Don’t wait until you are dead till you sleep well.
…Later in this article I share the six benefits of sleeping well and napping daily…
It is said that losing four hours of sleep in a night is equivalent to coming to work after drinking a 6-pack of beer, in terms of your mental alertness and wellbeing. While some people become the life of the party after a 6-pack of beer, maybe they would not do so well trying to run a company, lead a team, or deliver a complex project when they are in such a state?
On average, how many hours of sleep would you say you have each night?
While there is a minimum for the optimal number of hours of sleep per night, there is also a maximum. A 2014 Finnish study led by Tea Lallukka, PhD, found that workers “sleeping five hours or less or 10 hours or more were absent from work five to 9 days more each year, as compared to those with optimal sleep.”
According to their study on participants over a 7 year period, the optimal sleep duration per day is 7 hours 38 minutes for Finnish women and 7 hours 46 minutes for their men.
The American Board of Sleep Medicine’s Max Hirschkowitz, PhD, is an internationally-acclaimed sleep expert. Hirschkowitz says “If you don’t get the sleep you need, you don’t restore and refresh your brain and body. You’re basically running on empty… When a car runs out of gas (petrol), it stops running. That’s an apt analogy. Sleep is the gas (petrol) that fuels your brain, and when you don’t get enough you may end up on the side of the road, literally or figuratively.”
Several studies and scientific research now link poor sleep to cardiovascular diseases, impaired cognition, diabetes, obesity and depression. It is no wonder that some people refer to their day off from work as their mental health day. It is time to wake up, and get good sleep.
A number of us tend to sleep once a day, which is unlike 85% of mammals that actually sleep more than once a day.
Early in my career I would drive to and from work, and it seemed to suit me well. Later on when I had a longer commute each day I found myself struggling to stay focused, on the road and at work. I then decided to stay during the week in the city where I worked, and drive back home each weekend. That helped improve my sleep hours, alertness and productivity. But all the driving was still taking a toll. Now I take the train often, where I can have a five minute power nap on the way to work, and a 20 minute nap on the way home. I noticed an increase in mental alertness after these naps.
When is a nap not a nap? After you nap for more than 30 minutes you are at risk of developing sleep inertia – that groggy feeling upon waking, which takes a while to recover from. On the other hand, after a good nap, you immediately feel rejuvenated.
6 Benefits of Sleeping Well and Napping Every Day
1. Improves Your Long-Term Memory
A study by Olaf Lahl, Christiane Wispel, Bernadette Willigens and Reinhard Pietrowsky found that a nap as short as six minutes improves long-term memory performance. For an excelling Leader, such long-term memory comes in handy when you need to remember team members’ names and anecdotes. We tend to warm up and are more responsive when someone remembers our name, personal circumstances and work situation. It shows they care about us.
2. Boosts Your Alertness
Sara Mednick, author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life, asserts that a 20 minute nap gives a quick boost of alertness, with a low risk of sleep inertia kicking in. Mednick does not recommend a 30 minute nap due to the high risk of sleep inertia.
3. Helps You Learn Faster
In her TEDxUCR talk, Sara Mednick goes on to say that a 60 minute nap can improve cognition, so you actually learn faster after having such a nap. Can you afford that much time for a nap? Maybe the question is can you afford not to have that much time for a nap?
4. Can Help You Quit Coffee
To beat the tiredness during our work day, some people resort to taking stimulants like caffeine. Mednick’s study found that taking caffeine had a negative effect on verbal memory tests and motor memory tests. Bad news for coffee drinkers. Good news if you want to kick the coffee habit. Reliance on caffeine is the first indication you are not sleeping well or not napping right.
5. Makes You Work Smarter, Not Harder
On a brighter note, Mednick draws an analogy between weekends and nights. We tend to rest and recharge our batteries on the weekend and overnight. With the proven positive effect of taking a nap sometime in the middle of the day, Mednick suggests we will all benefit by taking a break in the middle of the week, by taking every Wednesday afternoon off work. Using that time to do other things we love. Maybe spending time with friends and family, playing your favourite music instrument, or doing some volunteer work. Engaging in such activities, like taking a nap, will restore us mentally and performance-wise. The alternative is to work through each and every weekday, while helplessly watching our performance decline through the week, as Friday approaches.
6. Boosts Your Creativity
For some anecdotes, consider that:
- Paul McCartney wrote the tune for the song Yesterday while sleeping,
- Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein after a dream she had while holidaying at a friend’s villa near Geneva (one wonders what was going on in that villa),
- Aphex Twin, the British electronic musician and composer, wrote most of the music on his album Selected Ambient Works Volume II after he went to sleep in the studio, woke up, and immediately wrote the music he heard in his dream, and
- Jack Nicklaus corrected his golf swing after he had a dream about it.
Mednick ends her TEDxUCR talk by acknowledging that napping may not be everyone’s preferred solution. If that sounds like you, Mednick’s advice is to instead take a break from what you are doing at work, go do something different and then return to your task.
Napping in these studies is in addition to a good night’s sleep, not instead of sleep.
What effect does napping have on you? If you never tried napping, I strongly suggest you give it a go, and watch if there is any effect. If anyone asks why you are doing it, you could say you read this article which suggests that napping makes you more productive and less grumpy.
There are some well-known ‘nappers’ who saw the benefit in having regular naps. The list includes Margaret Thatcher, Albert Einstein, Johannes Brahms, Leonardo Da Vinci, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Edison and Winston Churchill.
Action Point: Is your workplace nap-friendly, providing a Nap Room? If not, it may be time to introduce a nap room at your workplace.
GAICD, M.Comp (Monash)
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