or for equipment at the gym.
It's virtually impossible to know how many Americans are night owls. The Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics now compiles data on how Americans spend their time, in what it calls the American Time Use Survey. But applicable statistics are only available so far for 2004. They show that for the hours of 3 to 6 a.m., for example, the vast majority of people are engaged in "personal care activities" -- which includes sleeping -- followed by leisure and sports, and then work-related activities.
It's clear, though, that there's more and more to do in those wee hours, whether it be food-shopping or working out or making copies. 24-Hour Fitness Worldwide began as one club in California in 1983; it's now a chain of more than 330 clubs in 16 states. Of 1,500 FedEx Kinko's centers nationwide, 400 are open all night, and 35 percent of all copying at Kinko's is done between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., says spokeswoman Jenny Robertson.
Upsides, downsides
Also clear is that technology has enabled us to stretch -- or abolish -- the boundaries of the day, more and more. As with all advances, it's both a good and a bad thing. Laptop computers, handheld wireless devices and cell phones give us huge flexibility and allow us to be away from our desks, but they also mean the work day never ends.
Frederic Luskin, an author and researcher at Stanford University who specializes in the effects of stress, worries that this lack of clear boundaries to the day can compound the pressure on us, leading to less healthy lives. The off-hours e-mails and cell phone calls are a major assault on our nervous system, he says.
"The stress response is a tiny jolt of adrenaline in response to a threat," Luskin says. "Each e-mail, each call is a potential threat. It takes us back to primitive times, when threat was omnipresent."
And of course, there's that pesky problem of sleep deprivation.
"Eventually you start cheating yourself in terms of sleep, and you lose that key restorative function," says Larry Kubiak, a psychologist at the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital in Florida. He says middle-aged people have come to him fearing they may have Alzheimer's because they can't remember little things; others might fear they have attention deficit disorder. Often, he says, it's stress compounded by sleep deprivation. "They're sleeping less, eating less, exercising less," he says.
Some people are just not night people -- but they're very-early-day people. One is Dottie Smith of Sharon, Conn. "I can get 10 times more accomplished between five and eight than I can later in the day," says Smith, who used to get up regularly at 3 a.m. but is now "sleeping in" a little as she organizes her home and gets ready for her upcoming wedding.
Her fiance, Smith says, is on the reverse schedule. And that's an added benefit: "It gives us each our own space in the house."
It's 10 p.m. now, and my new nocturnal acquaintances are gearing up for another night in the world of no traffic, no lines, free swim lanes and exquisite, silky silence.
I wish I could join them again.
Truth is, though, I'm beat.
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