Crash test mummies: women mustn't sacrifice sleep when 'having it all' Until very recently, we knew surprisingly little about the physiology of sleep. Only in 2003 did David Dinges, the chief of Sleep and Chronobiology at University of Pennsylvania, announce that we are in the "dawn of the golden age of sleep research." There are currently more than 2,000 sleep clinics in the USA and according to a 2011 poll, two out of three Americans complain they aren't getting enough sleep. You don't have to be a scientist to know that a lack of shut-eye makes us grumpy, impatient, sluggish; bad at focusing on a task and quick to forget something that we would otherwise easily recall: in other words, our cognitive skills fall off a cliff. But research recently published in journal Current Biology paints an even bleaker picture. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied nematode round worms called Caenorhabditis elegans (weirdly these worms seem to act like humans under certain stresses) and basically kept them from entering a state of "lethargus" (worm bye-byes). Doing so activated a protein that triggered a stress gene and by "knocking out" this gene, the worms no longer needed to make up for their exhaustion (a concept called sleep homeostasis). This should have been great news: with a little gene manipulation, we could all survive without sleep! But then half the worms died. The scientists aren't entirely sure why, but I hope they work it out - once they've held all those little worm funerals. In only the last three weeks, Surrey University have released a study that concluded insufficient sleep altered the function of 711 human genes that affect metabolism, inflammation, immunity and stress, leading to heart disease, strokes and obesity. So if I didn't already resent my kids for messing up my sleep, I do now. Back at Leeds University, Hamish Jamson flicks through painstakingly composed graphs that illustrate the performances of Channel 4"s three drivers. By closely filming their "eye droopiness" (how closed they are at any given second) they found that over a 65km stretch of motorway, the Tired Driver's blink duration was twice as long as the Drunk Driver. An average driver would have their eyes closed for less than one per cent of the time, but here, the Tired Motorist spent eight to 10 per cent of the time with her eyes closed. The video of her "nodding off" into "micro-sleeps" is genuinely shocking (not least to the woman herself who was totally unaware) and will be all too familiar to anyone who has had a car full of kids, was up half the night and should have been at Grandma's half-an-hour ago. Beverley Turner inside the car simulator testing her alertness Of course, it's only a simulator, I reason, how realistic can it be? But as soon as I'm strapped inside, travelling 70 mph along the M62 as Eddie Stobart trucks passed by, I quickly forget the artifice of the environment. The digital graphics that surround the car (including the rear-view mirrors) are so accurate, that when I'm asked to pull over onto the hard-shoulder I'm reluctant to do so. Every trained instinct is telling me not to open the door with traffic zooming past. In the "Lateral Handling" test, Hamish's Tired Driver deviations from the lane were 78 per cent higher than the Baseline Driver and 25 per cent higher than Drunk Driver. Tired Mum had to correct her steering 30 per cent more than Intoxicated Mum. And although the latter also fared worse than Baseline Mum, she was more able to quickly respond. "In general," says Jamson, "On most measures, the Tired Mother was worse than the Drunk Mother. The problem in the real world we can measure blood alcohol but fatigue is subjective and self-regulating. With tiredness, we battle through. The average adult needs seven to nine hours each night. We have to take it more seriously. It's surprising that the motor trade - usually so innovative - hasn't done more to synchronize the relationship between vehicle and "healthy" driver. Hamish reveals that some manufacturers are now looking at "Eye-tracker cameras" that can raise an alarm on detecting a driver's slow or prolonged blinks. It's well over-due. In the UK, 300 people a year are killed due to sleep-driving with 20 per cent of all accidents on motorways attributed by fatigue. A driver nodding off for just six seconds whilst driving at 70mph, would still travel almost 200m - easily enough to cross three lanes of traffic and cause carnage. In such an event, the driver - if they were lucky enough to survive - could be charged with "careless" or "dangerous" driving. At worst, causing "death by dangerous driving" carries a 14 year prison sentence. One of the UK's most prominent sleep scientists, Professor Jim Horne of Loughborough University, has carried out extensive research into our natural rhythms of alertness and sleepiness. He concludes that most of us can be divided into "Larks" (morning people) and "Owls" (evening people). But whichever feathered-friend you are, hard-wired into us all seems to be the need for a siesta: that afternoon dip in which our eyes start to droop and our heads to nod - inconveniently, at about three o'clock, just when the kids need picking up from school. "It's lucky," says Hamish Jamson, "That most mums do a local school run rather than a longer, motorway drive. Then we'd see many more accidents. This story is in no way intended to defend the 80,000 people who are caught drink-driving in the UK each year, causing 280 avoidable deaths; 1290 injuries and 10,000 casualties. But it is an alarm call to the dangers of failing to prioritise sleep in the way that we are able to place importance on almost everything else: work, kids and socialising. It seems the female cost of trying to "have it all" is sleep: at achieving that, we are failing miserably. Channel 4's Bedtime Live starts next Tuesday, March 19 at 8pm