The
next time you tell yourself that you’ll sleep when you’re dead, realize
that you’re making a decision that can make that day come much sooner.
In this article, originally posted on LinkedIn Pulse, I explain why pushing late into the night is a health and productivity killer.
According to the Division of Sleep Medicine at the Harvard Medical
School, the short-term productivity gains from skipping sleep to work
are quickly washed away by the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation
on your mood, ability to focus and access to higher-level brain
functions for days to come. The negative effects of sleep deprivation
are so great that people who are drunk outperform those lacking sleep.
Why You Need Adequate Sleep to Perform
We've always known that sleep is good for your brain, but new
research from the University of Rochester provides the first direct
evidence for why your brain cells need you to sleep (and sleep the right
way—more on that later). The study found that when you sleep, your
brain removes toxic proteins from its neurons that are by-products of
neural activity when you're awake. Unfortunately, your brain can remove
them adequately only while you're asleep. So when you don't get enough
sleep, the toxic proteins remain in your brain cells, wreaking havoc by
impairing your ability to think—something no amount of caffeine can fix.
Skipping sleep impairs your brain function across the board. It slows
your ability to process information and problem solve, kills your
creativity, and catapults your stress levels and emotional reactivity.
What Sleep Deprivation Does to Your Health
Sleep deprivation is linked to a variety of serious health problems,
including heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes and obesity. It stresses
you out because your body overproduces the stress hormone cortisol when
it's sleep deprived. While excess cortisol has a host of negative
health effects that come from the havoc it wreaks on your immune system,
it also makes you look older, because cortisol breaks down skin
collagen, the protein that keeps skin smooth and elastic. In men
specifically, not sleeping enough reduces testosterone levels and lowers
sperm count.
Too many studies to list have shown that people who get enough sleep
live longer, healthier lives, but I understand that sometimes this isn't
motivation enough. So consider this—not sleeping enough makes you fat.
Sleep deprivation compromises your body's ability to metabolize
carbohydrates and control food intake. When you sleep less, you eat more
and have more difficulty burning the calories you consume. Sleep
deprivation makes you hungrier by increasing the appetite-stimulating
hormone ghrelin and makes it harder for you to get full by reducing
levels of the satiety-inducing hormone leptin. People who sleep less
than six hours a night are 30 percent more likely to become obese than
those who sleep seven to nine hours a night.
How Much Sleep Is Enough?
Most people need seven to nine hours of sleep a night to feel
sufficiently rested. Few people are at their best with less than seven
hours, and few require more than nine without an underlying health
condition. And that’s a major problem, since more than half of Americans
get less than the necessary seven hours of sleep each night, according
to the National Sleep Foundation.
For go-getters, it's even worse.
A recent survey of Inc. 500 CEOs found that half of them are sleeping
less than six hours a night. And the problem doesn't stop at the top.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a third of
U.S. workers get less than six hours of sleep each night, and sleep
deprivation costs U.S. businesses more than $63 billion annually in lost
productivity.
Doing Something About It
Beyond the obvious sleep benefits of thinking clearly and staying healthy, the ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance. TalentSmart has conducted research with more than a million people, and we’ve found that 90 percent of top performers are high in emotional intelligence
(EQ). These individuals are skilled at understanding and using emotions
to their benefit, and good sleep hygiene is one of the greatest tools
at their disposal.
High-EQ individuals know it's not just how much you sleep that
matters, but also how you sleep. When life gets in the way of getting
the amount of sleep you need, it's absolutely essential that you
increase the quality of your sleep through good sleep hygiene. There are
many hidden killers of quality sleep. The 10 strategies that follow
will help you identify these killers and clean up your sleep hygiene.
Follow them, and you'll reap the performance and health benefits that
come with getting the right quantity and quality of sleep.
1. Stay away from sleeping pills.
When I say sleeping pills, I mean anything you take that sedates you
so that you can sleep. Whether it's alcohol, Nyquil, Benadryl, Valium,
Ambien, or what have you, these substances greatly disrupt your brain's
natural sleep process. Have you ever noticed that sedatives can give you
some really strange dreams? As you sleep and your brain removes harmful
toxins, it cycles through an elaborate series of stages, at times
shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them
(which causes dreams). Sedation interferes with these cycles, altering
the brain's natural process.
