- Sleeping less than six hours per night is one of the best predictors of on-the-job burnout.
- Sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.
- Even moderate sleep deprivation lowers a person’s reaction time by 50%.
- Just a 10 to 20 minute nap can significantly improve a worker’s performance on the job (but good luck finding an employer who will tolerate that!)
Five Great Reasons to Make Sleeping Better Your New Year's Resolution!
Last year we treated our regular blog readers at lull.com to tips on how to get better sleep in the New Year, and it proved so popular, we've decided we should open up the benefits of a Lull mattress to everybody. Why? Funny you should ask. It’s because this year we're sharing our five best reasons why getting sleep in the New Year is important. And so without further ado, we go a little something like this...
1. Lack of Sleep Affects Your Health
It’s staggering how many ways not getting proper sleep poorly affects your health. Studies have shown that hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and even cancers have all been linked to lack of sleep. Sleeping buys our bodies time to metabolize our food, thus creating and storing energy for later use. Losing sleep can prevent your body’s immune system from producing antibodies and T-lymphocytes, making you more prone to infection and reducing your ability to fight illness. Getting good sleep also helps curb inflammation, which is linked to cardiovascular disease and diabetes – all these benefits from just getting better sleep on a premium mattress!
Scientific research suggests that when we aren’t able to sleep at least six hours a night, the inflammatory proteins in our bodies build up significantly more than for those of us that get a full night of better sleep. It seems that the C-reactive protein (which is commonly associated with heart attacks) was higher in people who slept less than six hours a night on average. In fact generally speaking, 90% of people with insomnia (trouble falling and staying asleep) were found to have at least one other health condition. Likewise, people with insomnia or sleep apnea - the disorder where a person briefly stops breathing while they sleep - were able to improve their blood pressure and inflammation level just by treating their sleep disorders. People with bipolar disorder can develop mania after prolonged sleeplessness too, so whether you’re healthy or ill, good sleep is absolutely essential to survival. Don’t believe me? Though we’re not fond of animal testing, consider that rodents in studies who were absolutely deprived of sleep died of fatal infections in a remarkably short time. Sleep on that.
2. Poor Sleep Makes It Tough To Acquire Wealth
The bottom line in achieving wealth or success of any kind is the amount of quality work you’re able to put into achieving it. In his best-selling book Outliers, journalist Malcolm Gladwell suggested that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in any discipline, and we can assume productive hours are what you’re shooting for. Lack of sleep decreases focus and thus decreases productivity, no matter how much extra time you put in. Or put another way, nothing from nothing leaves nothing. Lack of sleep has also been shown to affect judgment, leading to a massive increase in car and other accidents among the sleepless. Improper sleep can make a worker less reliable too, as it tends to detract from alertness and attention to detail. A person’s reaction time actually decreases significantly when they’re operating on less sleep, giving them a hand-eye coordination similar to someone with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.1%! “Micro-sleep,” which is when a tired person sleeps for a few seconds at a time without realizing it, has led to incriminating driving and other machinery-related accidents. The decline in performance without sleep affects the young too – it’s been proven that college students do much worse when pulling “all-nighters” in many cases, despite actually putting in more time for study! It seems that this is because ironically, the more sleep one loses, the worse their judgment becomes about how much sleep they actually need.
Naturally, many studies on lost productivity due to insufficient sleep have been done, yielding these real world numbers: