Book on shut-eye is a real eye-opener

Getting a good night's sleep may improve your looks and your mood.

Sleep is finally getting its due. When it comes to health, beauty, and mood, sleep is the new water. You simply have to get enough of it. Vermont's Ellen Michaud, co-author of the new book "Sleep to Be Sexy, Smart, and Slim," thinks the recognition comes not a minute too soon. Ignoring our sleep needs, as Michaud puts it, is leading us to be "fat, forgetful, diabetic, sexless, and prone to heart disease and cancer." Whoa. Maybe we should be making our daily cappuccino a decaf? She spoke with us from her home.

If there's a title to attract women, this book has it. It's absolutely deliberate. There's an incredible body of research out there to help women get a good night's sleep that isn't getting people's attention. We deliberately chose a provocative commercial title to get their attention to deliver the goods.

Emphasis is placed on our waking lives. Our sleeping lives are degraded as a waste of time. Women have bought into this big time. The employee who stays up all night working on something is thought to be advancing more than the employee who went to bed and had a good 10 hours sleep. In fact, studies show you lose your competitive edge. You lose your ability to think, process, and remember. Don't ask the person who comes into the office and brags they worked all night on a report to make a decision the next day.

Advertisers idealize running around 24/7 as necessary for a full and happy life. It's where we are as a society right now. It's aided and abetted by the fact that all the magnificent electronics that are supposed to allow us more personal time have made us more accessible to everyone and everything. In my book, I call it the "Blackberry effect." . . . We haven't taken control of it. It's controlling us.

The "doing-it-all" ideal can be addictive though. It's become the default setting and it's really causing trouble with our sleep.

So sleep is an appetite suppressant? There was a brilliant researcher who asked her students to keep diaries on how much sleep they got and the foods they ate. The week that they were asked to sleep for an extra two hours every day, they ate nearly 300 calories less than the normal. I've asked a couple of scientists what's going on. The sense I'm getting is that when you sleep less, hormones are released that increase appetite. When you sleep more, the opposite happens.

Should overweight insomniacs be reaching for sleeping pills? Cognitive behavioral therapy is far more effective than any sleeping pill and it's been demonstrated to be such in one study after another.

That's training your brain to sleep. Instead of reaching for the pill, people should take control of their sleep. That's exactly right. It ends up costing less than sleeping pills and there are no side effects. There are ads everywhere about how wonderfully effective sleeping pills are. But there are no ads for cognitive behavioral therapy anywhere. Gregg Jacobs [an insomnia expert at University of Massachusetts Medical School] led the CBT program and has put it into an online version.

So, "getting your beauty sleep" isn't some annoying myth after all? You walk into work in the morning and look at your co-workers and you can tell who has had a good night's sleep. We wear our insomnia on our face. And on our hips.

You include something to get men reading too: Sex sends people happily off to sleep. Sex releases anti-stress chemicals that are pretty darn potent.

So, sex is a good sleep aid and good sleep aids your sex life? Forty-four percent of women in various surveys reported that they don't feel like sex because they are tired. If we were animals in a zoo and we were not having sex, there would be an intervention by the zoo keepers. It's indicative of what our lives are like.