BoomerGirl.com

Here we go again. It's 2 a.m. and I'm still awake, fighting a panicky feeling and a revved-up brain.

On good nights, the gift of sleep might come after I journal, practice easy yoga or do breathing exercises.

But tonight nothing is working. So I give up and bravely start reading Gayle Greene's new book, "Insomniac."

Initially, this feels like a terrible idea. Other than my kids, nothing wrecks my sleep more than thinking about how I can't sleep.

But Greene's lively first-person account of her experience as a writer and academic living with chronic insomnia has the opposite effect: It's comforting. And I'm surprised to discover my occasional insomnia - which flairs even when I'm not stressed and practice "good sleep hygiene" - might not be my fault.

By Greene's definition, insomnia occurs when you can't get the sleep you need to feel good, for no other reason than you can't. It doesn't mean you're emotionally unstable, neurotic or behaving badly. It simply means that for whatever reason, you can't sleep.

About one in five adults, then, are sleep starved at some point during the week. Yet because we almost always blame ourselves and it's treated as a psychological rather than physiological disorder, it's one of the least talked about and most poorly researched conditions.

The National Institutes of Health spent less than $20 million on insomnia research in 2005, most of which went to treatments, therapies and "management" of insomnia rather than looking for the cause.

"Pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis spent $123 million that same year, advertising Ambien," Greene writes of the sleep medication.

But what if, Greene defiantly asks, many of the personality traits considered to be the "cause" of insomnia (anxious, easily stressed) actually are the consequences of living with it? What if some people are born with a defective sleep-wake mechanism? Or could it be that broken and irregular sleep patterns - common in the days before electricity - actually are the biological norm?

Sleep research, which is still in its infancy, can't answer these questions. Researchers don't even know why our bodies need sleep.

But they do know the devastating consequences of not sleeping. Sleep deprivation doesn't just trash the following day's ambition, our judgment and our sense of humor; it makes us fat, impairs immune function, raises levels of stress hormones, wreaks havoc on memory and coordination and raises the risk of diabetes.

It's arguably the strongest of our survival instincts, and some sleep researchers believe it's the most important predictor of how long you will live, topping smoking, exercise or blood pressure. Yet sleep often is beyond our control. The harder we try to get it, the more elusive it becomes.

Greene, who has tried every remedy imaginable and largely depends on sleeping pills, is wise enough to offer no one-size-fits-all solution. We must all find our own way, she said, because our relationship with sleep is personal, intimate and as individual and distinctive as we are.

But she urges her fellow insomniacs - as tired and depleted as we might be - to come together to fight for much needed research funding by forming patient-advocacy groups. With more research, insomnia might be "recognized as the debilitating, disabling and perhaps even life-threatening condition" that it is, she writes. "In turn, there might be a greater understanding of its sufferers."

"It's like insomniacs have been talked out of the condition and thoroughly taken the word of doctors that it's something we're doing wrong," she said. "We're `too stressed' or we should have listened to mom and gone to bed earlier.

"We're told to `get a grip,' but actually, we should get organized," she said. "We need more neurobiological research that can lead to new treatments."

Until then, we're left with W.C. Fields' cure for insomnia: "Get more sleep."