How just 16 minutes of sleep deprivation harms your productivity

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

You may not even know that you are not getting enough sleep.

Wrong sleep can seriously interfere with professional activity: you misjudge tasks, focus poorly on them, and think about the wrong thing. But when we talk about lack of sleep, we usually mean an extra hour or two of waking hours. Scientists have figured out what happens when you sleep just 16 minutes less than usual.

What happens if you don't get enough sleep

It's harder for you to concentrate

Researchers at the University of South Florida conducted the Bidirectional associations of sleep with cognitive interference in employees' work days experiment. Participants were asked questions such as "How often have you had different thoughts today that interfered with your work?" They are called cognitive hindrances.

A scale from 0 (never) to 4 (very common) was used for responses, and then the average was displayed. It turned out that there were more cognitive hindrances on days before which workers slept less.

Scientists have proven that even 16 minutes of sleep deprivation interferes with good concentration.

By neglecting sleep a little, you doom yourself to decreased mental alertness, slow decision making, and mistakes at work.

The study participants confirmed that after sleeping less than usual, they were often distracted by non-work-related thoughts and could not. As a result, in the evening after this mental struggle, they felt tired and went to bed earlier.

The link between sleep quality and focus was more evident on weekdays. Perhaps the fact is that on weekdays, few people have the opportunity to take a nap after lunch, and the need to strain the brain is much more than on weekends.

You become more sensitive to stress

For research, the scientists selected IT workers with high incomes and serious professional skills. These people usually work long hours and have very blurred lines between work and personal life. Delays in the office, frequent phone calls outside office hours, emails late at night, and early business meetings are all causes of sleep disturbance.

All this entails Work-Family Conflict and Employee Sleep: Evidence from IT Workers in the Work, Family and Health Study, resulting in reduced productivity and distracted attention. And this, in turn, leads to an increase in the influence of stress factors and the appearance of external and internal conflicts. For example, sleepy study participants admitted that it was more difficult for them between family and work. They did not have enough time for themselves, and they paid little attention to their children.

It turns out to be a vicious circle: the worse you sleep, the more nervous you become. And the more stress you experience, the more your sleep suffers.

What to do about it

Scientists note that employers should encourage good sleep, or at least not become the cause of its disturbance. You need to create and maintain a culture that minimizes everything that prevents employees from getting enough sleep and, as a result, being productive. Calls outside office hours, the obligation to answer emails in the evenings and meetings early in the morning should be eliminated.

The employees themselves must establish a clear-cut and follow it every day. You need to turn off your phone and ignore your email after 9pm. This is necessary in order to relax after a working day, tune in to sleep and spend at least seven hours in bed.

Regular exercise is also good for good sleep. However, the majority of employees believe that they have many more important things to do and simply do not have time for sports. But the vicious circle of "bad sleep - ineffective work" needs to be broken. If you don't get enough sleep every day, you will have to pay dearly with your productivity and, most importantly, health.