Dear Night Owls, How Sleep-Deprivation Leads to Poor Performance
Research shows that we are not at our best when sleep-deprived.
I used to be a professional night owl. Serious professional. If there were a legal title or an identification of “night owl”, I would have certainly been on the identified list. I picked up poor habits from high school and powered through on little-to-no sleep in college. The excuse is that in college you have to because typically you’re juggling a social, work, and academic life. However, with organization and discipline, the trio can evenly be balanced.
I would power through the night and nap when I could, guzzling down coffee, energy drinks, and plenty of gum to keep my mind “sharp.” I was overconfident in my ability to do it all — sleep less and work more.
What about you? I can’t be the only one right?
When life picked up, I took on more responsibilities such as starting a business that donates portions of the sale to planting trees, creating a universal, more effective phone charger, and well, marrying a much more talented woman. All the while trying to maintain some level of fitness.
The myth died. I was more tired, forgetting things, and in a constantly negative mood. I asked around and did my research. I knew sleep was the issue, but could I give this up and be effective? The answer is yes friends.
As we go deeper under the hood, sleep becomes even more vital, playing a major role in brain maintenance. While we sleep, the brain is able to get rid of toxins, including proteins that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Which is to say, if we don’t allow the brain time to do this crucial work, the cost can be high.
Sleep affects our mental health every bit as profoundly as it does our physical health. Sleep deprivation has been found to have a strong connection with practically every mental health disorder we know of, especially depression and anxiety. “When you find depression, even when you find anxiety, when you scratch the surface 80 to 90 percent of the time you find a sleep problem as well,” says the University of Delaware psychologist Brad Wolgast. In the Great British Sleep Survey, researchers found that sleep-deprived people were seven times more likely to experience feelings of helplessness and five times more likely to feel lonely.
Nancy Fox, who runs the healthy-eating website Skinny Kitchen, wrote evocatively about the effects of sleep on her emotional health: “When I was short on sleep it felt like my ‘cup of stress’ was full and the least extra amount made it spill over. I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot of the restaurant and getting a call telling me that it was my day with the carpool, and I had forgotten to pick up the kids. . . . It literally blew me out! . . . The lack of sleep was making me more emotionally fragile . . . [and] making small problems feel like big ones.”
Sleep deprivation also takes a toll on our mental abilities. “Your cognitive performance is reduced greatly,” said Till Roenneberg, a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. “Memory capacity is reduced. Social competence is reduced. Your entire performance is going to suffer. The way you make decisions is changed.”
Fact: when Golden State Warriors player Andre Iguodala improved his sleep habits, his playing time increased by 12 percent and his three-point shot percentage more than doubled. His points per minute went up by 29 percent, and his free-throw percentage increased by 8.9 percent. His turnovers decreased by 37 percent per game, and his fouls dropped by 45 percent.
In just two weeks of getting six hours of sleep per night, the performance drop-off is the same as in someone who has gone twenty-four hours without sleep. For those getting just four hours, the impairment is equivalent to that of going forty-eight hours without sleep. According to a Today show survey, the side effects of not getting enough sleep include difficulty concentrating (29 percent), losing interest in hobbies and leisure activities (19 percent), falling asleep at inappropriate times throughout the day (16 percent), losing your temper or behaving inappropriately with children or partners (16 percent), and behaving inappropriately at work (13 percent).
If a friend described chronic behavior like this to you, you might reasonably worry that he or she was having a drug or alcohol problem and stage an intervention. But we still have a long way to go toward treating sleep deprivation with the same seriousness and urgency.
If you are a professional night owl, consider a career change or just a little bit more sleep. Trust me, you won’t regret it.
It’s been a joy, thanks for reading.
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Part of this taken from the SLEEP REVOLUTION by A. Huffington. Copyright © 2016 by Christabella, LLC. Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Enjoy the read!
