Fresh Air - Best Of: Making 'Born To Run' / Why We Can't Sleep

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

This month marks the 50th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen's album Born to Run. We'll talk with Peter Ames Carlin, author of a Tonight in Jungleland, about the making of this now classic album.Also, we'll talk with Jennifer Senior about her Atlantic article "Why Can't Americans Sleep?" And, David Bianculli reviews season two of Wednesday, starring Jenna Ortega.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems. More information is at walton family foundation.org. From W.H.Y.Y in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. This month marks the 50th anniversary of Bruce Brinkstein's album Born to Run. We'll talk with Peter Ames Carlin, author of a new book about the making of this now classic album. Also, if you have trouble sleeping, you may experience something like this. It was sheer blinding panic.

And I'd be staring at the clock and going, oh my God, now I only have five hours to sleep. Now I only have four hours to sleep. Now I only have three. Now I only have two. Now I only have one. Now I have 20 minutes. We'll talk with Jennifer Sr. about her Atlantic article, why can't Americans sleep?

And David B. and Cooley will review the new season of Wednesday starring Jenna Ortega. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from WISE, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with WISE, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate

with no hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit wise.com. T's and Cs apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems.

More information is at waltinfamilyfoundation.org. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. The now classic Bruce Springsteen album Born to Run will have its 50th anniversary, August 25th. It was a turning point for rock and roll and for Springsteen in his life and in his songwriting. Before he recorded that album, his record label, Columbia, was on the verge of dropping him because his first two albums were critically acclaimed but had pretty feeble record sales. The Making of Born to Run is the subject of the new book, Tonight in Jungleland.

Jungleland is the title of Born to Run's final track. My guest is the book's author, Peter Ames Carlin. One of his earlier books is a biography of Springsteen called Bruce. He's also written books about R.E.M., Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, and Paul Simon. Let's start things off with this. streets of a runaway American dream. At night we ride to mansions

of glory and suicide machines sprung from cages on highway nine drum wheel fuel injected and stepping out over the line Oh baby this town rips the bones

From your back, it's a death trap It's a suicide rap We gotta get out while we're young Because trans like us, baby, we were born to run. Peter Carlin, welcome to Fresh Air. I really enjoyed the book. Looking back on Born to Run and looking ahead at what happened after it, what do you think is the significance of that album?

It's lovely to be here, Terry. Thank you. It's a hugely transformative album for Bruce in terms of his career, his record sales, but also, I think most importantly, his understanding of his own identity and the voice he would carry forward in his music. You know, it's such an important album too because his record company, Columbia,

was about to drop him. They were considering dropping him. And they told him he had a... This is in your book. They told him he had to make a single, and if they liked it, they'd release it. Tell the Billy Joel story about the record rap. Yeah. Well, when Bruce came on to Columbia in 1972, the president of the label at the time was Clive Davis. And when he heard Bruce's demos and then had Bruce up to audition for him in person, he was won over immediately and gave the marching orders to the company essentially that this is our new guy. Like Bruce Springsteen is really going to make it. And we're going to put everything we have behind him. And what happened next was, you know, his first record, greetings for Masbury Park, New Jersey.

came out in January of 1973, was hugely promoted, didn't sell very well. A few months went by. Clive Davis got pushed out of the presidency at Columbia for somewhat murky, corporate intrigue reasons. And then a new administration came in, and people came to power in the label who were not connected at all to Bruce Springsteen. The fellow who became the head of the artist and repertoire department was named Chargers. And he had brought into the company at the same time Bruce was signed another sort of outer New York working class type of pop songwriter named Billy Joel. And he heard a lot more potential in Billy Joel's music than he did in Bruce Springsteen. So after Bruce's second album, The Wild, the Innocent and the East Street shuffle came out in the fall of 1973 and failed commercially as well, despite how. having rave reviews, Coppulman essentially said, you know what, I think we're going to cut bait on this Bruce Springsteen guy. He's just not going anywhere. But fortunately, there were enough advocates at the company to steal the hand that was going to cut Bruce loose. And they gave him that opportunity to make one last song and to see if that could potentially be a hit single. So they sent him off to make one more song, which turned out to be born to run. So initially, the song Born to Run was called Wild Angels. What were the early

lyrics like? It's interesting because you can see Bruce getting at the feelings that, you know, underlie the finished song. But at first, he was working on a kind of this, this sort of gothic, almost horror story written in this heavily symbolic language where the fast rebel driver gets run over by his own car. You know, roads are collapsing beneath their wheels and the beautiful surfer girl on the beach, who is the fast rebels, girlfriend dies of a heroin overdose.

