News
Sleep your way to the top
A lack of sleep can be devastating to your career. The symptoms mimic depression and can bring your productivity to a grinding halt.
"There is a mistake in the belief that you get more out of life by cutting back on sleep. What you really do is compromise the quality of your wake time," says Professor Philippa Gander, director of Massey University's Sleep/Wake Research Centre.
Research shows we're sleeping around an hour less sleep a night than we were at the turn of the century when we averaged nine hours of sleep. Gander says this is costing us.
"If you're chronically sleepy and trying to do any kind of work you're at risk of making errors - whether it's brain work or whether physical work."
A lack of sleep causes poor concentration, impaired decision making, a lack of attention to detail, poor motivation and a lack of interest. For workers who find they haven't had enough sleep, the best thing they can do is take a power nap.
"You can top up and keep yourself going by taking short naps which I think are an effective use of time. A nap of 10 minutes will give you a few hours of better functioning. Even if you don't feel great, you will be more alert and more functional."
Gander says recent studies have found our need for sleep is so hard wired that it is a universal characteristic of all life on Earth.
"All species on the planet all the way back to blue-green algae have some kind of internal pacemaker which changes the way they function in step with the day/night cycle."
Getting up too early to go to work can not only make us less functional during the day but also lead to long-term negative health consequences such as a suppressed immune system. Gander says what's worse is that you can't make up for an early start by having an early night.
"You can't go to sleep a couple of hours earlier in the evening just because you have to get up early in the morning. It doesn't work like that. There is actually a period in the evening in the few hours before your normal sleep time where you can't go to sleep. We call it the evening wake maintenance zone."
To overcome this, a lot of people use night-time pain relievers containing antihistamine such as diphenhydramine hydrochloride (Benadryl) which Gander says is mildly sedating.
"They are generally regarded as pretty safe. That's why they're over the counter."