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Monday, July 06, 2009Beauty Sleep and Optimal Performance
This article is © 2009 PositivePsychologyNews.com - Marie-Josee Salvas Shaar
Did you know that changing just one of your daily habits can be enough to make you more alert, efficient, energetic, productive and motivated? Would you like to implement that change?
If you’ve observed children’s natural behaviors, you’ve probably been reminded that humor and play are natural parts of life. Natural when well-rested, that is. When tired, children’s behavior is a completely different ballgame. Rather than being pleasant and interested, fatigued children’s ability to behave, learn and perform is dramatically diminished. They become restless, cranky, irritable and frankly, irritating too!
The negative impact of sleep debt is just as important for adults, except that we get better at concealing it. But make no mistake: concealing sleep debt doesn’t inhibit the dreaded results.
Brain Impairment
For one, according to sleep scientist William Dement, illustrious discoverer of REM sleep, “Sleep deprivation is the most common brain impairment.” University of Pennsylvania fatigue expert David Dinges reinforces: chronic sleep loss degrades nearly every aspect of human performance, including the ability to receive, process and act on information, he warns.
Other researchers in Australia have found that a sleep-deprived group
of participants in a study performed no better on a series of tests
after 17 hours awake than drinking volunteers whose blood-alcohol
levels were of 0.05. After 24 hours awake, the sleep-deprived group
performed at the same level on the tests as the 0.1 blood-alcohol level
group.
If you are pulling an all-nighter for the sake of important deadlines, you may want to consider taking a nap first. Stanford researchers have shown in lab experiments that the benefits of a 45-minute nap can give you as much as an extra 6 hours of productive time. Employers reading this article might want to consider providing employees with nap rooms at work – an uncommon strategy that could provide unexpectedly uplifting results.
Immune Function Challenges
Prize #2 in the category of disturbing effects of sleep deprivation goes to our immune system. According to University of Michigan sleep scientists Luca Imeri and Mark Opp, sleep debt impairs our immune function. Drs. Roizen and Oz, authors of bestselling YOU: The Owner’s Manual reinforce: in a 2-week study, getting under 7 hours of sleep each day made people three times more likely to get sick after exposure to a cold virus.
If you are sacrificing sleep in the name of productivity, being sick more often certainly won’t help you in the long run. Try the opposite strategy for a few weeks and see how you’re doing.
Crankiness Ahead
The third problem with a lack of sleep pertains to our mood. If you find yourself sweating and closing your fists in reaction to the photocopier’s paper jam, chances are you are seriously sleep deprived. We know from Barbara Fredrickson’s research that it would take 3 (or more!) positive emotions to help us back on the learning and creativity track after this negative paper jam spin.
As an added challenge, the percentage of adults who regularly shorten their night’s sleep to 6 hours or less is greater today than at any previously recorded time. According to the National Sleep Foundation, only 28% of American adults get 8 hours of sleep regularly each night. When surrounded by individuals who are equally running low on gas, three positives can be a hard-to-reach ideal.
Resilience Break-Down
As crankiness rises, so does the need for resilience. When little everyday annoyances become a source of stress, our ability to cope is solicited. Indeed, a new study headed by Eric Powell at the Research Center at Clayton Sleep Institute in St. Louis shows a bidirectional relationship between chronic stress and sleep problems. Something worth sleeping on.
When Self-Regulating All Day…
Last but not least, I hypothesize that being sleepy puts our self-regulation in overdrive. We’re cranky, but showing irritability isn’t proper office etiquette, so we put on a façade, which is a constant act of self-regulation. As we know, the more self-regulation we use, the more it gets depleted.
By the time we get home, put the kids to bed and fire off the final few emails for the day, there’s no more self-regulatory power anywhere within reach. We need a break – it’s our well-deserved TV and ice cream time! (It is no surprise to find that both increased TV watching and increased overeating are both associated with sleep debt!) TV producers know how to get us hooked, so we end up going to bed too late, and the next day we’re back to more sleep debt and irritability.
Recognize the pattern? Here’s how you can break the vicious circle.Easy Steps for Sleep Debtors
If you are sleep deprived, I know that any effortful lifestyle change has next to no chance of being successfully implemented. So I’ll keep my recommendations simple and achievable:
1- Rethink your relationship to sleep. Recognize that sufficient shut-eye time is part of the solution. Playing "tough guy" is unproductive. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can get away with 6 hours of sleep – unless you are an anomaly, you can’t. (As I wrote here,in a 2-week study, getting under 7 hours of sleep each day made people three times more likely to get sick after exposure to a cold virus).
2- Go to bed and get up at regular hours. Your body will get used to the regularity of your routine and will make it easier for you to fall asleep and awaken. If you are working shifts, adopt a very organized bedtime regimen. Your brain will pick up the clues and by the time you are opening the bed sheets, sleepiness will start settling in.
3- Cut back on the caffeine. Caffeine is a stimulant, and therefore impedes sleep. It takes up to 7 hours before your cup of java has completely left your bloodstream. Start by reducing your afternoon and night-time caffeine intake and keep cutting back until you are happy with one or two morning cups.
4- Be enlightened – or not! Your brain interprets light as a signal guiding your biological clock. The more light exposure you get at night, the more you are delaying the onset of sleepiness. The flickering light of your TV is included here too. And by the way, plenty of research shows that TV watching is associated with slightly depressive states, overeating, obesity, chronic sleep debt and lack of physical and sexual activity – viewers, be warned!