And it's just like, it's a very dark and traumatic place to be. I'm going to stop you for a second because I want to quote a line from an earlier draft that you quote in the book and everyone will recognize a phrase in this line. This town will rip the bones from your back. It's a death trap.

You're dead unless you get out when you're young. So, you know, death trap, suicide rap is in the final version, and we've got to get out while we're young is in the final version. So it's just really interesting to read this early draft. Yeah, exactly. He knows the feelings that he's trying to evoke, but he hasn't hit the vocabulary yet. Eventually, as he began to clarify his vision, that feeling of being threatened, of living in a place that's dying. around you and needing to get out, he began to paint that in much more recognizable tones. Like, yes, this is modern America, New Jersey, circa 1974.

His songs I'm Born to Run have a real romance with cars and using the car to, like, escape to what will hopefully be a better place and a better life. Was he even driving when he wrote these songs? Bruce was a late adopter of automotive technology. He was much more involved in his in his guitars and amplifiers. Also, he found it traumatic to be taught how to drive by his dad. He had a difficult relationship with his father who suffered from bipolar disease. It was undiagnosed at the time and untreated, but he was a very remote person in a lot of ways. And so he didn't really know how to connect to his son and Bruce, being a very sensitive young person, experienced his dad's distance as kind of a dismissal, a sort of an existential rejection by his father. And so the prospect of learning how to drive with his short-tempered and angry father didn't appeal to him. So he stuck with his guitars. And finally, when he was about 22 or 23, he was more or less forced to learn how to drive in order to help drive this band to the West Coast.

I want to isolate a part of Born to Run that just shows the kind of tension and release in the song and it's the part where there's like almost an arpeggio of descending chords and then piano kind of swirls back up and it ends in like a little explosion with Bruce counting off after that and starting the song again so let's hear that I love that moment, because there's like leading you to the edge. So Bruce Springsteen wasn't used to this kind of highly produced recording. And I think he prized himself on having a band that was about spontaneity and hyperactivity.

and like playing it a little different every night. So how did this record end up being so highly produced? You know, Bruce definitely preferred this recording live in the studio thing because they were such a successful and powerful live band. The problem with the early records was that they were working in a studio that was less sophisticated than the ones in New York City. And when they realized how they needed to transform their, you know, Bruce's sound and get that power onto the vinyl,

they decided to start working in a more traditional studio fashion where you record the basic rhythm track with guitar, bass, drums, piano, and then layer everything else, instrument by instrument by instrument. So you have more control over, you know, how the different tracks come together

and you can build a fuller, richer, more powerful. and ironically live-sounding record the further away you get from the traditional live setup in the studio. There's a documentary that was made at least 20 years ago about the making of Born to Run.

And in one scene, you see Springsteen listening back to a take in which there were strings added. And I want to play that because this is like Born to Run with a string section. And it just sounds very, different. And you'll hear Springsteen laughing as he listens back to this. And so it's laughing like

years later after it was recorded. Baby, we were born to run. Honey, chants like us. Baby, we were born to run. Come on with each chants like us. Maybe we were born to run. They were wise to leave that off. Yeah, sure.

But they were also just trying every single thing they could think of. And so they, and it took them six months to record that song because it was like, let's see, how about strings? And then there do you have that whole arrangement? And then it's like, how about a whole huge choir of women, you know, singing along? And they'd give it a try and then they'd listen and they would sort of go, eh, nah, and then they'd toss it and start again. I think because it was such an existential moment for Bruce, it was like, if this didn't work, he was done. And if he was done, who was he? What was he?

Music was the only thing that he had really projected himself into. And it was everything to him, and the prospect of losing his career was terrifying. And so, you know, they couldn't leave any rock unturned. You know, you listen to the string arrangement with that kind of disco sounding, those little string churacos that would come up off the dance floor in those songs. You know, I mean, that was a real common trope in the mid-70s. And, you know, so they gave it a spin. Maybe it'll work here. And then it didn't.

