Sleep Well and Prosper

How Being Sleep Deprived Hurts You

Shortening your optimal sleep time (seven to eight hours for
most adults) by as little as an hour dramatically cuts into cognitive
performance. Research shows it diminishes your ability to concentrate,
multitask, pay attention, retain information, problem-solve, react quickly, and
make good judgments. Worst of all, you think you’re doing just fine.

In a landmark 2003 study, researchers at the University of
Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that subjects who slept four to six hours
a night for two weeks were as cognitively impaired as those who went without
sleep for three days straight — but they were too sleep deprived to
know it. They reported feeling “slightly sleepy,” when in
fact their response rates on standard psychomotor vigilance and other cognitive
tests showed that their response rates were so slow that they’d be at
risk for cracking up their car if they got behind the wheel.

Working While Intoxicated

Getting six or fewer hours of sleep each night is just like
being drunk. Consider that in California the legal blood alcohol content is
.08. When you’ve been up for 18 hours, studies show that you function
as if your blood alcohol content were .07. After 24 hours without sleep, you’re
at 0.1 — the same as a drunk driver. Now picture yourself at the
office.

“At that point, you’re fighting
sleepiness, you’re more irritable, and you have increased risk of
accidents both at work and [while] driving,” says Dr. Donna Arand,
clinical director of the Kettering Medical Center Sleep Disorders Center in
Dayton, Ohio. “That’s when you see people drinking a lot of
caffeinated beverages, popping out of their chairs at work more, using physical
activity to keep themselves awake.”

It doesn’t always work. At some point, your body
rebels. It needs sleep, and it’s going to grab snippets of it whenever
it can — during a meeting, a movie, or your drive home from work.
Doctors refer to these episodes as micro-sleep. “You’re so
sleepy, you don’t know it, but you might have drifted off to sleep
for 5, 10, 15 seconds. You’re just in the abyss,” says Dr.
Ralph Downey III, chief of sleep medicine at Loma Linda University Medical
Center and Children's Hospital in Loma Linda, Calif.

Other Costs to Your Career

If nodding off on the job isn’t enough to cripple
your career, how about snapping at your colleagues or pounding your fist on the
conference room table? A 2007 study by the University of California at Berkeley and
Harvard Medical School showed that lack of sleep doesn’t cause the
brain to become less active, but rather, it causes the brain to become 60
percent more reactive. That translates into losing your cool,
overreacting to situations, and being a real crab.

Not exactly the qualities that will impress your boss —
or a prospective one, if you’re job hunting. Even worse, studies show
that your emotional control is one of the first functions to go when you lack
sleep — and it’s one of the last to come back when you do
start sleeping enough.

Working late hours at the expense of sleep clearly sets you
up for failure, not success, according to Dr. Mitchell Lee Marks, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of management at San Francisco State University. “The
quality of work goes, productivity declines, there are more defects so you’re
actually not doing well,” he says. “Just working longer
hours is no protection these days. Those two hours extra you spend at work —
there are better ways to use that time. Quantity is not going to save you.”

But a good night’s sleep just might.