Jared Sandberg, The Wall Street Journal: 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 Mr. 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.”…