And you can hear Bruce's reaction. Yeah, and he was desperate musically in the same way his characters were desperate to like get out of town. Exactly. I mean, all of those characters are avatars for Bruce and various facets of his identity and his experience growing up in Freehold, which was a sort of a working class suburb in central New Jersey, about 20 miles west of the shore. And then, you know, as a young adult, he moved to Asbury Park where the local music scene was. centered. But even that town was falling apart. So he, you know, he had a very vivid understanding of how the economic and social frontiers were collapsing or felt like they were collapsing in the mid-1970s. My guest is Peter Ames Carlin, author of the new book, Tonight in Jungleland, The Making of Born to Run. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. And David B.

and Cooley will review the new season of Wednesday starring Jenna Ortega. I'm Terry Gross and this is Fresh Air Weekend. One of the themes of the whole album is that you need a car and a girl you love or that you think you love and then the car is your escape vehicle and you escape the town together.

Searching for whatever's down the road, you don't really know what. You're not totally confident. It'll be better when you get. there, but you're kind of, you're kind of faking it, maybe? Do you know what I mean? Sure. So the first time I talked to Springsteen, and this was in 2005, I asked him about the kind of romantic drama and the, like, very vivid language in his songs. And I just want to play

you that brief excerpt. Do you think of yourself as a romantic by nature? I mean, because some of your songs are, like, so romantic. And, I mean, you know, you know, lines like, I want to die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight, and an everlasting kiss. I mean, is that something that you could imagine saying to somebody in real life, or is that a kind of romantic nature that's just reserved for your art as opposed to life? No, I wouldn't say, I would act like that in real life, perhaps, but I don't think I would say that.

And it's a lot easier to say with the music raging underneath. That's the key to that line. I wouldn't advise, you know, they're not really to be spoken. They're really, you know, you need the music raging underneath for them to make sense. The lines are going to be so top-heavy, which is how I wrote at the time. I wrote very flamboyantly. And let me tell you, and that was after leaning it all down. That was after really cutting it down to like its toughest little construction for me.

The stuff previous to that, if you go back into my notebooks, some of it is so floridly so far out that it's all. So a line like that was just the longing and the intensity and the desire for a certain sort of a kind of living that art tends to, or music or films or whatever, sometimes, you know, tends to heighten and throw back on you as a way of sending you out to search for a certain kind of intensity in your own life, you know. He sounds so self-aware and so understanding of what his songs are art in general. does for people? Yeah, you know, his connection to what people are looking for in music and in particularly in his music and his performances

is probably the strongest of any artist I can think of. As he says in Born to Run, we'll get to that place that we really want to go and we'll walk in the sun. Does not narrow it down in terms of a destination. So what, you know, what occurs

to us as you listen is that it's not getting somewhere that matters as much as having the courage to go and start that process of recreation and discovery and getting away from the limitations and the boundaries of these towns that begin to feel, as he says, like a death trap. There's a song called Meeting Across the River on the album that it's kind of like if you turn to film noir into a song, this would be the song. It's about meeting a guy across the river who is your connection to a heist or a robbery. The song was initially called the heist.

So let's hear some of it. And then we'll talk about what's happening in this song. But listen for the trumpet because there's a story about that. Hey Eddie, can you let me a few bucks, tonight can you get us a ride? Got to make it through the tunnel Got a meeting with a man on the other side And hey this guy He's the real thing

So if you want to come along You gotta promise you won't say anything Because this guy don't dance So that's meeting across the river from Born to Run. Peter, so let's talk first about the story. You know, he's asking Eddie, who's a friend or an acquaintance, who knows. He doesn't, like, the main character, he doesn't have a car, he needs a ride. He doesn't have any cash.