Anything that interferes with the brain's natural sleep process has
dire consequences for the quality of your sleep. Many of the strategies
that follow eliminate factors that disrupt this recovery process. If
getting off sleeping pills proves difficult, make certain you try some
of the other strategies (such as cutting down on caffeine) that will
make it easier for you to fall asleep naturally and reduce your
dependence upon sedatives.
2. Stop drinking caffeine (at least after lunch).
You can sleep more and vastly improve the quality of the sleep you
get by reducing your caffeine intake. Caffeine is a powerful stimulant
that interferes with sleep by increasing adrenaline production and
blocking sleep-inducing chemicals in the brain. Caffeine has a six-hour
half-life, which means it takes a full 24 hours to work its way out of
your system. Have a cup of joe at 8 a.m., and you’ll still have 25
percent of the caffeine in your body at 8 p.m. Anything you drink after
noon will still be near 50 percent strength at bedtime. Any caffeine in
your bloodstream—the negative effects increasing with the dose—makes it
harder to fall and stay asleep.
When you do finally fall asleep, the worst is yet to come. Caffeine
disrupts the quality of your sleep by reducing rapid eye movement (REM)
sleep, the deep sleep when your body recuperates most. When caffeine
disrupts your sleep, you wake up the next day with a cognitive and
emotional handicap. You’ll be naturally inclined to grab a cup of coffee
or an energy drink to try to make yourself feel more alert, which very
quickly creates a vicious cycle.
3. Avoid blue light at night.
This is a big one—most people don't even realize it impacts their
sleep. Short-wavelength blue light plays an important role in your mood,
energy level and sleep quality. In the morning, sunlight contains high
concentrations of this "blue" light. When your eyes are exposed to it
directly (not through a window or while wearing sunglasses), the blue
light halts production of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin and makes
you feel more alert. This is great, and exposure to a.m. sunlight can
improve your mood and energy levels. If the sun isn't an option for you,
try a blue light device
.
In the afternoon, the sun's rays lose their blue light, which allows
your body to produce melatonin and start making you sleepy. By the
evening, your brain does not expect any blue light exposure and is very
sensitive to it. The problem this creates for sleep is that most of our
favorite evening devices—laptops, tablets, TVs and mobile phones—emit
short-wavelength blue light. And in the case of your laptop, tablet and
phone, they do so brightly and right in your face. This exposure impairs
melatonin production and interferes with your ability to fall asleep as
well as with the quality of your sleep once you do nod off. Remember,
the sleep cycle is a daylong process for your brain. When you confuse
your brain by exposing it in the evening to what it thinks is a.m.
sunlight, this derails the entire process with effects that linger long
after you power down. The best thing you can do is avoid these devices
after dinner (TV is OK for most people as long as they sit far enough
away from the set). If you must use one of these devices in the evening,
you can limit your exposure with a filter or protective eye wear.
4. Wake up at the same time every day.
Consistency is key to a good night's sleep, especially when it comes
to waking up. Waking up at the same time every day improves your mood
and sleep quality by regulating your circadian rhythm. When you have a
consistent wake-up time, your brain acclimates to this and moves through
the sleep cycle in preparation for you to feel rested and alert at your
wake-up time. Roughly an hour before you wake, hormone levels increase
gradually (along with your body temperature and blood pressure), causing
you to become more alert. This is why you'll often find yourself waking
up right before your alarm goes off.
When you don't wake up at the same time every day, your brain doesn't
know when to complete the sleep process and when it should prepare you
to be awake. Long ago, sunlight ensured a consistent wake-up time. These
days, an alarm is the only way most people can pull this off, and doing
this successfully requires resisting the temptation to sleep in when
you're feeling tired because you know you'll actually feel better by
keeping your wake-up time intact.
5. No binge sleeping (in) on the weekend.
Sleeping in on the weekend is a counterproductive way to catch up on
your sleep. It messes with your circadian rhythm by giving you an
inconsistent wake-up time. When you wake up at the same time during the
work week but sleep past this time on the weekend, you end up feeling
groggy and tired because your brain hasn't prepared your body to be
awake. This isn't a big deal on your day off, but it makes you less
productive on Monday because it throws your cycle off and makes it hard
to get going again on your regular schedule.
