5 Strategies to Help You Sleep Your Way to Success
There is a busyness epidemic
happening around the world today. My husband and I went out for breakfast
recently, and I was so disappointed to observe this beautiful family of four
sitting in their seats in silence, each attached to some type of electronic gadget.
You can go anywhere today - the grocery store, doctor's office, a restaurant,
walking down the street - and see people obsessively checking their Smart
phones. Our modern day drive toward fast-paced busyness is now a pathology
(Schulte, 2014), and we are paying the price with our health, disconnected and
fragmented relationships, and lack of purpose.
One of the first things to go in
favor of adding more to our already too-busy schedules is sleep. And in the
workplace, he or she who sleeps the least brags the most. According to
Christopher Drake, an associate professor of medicine at Wayne State
University, "just four hours of sleep loss will produce as much impairment as a six pack of beer. If
you have a whole night of sleep loss, that's the equivalent to having a blood
alcohol content of .19." I suspect you wouldn't even show up to work with
this level of impairment, much less brag about it.
Lack of Sleep: The Impact to the
Workplace
While lack of sleep in favor of
working more is often supported and even rewarded in the workplace, lost sleep
costs businesses over $63
billion annually in lost productivity. In my burnout
prevention work, I teach a three-part burnout formula -- too many job demands,
not enough job resources, and too little recovery. The recovery component is a
key part of this formula, as it measures the ways you are re-charging at work,
after work each night, on the weekends, and during vacations. I consistently
find that busyness interferes with the ability to adequately recover. A recent
Harris Interactive survey found that Americans had an average of 9.2 days of unused vacation
in 2012 - up from 6.2 days in 2011.
Lack of Sleep: The Impact on Health
Lack of sleep clearly impacts
health. People
who average less than seven hours of sleep each night were almost three times
more likely to develop a cold than those who had eight hours or more of sleep.
Job stress also drives sleep issues. In the past month, American
workers reported 5.3 days of difficulty
falling asleep, 6.6 days of trouble staying asleep, and 5 days of trouble
waking up for work. In addition, poor sleep quality is linked
to risk of heart attacks and coronary
heart disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, more aches and pains,
and can be a factor for the onset of mental health problems, like depression.
In addition, more studies are finding gender
differences -- "poor sleep and sleep-related
problems are more strongly associated with poor health outcomes in women than
in men." Finally, an estimated 20%
of vehicle crashes are linked to driving drowsy.
Strategies to Help
If you're one of the millions of
people who have a difficult time either falling asleep or staying asleep, try
one of these strategies:
Create a bedtime ritual. My bedtime ritual usually consists of falling asleep
during The Tonight Show and waking up sometime between midnight and 2am
completely groggy and in a fog. Clearly I need to take my own advice. Bedtime
rituals are your regular way of powering down from a long day. Maybe it's a
nice warm bath? A good book? Story time with the kids? Whatever you decide to
do, make sure to leave your electronic gadgets in a different room. The light
from the screens and audible pings can prevent you from falling asleep, wake
you up, and stress you out (clients who email at 3am with some urgent matter needing
to be handled by 7am).
Play a mental game. This was a popular technique we taught in the resilience
training program for soldiers (Reivich & Shatte, 2002). If you need to
temporarily "change the channel" of your thinking so that you can
focus and concentrate on the task at hand (in this case, getting to sleep),
play a mental game. Mental games are fun, easy brain activities to help you
lessen distraction. You can count backwards by 7 starting at 1000, recite
upbeat song lyrics or try my favorite one: create a sentence where every word
must begin with the same letter, starting with "A." For example,
"All aardvarks are awesome." Then go onto "B." "Big
bananas buy boats."
Tame the Zeigarnik effect. The Zeigarnik effect, named for the researcher who discovered
it in the 1920's, refers to your tendency to ruminate about all of the
unfinished tasks you didn't complete (Syrek & Antoni, 2014). I feel a quick
jolt of accomplishment every time I cross something off of my to-do list, and
now I know why. One way to lessen the impact of the Zeigarnik effect is to keep
a pad of paper next to your bed and do a "brain spill." Whatever
you're stewing about, put it on paper. This simple strategy relaxes your brain
so it can focus on sleep.
Find the good stuff. Our brains are hardwired to notice, seek out, and remember
negative events and information. It's called the negativity bias. Negative
emotions command your attention during the day and have physiological
consequences that can interfere with sleep. Simply writing down a couple of
good things that happened to you each day with a reflection about why those
good things were important can lead
to better sleep. In fact, one of my workshop
participants told me that as an insomniac, he had struggled for years to get
adequate sleep. By doing this simple exercise, he reported that he was sleeping
better than he had in years.
I recently mentioned the statistic
about impairment after sleep loss on Twitter, and one of my followers responded
with pride about how he has conditioned himself to function on four hours of
sleep or less each day. We need to change the conversation around sleep being a
serious element of resilience and well-being, not the first thing cut in favor
of adding more to our already too-busy schedules.
Paula
Davis-Laack
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paula-davislaack/5-strategies-to-help-you-sleep-your-way-to-success_b_7956664.html?ir=Healthy%20Living?ncid=newsltushpmg00000003
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