He needs the money to pull this off. I'm skeptical anything is ever going to happen. He's just like a loser whose dreams are kind of losing dreams. Yeah, you know, it's an interesting note to strike on this record and one that Bruce wasn't at first convinced was going to work because he wrote this song. The pianist in the East Street band, Roy Bitten, had come over to his house. And Bruce took a call and Roy had just seen a jazz artist play

some club in Greenwich Village. just started playing these really spare kind of jazzy chords. And when Bruce came back from his phone conversation, he said, what was that? And Roy showed him, you know, sort of arpegating the chords to show him, you know, what these were. They weren't really part of his usual musical vocabulary since he was more, you know, a straight rock and roll guy with, you know, a lot of different influences. But Bruce sort of like nodded and said, oh, okay. And then a few days later, he showed up in the studio. And he had taken some of those chords that Roy had shown him and, you know, made his own melody and added some other sections. And it just, again, it evoked that kind of cinema noir setting, this kind

of grim, black and white, down and out world where you have these two kind of low level or at least aspiring, you know, crooks who have a, you know, the one guy's got a connection. This is his last chance. They're going to pull this off and then they're going to come back with enough dough to float them into, you know, wherever they need to go next. But as you listen to it, you really get a sense of like, I've seen this movie before. And there's no, there's no way this is ending happily for these guys. But it's again, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's of having this kind of jazz trio song interrupt what he had set out to make as the greatest rock and roll album ever made because this did not sound like rock and roll. And so he and John Landau, the co-producer, you know, who had joined the team, were convinced that there's no way the song could work.

But Mike Appell stuck to his guns and said, no, no, no, no, this is the song, this is really going to work. And when they brought it into the studio and recorded, you know, the basic track, a few days later, they brought in the Brecker brother horn players. And Randy, I think, plays that really beautiful trumpet part that kind of sounds like it's echoing from around the corner, you know, on a street somewhere. And when they finally heard all the pieces come together, Bruce was like, that's, yeah, that absolutely is on the album. Yeah, and I think the trumpet was controversial initially, like, do we really want a trumpet on this? But I was thinking, you know, Born to Runn is released in 1975, Chinatown. The movie Chinatown comes out in 74, and the main instrument on the fantastic score of Chinatown as a trumpet. And I thought, in a way, it's a kind of echo of Chinatown in that respect.

Well, it's definitely taking place in the same, you know, the same kind of down-and-out, millie. of, you know, desperate guys doing desperate things to try to get ahead. Well, Peter Carlin, I enjoyed this a lot. Thank you so much for coming to fresh air. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you. Peter Ames Carlin is the author of The New Book, Tonight in Jungleland, The Making of Born to Run. August 25th will mark the 50th anniversary of the album's release.

In 2022, Netflix presented a new spinoff of the Adams family, Canon, focusing on the brooding, dark-haired daughter Wednesday. Jenna Ortega starred, the creators of the Smallville TV series originated it, and Tim Burton directed four of the eight episodes. Now they've all reunited for season two, and our TV critic David Being Coulee has this review. To many longtime fans of the Adams family, the ABC TV series from the mid-60s remains the most memorable incarnation of the Charles Adams cartoon characters. Gomez and Mortisha were a bizarre but passionate couple.

Their kids, Pugsley and Wednesday, were charmingly twisted. And their friends and relatives, including Lurch the Butler, Uncle Fester, and the disembodied hand known as Thing, all added to the hilariously haunted household. They're creepy and they're cookie, mysterious and spooky. They're all together rookie, the Adam's family. Their houses a museum, where people come to see them, they really are a screum, the Adams family. Charles Adams, who had been drawing these oddball characters since the late 1930s for cartoons published in The New Yorker, worked with the producers of the TV series to define the Adams family.

He finally gave them names, and also suggested some personality traits, essentially fleshing them out from two dimensions to three. The actors helped too. John Aston was an impish and roguish Gomez, and Carolyn Jones, with her long dark hair and form-fitting black dress, was the unlikeliest but one of the most prominent TV sex symbols of the 60s. But since then, there have been the successful Adams Family movies, which starred Raoul Julia and Angelica Houston as Gomez and Morticia.

