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Sleep, Social Attitudes,
It doesn't take much sleep deprivation to cause a significant drop in performance. Reducing your amount of sleep time by one hour can have a significant affect on your mental alertness, which is immediately connected to your performance and productivity. Unfortunately, we live in a society where three factors make most of us turn a blind eye to lack of sleep. First, stimulants are widely available and considered the perfect antidote the sleepiness. We tend not to focus on lack of sleep as the culprit; we focus on how to get beyond it, and a single cup of coffee readily perks us up. Perhaps it is normal for us to get sleepy in the middle of the day, and perhaps our ancestors would have napped during this period. We've gotten so used to eliminating sleepiness at lunchtime, that we don't think much about it. Second, we think it is normal for people to be sleepy, and more than just right after the midday point. We attribute sleepiness to boredom, lack of movement, or repetitive tasks. If someone goes to an opera and falls asleep, many will make the assumption that the opera wasn't sufficiently stimulating to keep the person awake. I can tell you from personal experience that it is possible to fall asleep in front of a rock band! I literally did that when severely jet lagged, sitting not more than 10 feet away from an extremely noisy band. That's not normal. If you are well rested, even a boring meeting will not put you to sleep. Boredom doesn't put us to sleep; lack of sleep and fatigue puts us to sleep! Third, we have a very strong societal judgment that taking naps or sleeping too long at night is an indication of some kind of moral weakness. People who take a nap during the middle of the day are seen as "giving in" to their feelings of fatigue, and that doesn't exactly meet the standards of a high work ethic. Because of these three factors, there is a lot of social pressure for us to not get enough sleep. Unfortunately, the bottom line is that lack of sleep affects our productivity. We make more mistakes; we have shorter emotional fuses; we are not so happy when sleep-deprived. One study even demonstrated that when people reduce their sleep from eight hours to 5 and a half hours a night, they don't get more done with those extra hours of wakefulness. They just take longer to do everything. Some argue that going from 8 hours to 5 and a half hours is a big jump. And that it is. Ultimately, we each have to make our own decisions about how much time we are willing to devote to sleep. It's the same type of question we have to answer when considering exercise. Perhaps the only way to accurately evaluate our personal sleep needs is to experiment. This requires tracking our amount of sleep against some kind of productivity standard you want to set. Perhaps it includes monitoring how many times during the day you feel sleepy. Does that happen with 7 versus 8 hours? Or does it happen with 6 versus 7 hours? It might include Ýracking how quickly you fall asleep in the evenings. (The more tired you are the more quickly you will fall asleep—-in most cases.) Certainly the variation in individual needs for sleep is so significant that the only way we can find out our own unique needs is to define our standards ourselves. Janelle Barlow, Author
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