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Let me be honest: I slept for the most part of the day. True, it was because I was feeling ill, but after a good day of sleep, I have to state that I feel more capable to tackle the work I have to do. I seem more focused and less apt to give in to distractions.
What are the benefits of sleeping, exactly? If we think clocking in some overtime work and burning the midnight oil will do wonders for our careers, we might be in for a surprise if we find out that it might be doing the opposite.
A current article from Scientific American shows how sleeping can make us smarter (emphasis mine):
It is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them and by finding patterns within studied material even when we don’t know that patterns might be there. It is also obvious that skimping on sleep stymies these crucial cognitive processes: some aspects of memory consolidation only happen with more than six hours of sleep. Miss a night, and the day’s memories might be compromised—an unsettling thought in our fast-paced, sleep-deprived society.
Source: Scientific American, August 2008
Apart from making us smarter, sleep can also make us more productive, as this article from India Times advocates. The senior sleep consultant at the Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals at New Delhi states (emphasis mine):
“First, any person who has a good 7-8 hours (depending upon individuals) of night sleep does not biologically require an afternoon nap. But, of course, a siesta can be very refreshing and re-energising for the people in active professions. It’s a different matter, however, that in today’s hectic life and demanding workplaces, a nap is an absolute luxury. However, for those who can afford this luxury, state for instance self-employed, retired or housewives, it can be a great stress-buster.”
Source: IndiaTimes.com
If sleep is so important in our waking hours, most of which is devoted to work, then this means that a good night’s sleep is also essential to our work. So if we’re having trouble sleeping, how do we manage to make the most out of it?
Schedule sleep time. By setting some sleeping time aside instead of just scheduling your waking hours, we can make a superior effort at sleeping properly. Also, sleeping on a regular schedule keeps our body clock predictable. A good night’s sleep means we won’t be surprised in to wake up from an unexpected nap during the workday.
Know more about your sleeping habits. Do you sleep better if the room is absolutely dark? Does a glass of warm milk help? What time do you feel the most active? Do you wake up in the middle of the night? If you need help figuring these things out, I found quite an extensive sleep profiling quiz on the BBC website that helps you examine your sleeping profile and what you can do to mend it. The only problem with the quiz is that in some portions, it has limited time options (for example, I couldn’t enter that I felt more active and optimized at 3am, the earliest time I could enter was 5am).
Develop a pre-sleeping ritual. Once you find out what conditions make you sleepy, incorporate them into a nightly ritual before you sleep. Doing so will help you mentally and physically get into ’sleeping mode’, instead of just lying awake in bed for hours waiting for sleep to happen.
How serious are you about your sleep? Do you take naps within the day? Do you try to get at least 8 hours of sleep each night? What effects does sleep (or the lack of it) have on your performance at work?
Image by Lynne Lancaster from sxc.hu
Tags: rest, sleep, work life balance, work smart, working smarter, Worklife Balance
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