Those films were all but stolen by Christina Ricci as pig-tailed morbid Young Wednesday. And in 2022, the Netflix spin-off called Wednesday arrived. Gomez and Mortisha were still around, now played by Louise Guzman and Catherine Zeta Jones, but their appearances were little more than cameos. Instead, the weight of the narrative and the series fell to Jenna Ortega, the former child star from the Disney Channel's stuck in the middle. And she killed it. When she came out of her shell at a school party and performed a macabre dance solo,

the internet went crazy, and Wednesday became a big hit. So big, it's one of the most watched English-language Netflix series ever made, and already has been renewed for season three, even though season two has just begun. And it's begun with a vengeance. The show's popularity means that Wednesday has returned with even bigger ambitions. Series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Miller are back as showrunners, and Tim Burton is directing another four episodes this season. The three of them collaborated on Burton's recent cinematic

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice sequel, and they've loaded up their return to Wednesday with lots of new guest stars and characters. Steve Busemi shows up early, playing the enthusiastic new principal of Nevermore Academy, the boarding school to which Wednesday is returning after having saved it from destruction in season one. Wednesday Adams!

Oh! It is an honor to meet the Savior of Nevermore. Allow me to introduce myself, Barry Dohert, your new principal. Would you like a sticker? Only if you have one that says, do you not resuscitate? There's that wicked tongue I've heard so much about. I love it. I love it, too. Tim Burton channels both his own past quirkiness and the spirit of such Alfred Hitchcock classics as The Birds and Psycho.

The other directors match his game, the writing veers from very funny to a little scary, and other new cast members, besides Busemi, include Joanna Lumley from Absolutely Fabulous as Mortish's grandmother, Billy Piper from Doctor Who and Secret Diary of a Call Girl as Wednesday's new music teacher, and Christopher Lloyd is the school's head professor. That's all he is, a living head floating in a glass jar. In the new season's second half launching in September, additional guest stars include Lady Gaga. These eccentric new characters add to the roster of returning old ones, including Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester and Christina Ritchie, embodying a different role than when she played Wednesday on the big screen.

But watching the four new episodes available for preview, the greatest joy has been the expanded screen time and emphasis given to Catherine Zeta Jones as Morticia. The mother-daughter dynamic now is central to the story, with Morticia invited to live on campus as a school fundraiser. And with a sumplot that has to do with Wednesday, experiencing the same crippling psychic visions that once haunted Mortisha's sister, Ophelia. Mortisha wants to protect her daughter, but Wednesday is a rebel.

In this scene, they confront one another, Wednesday exits, and then Gomez enters. You're a dove. I'm a raven. We're on different paths. You said so yourself. I've had experience with ravens. Are you talking about your sister? We've never been Barry forthcoming about anophilia. You remind me a lot of her, especially as you've gotten older. You don't need to worry about me, mother. You should be focused on Pugsley.

We both know being tall and male will only get him so far. Besides, he's got the brains of a dung beetle. brains of a dung beetle and the ambition of a French bureaucrat. What is it, Carita? Wednesday is hiding things from me. I will not let history repeat itself. If Ophelia appears as part of the storyline in the future, I hope the producers of Wednesday will do what the original

Adams Family TV series did. On ABC, they gave the role to Carolyn Jones, who played both the blonde Ophelia and the raven-haired morticia. It would be a delight to see Catherine Zeta Jones as both sisters. On Wednesday, this season, she's already become the best morticia of them all. And Jenna Ortega, likewise, is now the best Wednesday. David Bion Cooley is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the new second season of Wednesday on Netflix.

Coming up, journalist Jennifer Sr. talks about her own insomnia and her Atlantic magazine article, Why Can't American Sleep? I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. If you've ever had trouble sleeping, you know that the more you worry about not being able to fall asleep, the more likely you are to keep staying awake. So what do you do? Pills, therapy, meditation?

Or just learn to accept that you'll feel like a zombie the next day? My guest, Jennifer Sr., knows this feeling. She suddenly went from sleeping through the night, to suffering from insomnia. That started about 25 years ago, and she was 29. Senior is a staff writer at the Atlantic magazine, so she eventually decided to write an article about her own insomnia and the latest science

surrounding sleep and insomnia. She interviewed some of the top sleep researchers. Her article is titled, Why Can't Americans Sleep? Insomnia has become a public health emergency. Her article in the Atlantic about Greek, brief, love, loss, and memory, won a Pulitzer Prize. She also won two National Magazine Awards. She spent five years at the New York Times as a book Critic and Opinion columnist and 18 years at New York Magazine. She's also the author of the book, All Joy and No Fun, The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. Jennifer Sr., welcome back to fresh air. Thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to be here.

