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The Monte Verità voices · 03

A sleep-deprived society

Carlos H. Schenck, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota and one of the fathers of sleep medicine, looks at the causes: caffeine, screens, stress. Hyperstimulation takes sleep away - and the sleep we lose reaches the road.

World Sleep Forum · Monte Verità · Ascona, Switzerland · November 2025

In our society, Schenck says, chronic sleep deprivation is everywhere - and we partly build it ourselves. Energy drinks full of caffeine, caffeinated beverages in the evening, perhaps an hour before bed: they stimulate, and they prevent good sleep. Add the stress of modern life. The result accumulates night after night, and it can end in a road accident.

The internet, our devices, being always reachable: for Schenck it all contributes to making us hyperstimulated, and hyperstimulation is the enemy of good sleep. It was one of the themes discussed at the World Sleep Forum at Monte Verità: sleepiness at the wheel also begins here, with people who simply do not get enough sleep. No rare disorder is needed: the sleep we take from ourselves every evening is enough.

Hyperstimulation is bad for good sleep, it causes sleep deprivation and it contributes to car accidents.

Carlos H. Schenck teaches psychiatry at the University of Minnesota and works at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center. With Mark Mahowald he was the first to describe, in 1986, REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), one of the founding discoveries of modern sleep medicine. His voice brings to the project the perspective of someone who has studied for forty years what happens when sleep breaks - and what it takes from us when it is missing.

When his voice went online, Schenck wrote to us: "You are doing a great public health service." Words we keep as the direction of this work. Quoted with his written permission, 24 August 2026.