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January 14 - February 17, 2020
A study across four large US companies found that insufficient sleep cost almost $2,000 per employee per year in lost productivity. That amount rose to over $3,500 per employee in those suffering the most serious lack of sleep. That may sound trivial, but speak to the bean counters that monitor such things and you discover a net capital loss to these companies of $54 million annually. Ask any board of directors whether they would like to correct a single problem fleecing their company of more than $50 million a year in lost revenue and the vote will be rapid and unanimous.
Early studies demonstrated that shorter sleep amounts predict lower work rate and slow completion speed of basic tasks. That is, sleepy employees are unproductive employees. Sleep-deprived individuals also generate fewer and less accurate solutions to work-relevant problems they are challenged with.III
Under-slept employees are not only less productive, less motivated, less creative, less happy, and lazier, but they are also more unethical.
naps as short as twenty-six minutes in length still offered a 34 percent improvement in task performance and more than a 50 percent increase in overall alertness.
Could you concentrate and learn anything after having forcefully been woken up at 3:15 a.m., day after day after day? Would you be in a cheerful mood? Would you find it easy to get along with your coworkers and conduct yourself with grace, tolerance, respect, and a pleasant demeanor? Of course not.
REM sleep is what stands between rationality and insanity.
no matter what the age, the longer a child slept, the more intellectually gifted they were. He further found that sleep time was most strongly connected to a reasonable (i.e., a later) school start time: one that was in harmony with the innate biological rhythms of these young, still-maturing brains.
Teton County in Wyoming enacted an even more dramatic change in school start time, shifting from a 7:35 a.m. bell to a far more biologically reasonable one of 8:55 a.m. The result was astonishing—a 70 percent reduction in traffic accidents in sixteen- to eighteen-year-old drivers. To place that in context, the advent of anti-lock brake technology (ABS)—which prevents the wheels of a car from seizing up under hard braking, allowing the driver to still maneuver the vehicle—reduced accident rates by around 20 to 25 percent.
Amphetamine and methylphenidate are two of the most powerful drugs we know of to prevent sleep and keep the brain of an adult (or a child, in this case) wide awake.
Based on recent surveys and clinical evaluations, we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications.
after a thirty-hour shift without sleep, residents make a whopping 460 percent more diagnostic mistakes in the intensive care unit than when well rested after enough sleep.
One in twenty residents will kill a patient due to a lack of sleep.
after twenty-two hours without sleep, human performance is impaired to the same level as that of someone who is legally drunk.
addressing this issue involves two steps of logic. First, we must understand why the problem of deficient sleep seems to be so resistant to change, and thus persists and grows worse. Second, we must develop a structured model for effecting change at every possible leverage point we can identify.
Within three to five years, I am quite certain there will be commercially available, affordable devices that track an individual’s sleep and circadian rhythm with high accuracy.
One practice known to convert a healthy new habit into a permanent way of life is exposure to your own data.
When it comes to the quantified self, it’s the old adage of “seeing is believing” that ensures longer-term adherence to healthy habits.
the annual financial cost of the flu in the US is around $100 billion ($10 billion direct and $90 billion in lost work productivity).
I believe it is time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep, without embarrassment or the damaging stigma of laziness.