It's wonderful to have you. As preparation for this interview, I had trouble sleeping last night. At about 5 a.m., I couldn't get back to sleep. Occasionally, I'd fall back asleep and wake up and look at the clock, and each time that happened, only five minutes had elapsed. So I slept for a full five minutes, woke up, tossed and turned, and then slept five minutes more, et cetera, et cetera. I wanted to get out of bed desperately. I was, like, feeling hopeless and uncomfortable,

but I knew I'd regret it during the day. So I just thought I'd tell you a little bit of backstory. I don't have insomnia per se, but I have my nights. when it's just like really hard to sleep. I've come to think of sleep as a talent, you know, that some people have and some people don't. You know what? I would call it a gift. I mean, a talent suggests that, like, people have worked at it.

And some people have. I want to thank you for telling me that. It is interesting post-publication, how many people have written me saying, I'm a fellow traveler. And you wouldn't know. You're right. I like to tell people that the night before I stopped sleeping, I slept. Not only that, I slept well. And you go on to say that you used to sleep through the night, like you'd go to bed and you just like wake up seven or eight hours later. That's amazing

to me. I don't think I've ever slept through the whole night in my life. What was that first sleepless night like? Puzzling. I mean, it's a cliche among sleep clinicians that everyone idealizes their pre-insomnia selves, right? That they say, that everybody says, oh, my sleep was perfect. I'm sorry. My sleep was really great. And it was so consistent that I didn't need an alarm clock when I, like, lost one. I always slept from one until nine. And I had standing appointments at like 10 o'clock that I'd never miss. I mean, it was so remarkably regular. So that when it first happened, I thought, like, have I been poisoned? I really had no idea. I mean, it just, I greeted it with bafflement and kind of curiosity more than anything else.

It wasn't alarm. It was just like, oh, that's weird. I thought sort of nothing of it until it became regular and then really regular and then super intense. And then I wasn't waking up at 5 in the morning. I was just staying up all night. So, you know, it got bad in a hurry. Did it lead to? Or as Ron Burgundy says, an anchorman, you know, that escalated quickly.

I mean, it just got bad. Did it lead to panic in bed? Yeah. Oh, God, a lot. And I remember one time I did exactly the wrong thing. You're never supposed to do this for anybody who's suffering. I left a lot of runway. I went to bed at like 8 o'clock, even though, you know, I was a 1 o'clock sleeper because I was exhausted because I wanted to sleep and I wanted to leave a lot of extra time. And I happened to fall asleep very quickly and then woke up thinking, oh, great, I slept through the night.

And I had slept until 10.30. So two hours. What did you think was wrong with you? I didn't know. I mean, this is the problem. I was not perseverating or stressing or lying awake thinking about anything. People would say to me, what are you thinking about? What are you obsessing about? And I would say, my mind is a whistling prairie. It's a whistling conch shell. There is nothing in my head at all. I'm just lying there, expecting to fall. sleep. And so I couldn't determine what happened. Honestly. I think you were thinking was like,

I can't fall asleep. Oh, God. Give me like I can't sleep. Oh, so eventually you do the countdown clock. Absolutely. Okay. So that's like down the road. In the beginning, it was just all bewilderment and like this must be biologically driven. What happened? Eventually, it was sheer blinding panic where I was, my mind was racing and I was going, what's going on, something must be happening. Oh my God. And I'd be staring at the clock and going, oh my God, now I only have five hours to sleep. Now I only have four hours to sleep. Now I only have three. Now I only have two. Now I only have one. Now I have 20 minutes. I mean, that was certainly happening. And there would also be this kind of sound cloud of I'm going to get fired. I'm not going to be able to do my job.

I'll never be an appealing girlfriend, any of these things, right? Like the things that you think when you're at 29, you know, I'll be perceived as a basket case or I'll not be able to exercise. I was quite active. I'd run. I'd do whatever. Oh, and eventually, I would have these weird, repetitive thoughts. At the time, I was covering, like, theater. It was a really fun job. I was covering theater for New York Magazine for no money, just writing all these kind of squibs about things that would open. And I would see all these kind of cool musicals like Hedwig and the Angry Inch and, you know, cool stuff. And snippets of songs would run through. my head. And I would just sit there and think, would the orchestra please pack up and go home? I can't deal with this. So among the things you tried early on were acupuncture, Tylenol, PM, melatonin, running for miles, breathing exercises, listening to a meditation tape. What did you learn about those approaches and how effective they were for you? And what did you learn about yourself after trying them.

