Night Owls

Resetting the bodily clock

Evelyn King, a housewife and mother in her 50s, says that she was already plagued by insomnia in infancy. By college, King was resorting to barbiturates, but still she rarely dozed off before 3 a.m. Her life became a struggle. Any activity before noon was agonizingly difficult.

To doctors who specialize in such disorders, King belongs to a category of insomniacs dubbed "owls." For reasons that still baffle medicine, they are totally out of harmony with the workaday world. Only such tactics as copious infusions of coffee keep them awake when they are forced into a 9 a.m.-to-5 p.m. schedule.

Now Dr. Elliot Weitzman and his colleagues at New York City's Montefiore Hospital and Medical Center may have welcome news for those night owls. By a technique they call chronotherapy, they have managed to help King and six other victims of this disorder. The feat, says Weitzman, was accomplished not with drugs but by resetting internal clocks.

As Weitzman explains it, for these people the hands of the clocks can best be moved forward, not backward. Accordingly, four night people were placed in isolated rooms without clocks, phones or radios to provide the time. The doctors kept moving their patients' bedtimes ahead, three hours a day. (Three patients, including King, tried the test at home, pledging to retire on schedule.) The chronotherapy lasted a week, until the night folks had been worked around the clock to a reasonable bedtime. In King's case, that meant midnight.

While thus far effective in these limited cases, chronotherapy may not be suitable for all such night owls. Admits King: "During treatment, I felt like a zombie." But the effort seems to have been worthwhile. For the first time in years, she is off pills and getting a good night's rest. Says she: "This has changed my life."

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