So That's Why Your Boss is Hypercritical

Yawn. It was your fault.

That, in a nutshell, is how sleepy people tend to think, according to new research from a team led by David Mastin of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and presented at a recent meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. So if you know your boss has had a tough night or isn't well rested, you might want to reschedule your performance review or that in-depth discussion of the big project you're both working on.

Mastin and his team asked 108 college students to fill out a questionnaire designed to measure how sleepy they were. They were then asked to recall a recent incident that didn't work out well and to answer a variety of questions related to it. The results:

• Sleepiness makes people more likely to dwell on what might have been. This tendency, called "counterfactual thinking" has sometimes been seen as a strength, as it can motivate people to learn from their mistakes or to come up with better ways to do things in the future. When people are sleepy, though, so-called counterfactual thinking doesn't seem to be so positive.
• Sleepy people thought more about how things could have been better. But they didn't look at the other side of the coin-about how things could have been worse.
• Sleepy people blamed others when things went wrong. They focused on how other people could have done something better. But they didn't think much about the quality of their own performance. So while they were likely to dwell on others' shortcomings, they didn't show any tendencies to think about their own.
• Sleepy people were more likely to "take out" their aggression or disappointment on innocent targets. Sleepiniess made people more likely to dwell on their anger and to plot revenge. It even made them more likely to seek retribution against the people they believed screwed up.

Sleepier people seem to engage in counterfactual thinking that is more dissatisfied and perhaps more selfish... It may be that the sleepier you are, the more likely your musings are to be angry thoughts about how others could have done better.

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