I learned I'd never done acupuncture before, and I learned that it was wonderful, just not particularly helpful for that. I did acupressure, too, and same deal. I guess I learned also that there was this whole alternative medicine kind of shadow world that was starting to bloom back in the late 90s, maybe it even had before.

I learned that once you're in a certain state of panic, trying to meditate is very hard, right? Because it's something that most people fail at initially. I mean, there's no such thing as failing when you meditate. You always have to bring yourself back to paying attention to your body or to a mantra or whatever form of meditation you do. Your mind is prone to wander. That's what it does. But if you're having trouble sleeping, that's a super alarming quality to be noticing in yourself. And it's wandering to catastrophic thoughts. So I noticed that. I noticed that melatonin, particularly in the megawatt doses that Americans take, what do you consider mobile? Oh, so it's often sold in three milligram and five milligram doses. You can even find 10. The people who really look at this stuff will tell you, first of all, if you take it late at night, that's when your melatonin peaks anyway.

What melatonin does is regulate your circadian rhythms. So it's not necessarily what your body responds to for sleep itself. So it tells you it starts signaling when you're supposed to wind down and when sleep is coming and when it's supposed to happen. But taking these giant doses, which in some countries are regulated, you know, like they're widely available here for three milligrams and five milligrams. That kind of stuff is regulated in some countries in Europe. It's not necessarily the best solution for everyone. So, and it wasn't for me. Because if you're going to bed and it's already dark and you're on a regular schedule,

it's not going to help your circadian rhythms. Is that the theory? Yes, the theory is that your body is already producing quite a bit of it. So just hammering it with more and won't necessarily tell it, you know, to go to bed. It's already being told to go to bed. And it might just make you feel off. If you really want to use it right, you can order like 300 microgram doses online and start taking them, you know, take one when the sun sets, take another, maybe two hours later, to start telling your body, hey, hey, hey, it's time. But that would be the way to do it for me.

So you interviewed a lot of sleep researchers. And the first question you asked each of them was, what's the myth about sleep that you'd most like to debunk? So what was the most frequent answer? That you need eight hours. You know, when I read that, I cheered. Because for me, if I'm in bed, forget how much of the time in bed I'm actually sleeping. But if I'm in bed for seven hours, I feel like victory is mine. Because more typically, it's like six and a half hours. And I feel so bad, I feel like you're harming yourself.

You really have to find a way to get more sleep, but it never seems to work. And so that was really great to read that. But everybody told you that, that you really don't need eight hours of sleep. it wasn't that they said you really don't need it. They said that this was this myth out there that was just a kind of tyranny. And I'll explain why. And I spoke to so many people that I was really struck by how many people did say it. So here are the things to bear in mind. Obviously, people vary, right? And there's even this vanishingly, but it's really interesting, small number of people who are called short sleepers who need only four to six hours. Very few people are like that. But you can always sort of tell who they are. They hurdle through the world as if they've been fired from a slingshot. They're just kind of amazing. But it varies from person to person. It varies depending on your age. So a lot of clinicians would tell me about people in their late 60s or their 70s coming into their clinic and saying, I can't sleep eight hours. And the doctors would

just look at them or therapists would look at them and say, well, at this age you're not supposed to. It's a bummer, but it's true. And why is that? We don't function optimally as we get older in most ways, and there are cognitive decriments in ways that the brain, you know, changes, right? So I'm sure it's broadly a part of that, but the specifics and circadian signaling, you know, there's some thought that are, we're designed to sleep bifasically in two episodes. And as we get older, that seems to happen. We seem to wake up early, and if we had enough time, we could probably fall back asleep, but don't, because our jobs tell us we can't. We just have to get on with our days, but it seems that we settle into that rhythm again. So that's some of it.