6. Learn how much sleep you really need.
The amount of sleep you need is something that you can't control, and
scientists are beginning to discover the genes that dictate it. The
problem is, most people sleep much less than they really need and are
under-performing because they think they're getting enough. Some
discover this the hard way. Ariana Huffington was one of those frantic
types who underslept and overworked, until she collapsed unexpectedly
from exhaustion one afternoon. She credits her success and well-being
since then to the changes she's made to her sleep habits. "I began
getting 30 minutes more sleep a night, until gradually I got to seven to
eight hours. The result has been transformational," Huffington says,
adding that, "all the science now demonstrates unequivocally that when
we get enough sleep, everything is better: our health; our mental
capacity and clarity; our joy at life; and our ability to live life
without reacting to every bad thing that happens."
Huffington isn't the only one. Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Sheryl
Sandberg have all touted the virtues of getting enough sleep. Even Bill
Gates, an infamous night owl, has affirmed the benefits of figuring out
how much sleep you really need: “I like to get seven hours of sleep a
night because that’s what I need to stay sharp and creative and upbeat.”
It's time to bite the bullet and start going to bed earlier until you
find the magic number that enables you to perform at your best.
7. Stop working.
When you work in the evening, it puts you into a stimulated, alert
state when you should be winding down and relaxing in preparation for
sleep. Recent surveys show that roughly 60 percent of people monitor
their smartphones for work emails until they go to sleep. Staying off
blue light-emitting devices (discussed above) after a certain time each
evening is also a great way to avoid working so you can relax and
prepare for sleep, but any type of work before bed should be avoided if
you want quality sleep.
8. Eliminate interruptions.
Unfortunately for those with small children, the quality of your
sleep does suffer when it is interrupted. The key here is to eliminate
all the interruptions that are under your control. If you have loud
neighbors, wear earplugs to bed. If your mother likes to call at all
hours of the night, make certain you silence your ringer before you go
to bed. If you had to wake up extra early in the morning, make sure your
alarm clock is back on its regular time when you go to bed. Don't drink
too much water in the evening to avoid a bathroom trip in the middle of
the night. If your partner snores…. Well, you get the idea. If you
think hard enough, there are lots of little things you can do to
eliminate unnecessary interruptions to your sleep.
9. Learn to meditate.
Many people who learn to meditate report that it improves the quality
of their sleep and that they can get the rest they need even if they
aren't able to significantly increase the number of hours they sleep. At
the Stanford Medical Center, insomniacs participated in a six-week
mindfulness meditation and cognitive-behavioral therapy course. At the
end of the study, participants' average time to fall asleep was cut in
half (from 40 to 20 minutes), and 60 percent of subjects no longer
qualified as insomniacs. The subjects retained these gains upon
follow-up a full year later. A similar study at the University of
Massachusetts Medical School found that 91 percent of participants
either reduced the amount of medication they needed to sleep or stopped
taking medication entirely after a mindfulness and sleep therapy course.
Give mindfulness a try. At minimum, you'll fall asleep faster, as it
will teach you how to relax and quiet your mind once you hit the pillow.
10. When all else fails, take naps.
One of the biggest peaks in melatonin production happens during the 1
to 3 p.m. time frame, which explains why most people feel sleepy in the
afternoon. Companies like Google and Zappos are capitalizing on this
need by giving employees the opportunity to take short afternoon naps.
If you aren't getting enough sleep at night, you're likely going to feel
an overwhelming desire to sleep in the afternoon. When this happens,
you're better off taking a short nap (even as short as 15 minutes) than
resorting to caffeine to keep you awake. A short nap will give you the
rest you need to get through the rest of the afternoon, and you'll sleep
much better in the evening than if you drink caffeine or take a long
afternoon nap.
Bringing It All Together
I know many of you reading this piece are thinking something along
the lines of "but I know a guy (or gal) who is always up at all hours of
the night working or socializing, and he's the number one performer at
our branch." My answer for you is simple: This guy is underperforming.
We all have innate abilities that we must maximize to reach our full
potential. My job is to help people do that—to help the good become
great by removing unseen performance barriers. Being number one in your
branch is an accomplishment, but I guarantee that this guy has his
sights set on bigger things that he isn't achieving because sleep
deprivation has him performing at a fraction of his full potential. You
should send him this article. It just might shake something loose.
After all, the only thing worth catching up on at night is your sleep.
Source: seccess.com
and Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization
