It’s the silences that get you.

The silences between emergency calls, incoming planes or products rolling down the line. Those stretches of time and quiet make a person want to nap, and today more than ever, napping is taboo.

It happens every time an air traffic controller falls asleep on the job. The common nap becomes news. The public expresses horror and some government agency launches a million-dollar study to determine why we’re so tired and what can be done about it.

If you’ve ever worked the overnight shift, you don’t need a study. You know that when the world goes dark and there’s a break in the action, you want to sleep.

“I guess I made it through the nights,” said emergency dispatcher Andrew Hart, “playing solitaire, chatting with co-workers a lot. And the 3:30 a.m. Dunkin’ Donuts run.”

For a year, Hart manned a radio at the 911 dispatch center in Auburn. When a building is burning down or stores are getting robbed, it’s not hard to stay awake. Take away the drama, though, and the body wants to go to sleep.

“In Lewiston-Auburn, it was tough. Come in at 10:30 p.m. and usually it would be constant until around 2 a.m.,” said Hart, who later went on to work for a dispatch center in Austin, Texas. “This would usually quiet down from 20-25 phone calls an hour to one-to-two. Radio traffic would also slow considerably.”

And then? The radios would fall silent. The world outside went dark, a signal to the human body that it’s time to sleep.

That’s when you’re supposed to sleep, right? When it’s dark outside?

“The body is not accustomed to sleeping during the daytime,” says Thaddeus Shattuck, a sleep specialist and psychiatrist at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston. “The body is just not programmed to do it.”

“We do live in a 24-hour-a-day society.”

If you have the luxury of a a 9-5 job and a healthy history of sleep, it’s probably not a problem. But if you’re tasked with routing planes to runways, driving loads from one state to another or manning a highway toll booth, napping on the job can get you in trouble.

In February, at McGhee Tyson Airport in Knoxville, Tenn., a traffic controller went to sleep for five hours during a midnight shift. Pilots couldn’t reach the sleeping controller, and his fellow employee working on another floor had to land seven planes by himself.

Now everybody wants to know why Americans are so tired. Some people can’t stay awake when they’re supposed to, others toss and turn all night and can’t seem to get a wink. As a society, our sleep habits are not healthy.

“I see people who don’t sleep enough,” Shattuck says. “And I see people who sleep too much.”

Some of it may be the hours we keep. If you work a 12-hour overnight at the mill, it’s easy to see how your circadian rhythm — that internal, 24-hour clock we all are blessed with — gets out of whack. But what about the computers, the television, the cell phones and other contraptions that want us to believe it is never bed time?

“We do live in a 24-hour-a-day society,” says Shattuck. “It’s a wired world. The television is on all the time. There are a lot of things that are counterproductive which have woven their way into our lifestyles.”

Gadgets weren’t the problem for Tom Fallon. For 32 years, Fallon toiled at Oxford Paper Co., adapting to different shifts. Sometimes he’d be required to sleep during the daytime, sometime at night.

“On the 11-to-7 shift I became a bear on the fourth day,” Fallon says. “My wife kept my six kids very very quiet in the house because of my temperament on that shift. Add to this the rotating shifts: 11-7, with a night off usually during the five or six days; then from 11-7 to 3-11 the next afternoon, sleeping a few hours; and from 3-11 to 7-3 the next morning. The changeover took two days to get used to.”

Angelo Giberti worked for 22 years as an emergency dispatcher in Lewiston-Auburn. Back in the day, a dispatcher could work a 10-hour day or a 14-hour night. The rules were later changed so that no dispatcher was allowed to work more than 16 hours in a 24-hour period.

Giberti eventually did learn to sleep during the daytime because he had no choice. The problem was what happened when his career ended. After 22 years of working the overnight, his body thought it was normal to sleep when the sun was up.

“For the first two, two-and-a-half years, I couldn’t fall asleep at night,” Giberti said. “I couldn’t do it today, I’ll tell you that much.”