But there is a really robust body of literature. One of them was done by this famous guy named Kripke looking at like a million people. And it's 6.5 hours to 7.4 was associated with the best health outcomes. Now, there are design issues with all of these studies, right? It's because they are almost by definition going to be observational. They're not going to be randomized. Also, you can only control for what you can control for. It's just what you can think of.

So you can control for age, for body weight, for do you smoke, for sex? Did you once have cancer? Things like this. But to quote Donald Rumsfeld, there are unknown unknowns, right? So you just, there are things you just can't think. of to control force. So there are people who believe Kripke's data and people who don't. These kinds of studies have been replicated, though. I'm going to paraphrase you here. You say that throughout the night, people with insomnia, the arousal centers of the brain keep chattering or

clattering away, as does the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of planning and decision making. So in regular sleepers, those regions of the brain go offline. They quiet down. So the parts of the brain that should be resting aren't resting if you have insomnia. Can you go into that in some more detail? So particularly in depressed insomniacs, in depressed people, and insomnia is a really good recipe for depression. Your brain, when you are in REM sleep, it's much more intense. And so that part of your brain is more active, right? And that's the part with all the primal drives. It's your fears and your anger. It's not necessarily the stuff that you're basking in, right? So that's one thing. And also, yeah, the part of you that's really supposed to go offline is your prefrontal cortex, which plans. It's the executive function part. It's decision making, all that stuff. And that really is supposed to go offline when you sleep, which is why your dreams can be so wild and sort of have no logic. It's because there's no director there, right?

But in insomnia acts or poor sleepers, it's half there. It's not entirely offline. So when people say they haven't slept a wink, in some ways that's what they feel like, because they feel like their waking brain was still active. And in point of fact, to some degree it was. And although parts of your brain go offline, when you're sleeping, parts of the brain are doing really important stuff, What are the parts of the brain doing when you're sleeping? The most important thing, which I've only recently discovered, is rinsing out toxins, which is super fascinating.

It's called the glyphatic system. This is something they just found. And it's this waterway in your brain of these kind of microcanals that flush out all sorts of terrible stuff out, including amyloid proteins, which are associated with dementia. I mean, so imagine the importance in that way, too. And then there's just all the healing that goes on during sleep. There's your heart is repairing, your muscles are repairing. Sleep is essential to regeneration and growth. Adolescence needed for this reason.

And older people need it just to heal, you know, so there's that too. Oh, and also emotional regulation. Let's not forget that, right? You know, and we all know that. You wake up and you haven't slept in your ear, and awful. I want to ask you about antidepressants because that's something that you tried in the hopes that it would help you sleep, and it did. I don't know how long you stayed on the antidepressant you were taking, but are antidepressants often prescribed for insomnia?

Yes. And sometimes they help, and sometimes they don't. If depression is at the root, then absolutely they can. Although, It's important to note, and this is absolutely true for me, many antidepressants can have a paradoxical effect and make you extremely wakeful. So it's important for people who are seeking relief not to lose hope if they try one antidepressant and it does not work. They all have slightly different or very different, depends, mechanisms of action. Some of them are not well known. They're mysterious, but they have different effects on different people. Is it sometimes hard to tell whether the depression was caused by the insomnia or the insomnia was caused by the depression? Totally. Yes. And I was told that I was just depressed and my insomnia was a symptom and I didn't believe it because no, I wasn't. But it made me depressed. I mean, it made me depressed fairly quickly because you can't live for very long if you are extremely sleep deprived and not be really miserable. So I was responsive when I took.

the antidepressant, but the one that I took made me really vague. It blew out all the circuitry that was responsible for generating metaphors, which is what I do as a writer. So it made my writing really flat and unexciting. So I had to go off that. And as soon as I went on one that left my metaphors intact, I needed a sleep medication too. So I don't know. It made me feel better, but it didn't sort of solve the sleep problem. The problem is, as doctors like to say, bidirectional. Depression can cause insomnia. Insomnia can cause depression. It can be a loop. There's now some thinking that it's more often that insomnia causes depression than the other way around. It's just very hard to know, you know. All right. Well, listen, I wish you well with your

sleep and your health. And thank you so much for coming back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me back on. Jennifer Sr.'s article, Why Can't American Sleep, is published in the Atlantic. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Jenny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.

Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems. More information is at waltinfamilyfoundation.org