Caffeinated — Afternoon drowsies tug at workers

Without fail, Joel Darrow runs into a wall of torpor at 3:30 in the afternoon. The financial engineer describes it as "brick, thick and high."

He doesn't exactly go to sleep, he says, but he might as well. "It's that point in between when you know you're awake but you're basically unable to move," he says. Typically, he's looking at his computer screen, his back to his office door and a pencil in hand. "Next thing I know," he says, "the pencil's on the floor, and I have a thousand-mile stare through the back of the screen."

A colleague once asked Darrow if he was OK. "It would be easy for someone to think I popped some pill and was in La-La Land," he says. "Fighting it just prolongs it, and self-medicating with sugar provides brief relief followed by deeper stupor."

No one exactly schedules a slumberous coma each afternoon, but for many people, it's more punctual than the coffee cart. No sooner do you get back from lunch than every document seems like an opiate, every colleague a sheep to count, and the creepy carpeting an enticing feather bed. It's the only time of day when the incessant chatter of a cube mate can fade like a lullaby. Even insomniacs can't always withstand the contagion of a yawn in the middle of the afternoon.

To stay awake, Pam Sturchio Quandt resorts to such remedies as candy bars, frozen yogurt and coffee. Bribery also comes in handy. "I'll treat the department if someone goes to get coffee," says the online marketing director.

Neal Katz, who works in an industry that's contracting rapidly from layoffs, says fear of becoming one of them is what keeps him bright eyed. "If my eyelids feel like they're 100 pounds each," he says, "I still do what I have to do to snap out of it."

Peri Brand, a recent Indiana University graduate, tries to talk herself through it. "You've made it this far," she tells herself shortly after 2 p.m. But only a can of Red Bull, with its heart-pounding 80 milligrams of caffeine, really helps.

The tussle to stay awake is clearly a sign that work is at odds with our nature. We're a society that has ritualized the sleep deprivation that caused such disasters as the Exxon Valdez and Chernobyl, so our daily battle is also evidence of just how dumb the planet's smartest beings have become.

"You're phenomenally stupid when you're sleep deprived, and you're too stupid to realize it," says Bob Stickgold, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "We are certainly the only known organism that sleep-deprives itself."