“I loved third shift.”

The recent problems with air traffic controllers has led to another round of debates. Maybe, some have suggested, the controllers should be allowed to nap in the spans between arriving or departing planes.

“No agency that I know of allows that,” Giberti said.

Because, how will the rest of us sleep at night knowing people in important positions are snoring on the job? The very idea of sanctioned naps is an outrage.

“On my watch,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said recently, “controllers will not be paid to take naps. We’re not going to allow that.”

If it was the air traffic people alone, the problem might be manageable. But plenty of other Americans are working the overnight — 3 percent of them work night-shift jobs between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m., according to a 2007 report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Cops, cab drivers, mill workers, truck drivers, jewel thieves. Nobody could survive in those jobs if the human body wasn’t adaptable. But it is. A person can adjust to almost any situation and learn to sleep even when it feels unnatural.

“I worked 10 years in a paper mill and the shift changed every week,” says Patti Estes. “In the beginning year I had three shift changes in a week. Just the men’s way of trying to prove a woman did not belong there. By the end of the first year I was just another one of the crew. Even became their union rep. I loved third shift; first was OK; never a fan of second shift.”

It can be done, sure. But it’s not healthy. According to Shattuck, sleep issues resulting from shift work can lead to an array of problems: heart disease, gastrointestinal issues, even cancer. A sleep disorder, the experts say, is more than an inconvenience.

“It’s not a benign thing,” Shattuck says.

Most people, regardless of whether they work shift hours, do not get enough sleep, Shattuck says. Who can manage eight hours? When the kids have to be carted off to school, there’s the commute to work and then all the craziness that follows?

“They just don’t have enough time to get all the sleep they need,” Shattuck says. “It’s a huge problem. People try to squeeze as much as they can out of their life.”

“Like sleeping on a cloud.”

So, maybe you just need a better bed?

That’s what the commercials would have you believe, anyway. Find out your sleep number. Get a mattress on which you can balance a glass of wine while your spouse does cartwheels on the other side of the bed. Custom order your own Tempur-Pedic and you could be looking at close to $5,000 worth of bedding.

Is it worth it?

“Like sleeping on a cloud,” says Gail Scipione Tarr, who bought a Tempur-Pedic to combat her own sleep issues. “It conforms to your shape. Foam. I can jump up and down on one side while you sleep peacefully on the other side. It’s great!”

Shattuck, the sleep specialist, surely doesn’t begrudge anybody a good night’s sleep. His business, after all, is trying to figure out why people toss, turn and snore. But he cautions that an expensive mattress isn’t always going to be the panacea the advertisers would have you believe.

“If you’re not comfortable in your bed, that is an issue. But if your mattress is fine and you still have trouble sleeping, getting a better mattress probably isn’t going to make much of a difference,” Shattuck says. “It’s not really treating the underlying problem. It’s a bit gimmicky. It’s quite an industry now.”

So, what’s to be done?

If you have one of the more common sleep problems — apnea, restless leg syndrome — get ye to a sleep clinic. Both St. Mary’s and Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston have one.

If you find that your sleep problems stem from a World of Warcraft addiction that keeps you up until dawn, consider “blue blocker” glasses, which filter out light in the blue spectrum. Blue light suppresses melatonin, a naturally occurring substance in the body that is vital for sleep.

If you work shifts? You’re kind of on your own. One way or another, you’ve got to find a way to get the recommended amount of sleep — according to Shattuck, it’s at least eight hours — no matter how crazy your schedule.

If it’s any consolation, you’re not alone. Although doctors will pass along sleep recommendations any time, those who work in the health care profession are as at risk as anybody. Interns that work around the clock, residents catching naps in between emergencies, men and women demanding sometimes unreasonable things of their own bodies.

“You’d think we’d be on top of it,” Shattuck says. “You’d think we’d be the first to take care of ourselves.”

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