Sweet Dreams, Sleep Tight, Succeed!
Many hard-charging managers pride themselves on their ability to work long hours and get by on five or six hours of sleep. But the truth is that they’re shortchanging themselves—and their companies.
“Sleep is not a luxury,” says Dr. James O’Brien, medical director of the Boston SleepCare Center in Waltham, Massachusetts. “It’s a necessity for optimal functioning.”
When you sleep, your brain catalogues the previous day’s experiences, primes your memory and triggers the release of hormones regulating energy, mood and mental acuity. To complete its work, the brain needs seven to eight hours of sleep. When it gets less, your concentration, creativity, mood regulation and productivity all take a hit.
HOW SLEEP WORKS
To understand why the right amount of shut-eye is so important to performance, it helps to know how sleep works.
Healthy sleep is divided into four-stage cycles. As we progress through stages 1 and 2, we become increasingly unplugged from the world until we reach the deep sleep that happens in stage 3. In deep sleep, both brain and body activity drop to their lowest point during the cycle, and blood is redirected from the brain to muscles.
The fourth and final stage is named for the rapid eye movement—REM—that is its defining characteristic. Our brains become busily active in REM sleep, too, even more so than when we are awake. Dreaming happens at this stage.
In a full night’s sleep, we experience three or four such cycles, each lasting 60 minutes to 90 minutes.
THE WORK SLEEP DOES
Different yet equally important restorative work happens during deep sleep (stage 3) and REM sleep (stage 4).
Deep sleep is crucial for physical renewal, hormonal regulation and growth. Without deep sleep, you’re more likely to get sick, feel depressed and gain an unhealthy amount of weight.
In REM sleep the brain processes and synthesizes memories and emotions, activity that is crucial for learning and higher-level thought. A lack of REM sleep results in slower cognitive and social processing, problems with memory and difficulty concentrating.
A DEFICIT IN SLEEP LEADS TO DEFICITS IN WORK PERFORMANCE
Performing complex tasks and navigating complicated relationships—the heart and soul of a manager’s work—both become much harder to do when REM sleep suffers. And when you cut back on sleep, your REM sleep suffers the most. There are two reasons for this:
1. Your brain, when confronted with sleep deprivation, opts for lighter sleep and hence less REM sleep.
2. Later sleep cycles tend to have longer REM periods than cycles earlier in the night. When you sleep through only one or two cycles instead of three or four, your REM sleep is disproportionately affected.
When your brain is starved of REM sleep, concentrating on a single activity is challenging. Multitasking—an inescapable bane of managerial work—becomes exponentially more so.
A deficit of REM sleep also makes it tougher to pick up on nuances in discussions or negotiations.
“When you’re listening intently to someone, trying to understand the main meaning as well as the subtext of what’s being said, your brain is multitasking on several levels—an activity that requires lots of mental horsepower,” says Dr. Gandis Mazeika, head of Sound Sleep Health in Seattle. “If you’re sleep deprived, that’s hard to do.”
In addition, recent research shows that sleep deprivation takes a toll on decision-making ability.
GETTING MORE FROM THE SLEEP YOU GET
Given the demands facing managers today—working in a 24/7, always-on environment is a big one—a full night’s sleep is sometimes an impossible dream. Fortunately, there are ways to get more out of the time you do manage to spend in sleep:
Avoid caffeine. Cut out caffeinated coffee, tea and soda ideally 10 hours before bedtime—and chocolate, too.
Although some antidepressants can help you feel drowsy enough to fall asleep, they also tend to compromise REM, says O’Brien. A more healthful approach for some is to meditate a half-hour before hitting the sheets.
Darken the room completely. Your brain creates a hormone called melatonin that senses when it’s dark out and primes you for sleep. If you try to sleep amid too much light, your brain may decide you’re not ready for bedtime after all.
Sleep in a restful environment. Make sure the room is quiet and your BlackBerry is out of hearing range. Sleep on a comfortable mattress; Mazeika advises not to skimp on quality and plan on getting a new one every eight to 10 years.
