How to Be Smarter, Look Younger, Perform Better, and Keep Your Job

by Gail Belsky | Mar 4, 2009 | Comments

Key Stats

• Sleep deprivation impacts your:
• Decision making: If you work 18 hours, you perform cognitive tasks as well as someone who's legally drunk.
• Health: Lack of sleep makes you three times more likely than an eight-hour sleeper to catch a cold.
• Mood: In a survey, 44 percent of respondents said they were likely to be unpleasant without enough sleep.
• Productivity: According to one estimate, U.S. businesses lose about $150 billion a year in sleep-related absenteeism and lost productivity.

Pulling all-nighters for work used to be a sign of your drive and dedication — a bragging right to being the best. Now it's a sign of the times. You’re not trying to show off as much as you’re trying to stay employed. But limiting your sleep isn’t going to save your job or advance your career. Quite the opposite.

If you’re awake enough to absorb one message from this story, then remember this: Getting a good night’s sleep is the single best way you never thought of to improve your abilities and human capital literally overnight.

How Being Sleep Deprived Hurts You

Shortening your optimal sleep time (seven to eight hours for most adults) by as little as an hour dramatically cuts into cognitive performance. Research shows it diminishes your ability to concentrate, multitask, pay attention, retain information, problem-solve, react quickly, and make good judgments. Worst of all, you think you’re doing just fine.

In a landmark 2003 study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that subjects who slept four to six hours a night for two weeks were as cognitively impaired as those who went without sleep for three days straight — but they were too sleep deprived to know it. They reported feeling “slightly sleepy,” when in fact their response rates on standard psychomotor vigilance and other cognitive tests showed that their response rates were so slow that they’d be at risk for cracking up their car if they got behind the wheel.

Working While Intoxicated

Getting six or fewer hours of sleep each night is just like being drunk. Consider that in California the legal blood alcohol content is .08. When you’ve been up for 18 hours, studies show that you function as if your blood alcohol content were .07. After 24 hours without sleep, you’re at 0.1 — the same as a drunk driver. Now picture yourself at the office.

“At that point, you’re fighting sleepiness, you’re more irritable, and you have increased risk of accidents both at work and [while] driving,” says Dr. Donna Arand, clinical director of the Kettering Medical Center Sleep Disorders Center in Dayton, Ohio. “That’s when you see people drinking a lot of caffeinated beverages, popping out of their chairs at work more, using physical activity to keep themselves awake.”

It doesn’t always work. At some point, your body rebels. It needs sleep, and it’s going to grab snippets of it whenever it can — during a meeting, a movie, or your drive home from work. Doctors refer to these episodes as micro-sleep. “You’re so sleepy, you don’t know it, but you might have drifted off to sleep for 5, 10, 15 seconds. You’re just in the abyss,” says Dr. Ralph Downey III, chief of sleep medicine at Loma Linda University Medical Center and Children's Hospital in Loma Linda, Calif.

Other Costs to Your Career

If nodding off on the job isn’t enough to cripple your career, how about snapping at your colleagues or pounding your fist on the conference room table? A 2007 study by the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Medical School showed that lack of sleep doesn’t cause the brain to become less active, but rather, it causes the brain to become 60 percent more reactive. That translates into losing your cool, overreacting to situations, and being a real crab.

Not exactly the qualities that will impress your boss — or a prospective one, if you’re job hunting. Even worse, studies show that your emotional control is one of the first functions to go when you lack sleep — and it’s one of the last to come back when you do start sleeping enough.

Working late hours at the expense of sleep clearly sets you up for failure, not success, according to Dr. Mitchell Lee Marks, Ph.D., assistant professor of management at San Francisco State University. “The quality of work goes, productivity declines, there are more defects so you’re actually not doing well,” he says. “Just working longer hours is no protection these days. Those two hours extra you spend at work — there are better ways to use that time. Quantity is not going to save you.”

But a good night’s sleep just might.