Do you feel stressed, tired, fatigued, rushed, drained, zapped? Join the club. Add an economic crisis to multiple jobs, children, elderly parents and a body-crushing lifestyle, and lots of Americans feel whacked-over-the-head overloaded.

Judged by the media reaction, napping on the job is a crime. Thirteen-time baseball All Star Ken Griffey Jr. was near universally condemned for allegedly napping during a game and has now left baseball. The prejudice against naps is deep. According to one major consulting group, 52 percent of large American corporations will fire or reprimand workers for napping on the job.

Thumbs. They race across joysticks and pale glass surfaces, clicking and pulling so quickly you need a stop-time camera to see what they’ve done. They send messages of love and forgiveness, kick footballs, pilot spacecrafts across millions of light years and explode the immense teethed jaws of flesh-eating aliens who will destroy Earth and every living thing on it.

When was the last time you took a vacation and came back fully rested, renewed and refreshed? Half of Americans come back from vacation bushed or exhausted. Yet rest should produce renewal. We see our hair and nails grow, but we don’t see our brain grow.

Systems biology is a new field you’ve probably never heard of that should change the way we live. It studies and models how different parts of life work, interact, communicate and operate together. It provides a very different way of thinking than the standard reductionist approach in the biological sciences, where smaller and smaller parts are studied in more minute detail.

These are not easy times. People are feeling stressed. How do you calm down when your supervisor is ordering you to immediately do someone else’s work and if you don’t finish by 6 p.m., you will join her on the unemployment line? Or you’re preparing a family trip and find an unbelievable deal just as your 16-year-old marches in requesting the car to “work with a friend on a class project,” followed by your 12-year-old demanding help with her math homework? What do you do when your heart begins to race, your eyes blur?

For centuries coffee has been praised and vilified for its health and social benefits. Bach wrote a cantata depicting a young woman willing to give up most things in life for her very expensive, imported brew. That caffeine is addictive has been known for centuries. Yet now coffee is praised for lowering insulin levels and decreasing uric acid levels. It’s said to provide the American population perhaps half the anti-oxidants in its diet.

Though aided by genetics, you normally have to do something actively to create calcified, narrowed heart arteries. Tobacco is a powerful promoting influence, but eating lots of cheeses and meats full of saturated fats plus the high fructose corn syrup and industrial starches that are the bedrock of the American diet provide the common, recognized ways to harden your arteries. Yet now you can calcify your arteries simply and easily, without major effort — just stay up at night.

Remember coffee breaks? When was the last one you had at work? Rest is disappearing as an element of American life, particularly on the job. Sleep may have been reduced by 90 minutes per person on average over the last 40 years, if University of Chicago researchers are correct, yet rest may be declining faster.

Heart Disease is the single leading killer in America. The costs of treating it are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. A recent study of stents versus drugs for patients with chronic chest pain produced the “astonishing” conclusion that stents opening arteries did not improve mortality, decrease heart attacks, or over time decrease subjective pain beyond drug treatment alone.