5- Get comfy! In order to fall asleep, your brain needs to successfully block out all sensory input. Choosing comfortable pillows, comforters, mattress, bedtime attire and minimizing noise will help you do that. This may sound like obvious advice, but if you are in awe at how comfortable a certain hotel bed was during your last trip, your set-up at home might need revision.
6- Learn how your body functions. Keep a sleep diary for a few days or weeks. What precedes your insomnia? When do you wake up too early and can’t pass back out? When are you most rested? After a few days you’ll see patterns emerge, which will help you maintain good sleep hygiene.
Making the Most of Your Biological Clock
Once your sleep patterns are back on track, try to organize your
schedule such that moments of sleepiness and alertness are maximized.
For example, I used to try to get all the quick and easy things out of
my way so I could focus on more substantial pieces afterwards. After
paying attention to how my rhythm of alertness works, I realized that I
usually feel most alert between 10 and 12 in the morning, so I reserve
that time for what demands the most concentration. I usually hit a drop
of energy around 3 or 4, so I now use this time to return emails, run
to the post office or do other things that require minimal effort. The
result? My productivity has increased – and so did my work satisfaction.
I hope to have convinced you that the idea to frequently stay up late “to get more done” is deceiving and that sleep time is actually productive time. When it comes to beauty sleep, the real beauty isn’t related to the absence of wrinkles and dark circles, but to the splendor of optimal human performance.
Images:
Purchased for the purpose of this article.
References:
Baumeister, R. F., Zell, A. L., & Tice, D. M. (2007). How emotions
facilitate and impair self-regulation. In J. J. Gross, (Ed.) Handbook of Emotion Regulation, (pp. 408-426). New York: Guilford Press.
The Promise of Sleep: A Pioneer in Sleep Medicine Explores the Vital Connection Between Health, Happiness, and a Good Night’s Sleep. New York: Random House. Quote above from p. 231.
Fredrickson, B. (2009). Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive. New York: Crown.
Imeri, L., Opp, M. (2009). How and why the immune system makes us sleep. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Loehr, J. & Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. New York: Free Press.
Roizen, M. F. & Oz, M. C. (2005). YOU: The Owner’s Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition: An Insider’s Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger. New York: HarperCollins.
Wagner, K. (2009, June 10). Study shows a bidirectional relationship between chronic stress and sleep problems. Paper presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. Abstract retrieved June 11, 2009, from http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/aaos-ssa060209.php.
Posted By: Marie-Josée Salvas @ 10:40:30 AM
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008Greatness over Busyness
This article is © 2008 PositivePsychologyNews.com - Marie-Josee Salvas Shaar
On the outside, busy seems to rhyme with happy. Busy people seem more successful, needed and important. Busyness is, after all, serious business!
Yet on the inside, busy is often synonym of misery. We make it through the day, race though the week, shorten our night’s sleep, miss our workout, and finish off what is left on our to-do list over the weekend. We often describe our workloads with adjectives like “crazy” and expressions like “no time to breathe.” Before we realize it, our lives pass us by and we forget to verify whether what we are doing makes us into the person we want to be.
Also interesting to note, we discuss time in very financial terms - we save it, spend it, waste it, and never have enough of it! Time is now seen as a non-renewable resource, and as such, it is scarce and precious.
But is time really our most precious resource? When facing increasing demand, given time is limited, our best response is to augment capacity. Therefore, disposable energy - not time - is our most precious resource.
Loehr and Schwartz, authors of bestseller The Power of Full Engagement, suggest a new and interesting paradigm. Rather than go through life as if it were a marathon, they recommend we approach it as a series of sprints. The focus shifts from managing our time more efficiently (most of us are already proficient at it with fancy blackberries and ever-shorter texting strategies!) to managing our energy more effectively.
In concrete terms, the skillful management of energy means avoiding both over and under-use.
In an economy driven by the capacity of its workers to innovate, rather than making our mind the sole driver of performance, their model recognizes that energy comes from four related sources: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Neglecting one source will have repercussions on the others, as we now know not only from personal experience, but also from empirical research.
While this equilibrium seems very much intuitive, it uncovers the less obvious conclusion that constant busyness impedes greatness.
Building Competence
To build higher competence, we need to push beyond our usual limits, thus setting them further back. Following the effort, rest is necessary not only for our subjective wellbeing, but also for our body and brain to process and register that a new boundary was established. In this model, downtime is not an unproductive indulgence, but a necessary step that prepares us for the next effort.
This technique works for your workouts – it is the exact technique professional athletes of many disciplines have used for years and years. Ask any personal trainer and you’ll hear all about the benefits of interval training and periodization. The method is equally effective at the office – it is no wonder most people are most productive in the morning (following a real period of rest), or getting back from a vacation.
This new approach certainly deserves consideration. If your small voice inside is begging you for a rest, I suggest you pay attention. You will engage and perform better after recovery.
We are fascinated but the concept of peak performance, but we easily forget that by definition, between two peaks, there is necessarily a valley… Performance, health and happiness are all grounded in the skillful management of energy. Let’s learn to honor intervals of rest; it will pay back big time!
References:
Boniwell, I. (2006). Positive Psychology in a Nutshell. London: PWBC.
Loehr, J. & Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. Free Press: New York.
Posted By: Marie-Josée Salvas @ 8:40:27 AM
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