It was four years before he and his colleagues felt they had found something of note, and tested the new drug on laboratory mice, observing the creatures' behaviour when placed at the bottom of a sharply inclined screen. Sternbach instead decided to devote his time to pursuing his own investigations. The postwar US had displayed a considerable appetite for anti-anxiety medication, and Sternbach had been charged with the task of creating a copycat version of Miltown, the most-popular anti-anxiety drug of the day. It was in the early 1950s that a Polish immigrant named Leo Sternbach was employed as a researcher at the headquarters of drug company Hoffman-LaRoche in New Jersey. Yet for all our increasing reliance on medicated sleep, there lingers a residual social suspicion of sleeping tablets – fired, perhaps, by the memory of barbiturates (usage of which only began to dwindle in the 70s and 80s) and of the zombified 'mother's little helper' image of Valium. 'Some people, whether for genetic reasons or stress, have persistent trouble sleeping, and some of those people need sleeping pills in the long term.' Professor David Nutt, director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit at Imperial College, goes further: 'The hope is you knock people back into the routine of sleep,' he says. In light of this, are sleeping tablets really so terrible? Might they work to simply realign our sleep patterns, to break the vicious cycle of the insomniac? 'They do have a place in treatment,' says Dr Andrew Hall, consultant in sleep disorder medicine and a member of the British Sleep Society, 'especially for an acute problem, such as a grief reaction, when it may be a humane act to prescribe them.' If this is maintained for some time, it can result in hardened arteries and increased risk of infection. This emotional stress soon translates to physical stress, which affects the immune system and leads to inflammation the American Heart Association found that sleeping under six hours a night causes inflammatory substances in the blood to increase by 25%, as well as raising blood pressure and heart rate and affecting glucose levels. The effect on the body is noticeable even after a single restless night: brain-scan research at the University of California showed that the amygdala, the area of the brain responsible for emotional response, overreacts when shown disturbing or upsetting images. Recently, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine reported another impact of sleeplessness – it causes a spike in white blood cells to rally the immune system, in much the same way as the body reacts to high stress. We will, it seems, get fatter, quadruple our risk of stroke and increase our chance of a car accident.

Increasingly businesses are capitalising on our worries about what might happen if we don't get enough sleep.

In 2006, Forbes magazine published an article called The Sleep Racket, detailing the billions we spend on mattresses, pillows, herbal sleep-aids, soothing room-spritzers, bath-soaks and other products each year. The idea that we might not be attaining the desirable number of sleep hours fuels further sleep anxiety.

Earlier this year, when Nuffield Health reported that UK adults 'miss out' on 378 million hours of sleep a week, their respondents averaging 7.1 hours a night, they stressed that this figure was 'much less than the recommended eight hours'. Sleep is perhaps only rivalled by sex in terms of our concern about how much we get, how much we want and how we go about doing it. So how easily can we be weaned off them? Our desire to medicate ourselves in this way is part of our wider preoccupation with sleep.

Medication for insomnia uk