Time In A Bottle: No More Sleep
Be careful what you wish for: Modafinil, a drug used for sleeping disorders, is now being tested as a way to keep people awake, safely, for up to 40 hours.
So does it work? It's still being tested. CBS News Correspondent Tracy Smith conducted a little test of her own with her doctor's consent.
Think of it as time in a bottle, she says. One little pill can give you up to 40 straight hours without sleep. Coffee can give you the jitters, but Modafinil can keep you alert, jitter free, all day and all night, maybe.
Like any drug, it may not agree with you. Side effects like nausea, diarrhea, or headache may occur. Those are the most common.
And the label can be confusing.
It reads, "Report promptly trouble sleeping." Trouble sleeping? Wasn’t that the whole point!
The best way for Smith to see if it worked was to take one and see what happened.
On the last Monday morning in June, she started her workday with Early Show’s July Chen at 4:30 a.m.
The idea was to work a normal day and see just how long she could stay alert.
Part of this assignment was a flight to Houston, Texas, to talk to someone who's testing the drug on people who work the night shift.
“I don’t care how good your exercise program is or how good your nutrition program is, if you don't get enough sleep, you feel like crap,” says Dr. Max Hirschkowitz, sleep researcher.
“America stays up late. And I'm one of those people who serves the people who stay up late. And I'm proud of it,” says waiter Christopher Jerry.
Houston after dark is like any other big city: night workers drive the trucks, wait the tables and staff the hospitals. They have their own ideas about staying awake without taking a pill.
“Anything that allows you to stay up for two or three days, that seems unnatural to me,” says Jerry. “Now maybe if I was doing a job that required me to be really, really alert, where other lives were at stake, I'd consider it. But I serve sandwiches.”
“I myself, I like coffee,” says nurse Leroy Beck. "A ton of coffee. It's pots of coffee."
By half past midnight, a pot of coffee sounded pretty good to Smith. Though pretty alert, she says she was beat.
It is 1:15 a.m. Houston time. She got up at 3:30 a.m. New York time, which is 2:30 a.m. Houston time so after 23 hours, she says, she felt and looked exhausted.
A key feature of Modafinil is that it allows you to sleep if you want to. And by 3 a.m., she did.
It didn't work for Smith, but your experience could be different. When the army tested Modafinil on helicopter pilots, they were able to stay up for days and perform almost as well as they did with a full nights' sleep.