Hello, I'm Taylor Wilson, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

According to a report released by the American Medical Association earlier this year,

one third of American adults experience acute insomnia, an inability to fall or stay asleep for several days at a time,

but one in ten adults suffer from chronic insomnia.

That's an inability to fall or stay asleep three nights a week for three months or more.

The condition has potentially debilitating health impacts,

including an increased risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and even car accidents.

So the question is, why can't we sleep?

Here to help me dig into the issue is Jennifer Sr., a staff writer at the Atlantic,

who recently went on her own journey to solve her insomnia and who shared her story in the magazine. Thank you for joining me, Jennifer. Thanks for having me. So let's start with a, I guess, a 30,000 foot view of the issue. I know you spoke with a lot of sleep specialists, did a lot of independent research for your piece, Jennifer. What's the big picture here on Americans' trouble with sleep? Right. Yeah, you know,

it's funny. I think the story was a little misnamed. I mean, this is really a more story about,

like, well, if you can't sleep, don't feel awful about it because there are so many

shaming stories about people, whatever solutions people seek out. I do talk in the beginning

about the way that the modern

world absolutely conspires against sleep, that it just lays waste to your circadian rhythms,

that people work two jobs, 16.4% of us working on standard hours. If you're a white collar

kind of professional, you've got these woodpecker- peck, peck, peck, peck,

incursions into your life all night and weekend long from your bosses.

Work sort of never ends.

I mean, we're just no longer yoked to the rhythms of the earth anymore.

We're just part of this war of a wired world.

In the course of doing your research, was there something in particular that surprised you most

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