MEN ASLEEP: EIGHT HOURS
The new status symbol
Not only is sleep back in fashion, but it has now become a status symbol. Until a few years ago, people boasted about how little sleep they needed. Requiring only 4 or 5 hours a night was seen as a sign of success. It implied there was more time for work.
But people are waking up to the costs of chronic sleep deprivation and are rejecting round-the-clock workaholism. These days corporate big shots in America are talking about sleep as an essential component of excellence, and they want as much of it as they can get.
As the last century closed, the Wall Street journal reported that in the upper echelons of American business 8 hours of sleep had become the ultimate perk for the truly successful. Sleep seemed to be especially attractive to Internet entrepreneurs, who, contrary to popular imagination, were not propped up in front of their screens all night surfing the Net. They were tucked up in bed, recharging their brains for the next assault on cyberspace.
For such people, sleep underpins performance. One executive, Marc Andreesen, was quoted in the newspaper article rehearsing his sleep-performance ratio like a computer algorithm: ‘I can get by with 7/4 without too much trouble. Seven and I start to degrade. Six is suboptimal. Five is a big problem. Four means I’m a zombie.’ On the weekends, Andreesen, who co-founded Netscape Communications Corp., indulges in 12 plus!
This contrasts strongly with the sleep patterns of veteran insomniacs such as Michael Milken and Donald Trump, who used to announce proudly that they could manage perfectly on 4 hours a night. Cumulatively, it is also a long way from those executive foot soldiers who marched through the eighties and nineties rarely getting more than a straight 6.
The average person needs between 7 and 9 hours of sleep a night to be sufficiently refreshed to perform well in the workplace. Sleeping fewer hours for a day or two will not make a difference to your performance, but if the sleeplessness continues, your productivity will begin to fall.
Studies show that when a person consistently gets no more than 6 hours of sleep a night, their productivity falls by 17 per cent. If they reduce this amount to 5 hours there is a dramatic loss of 43 per cent, while if they manage only 4 hours the loss plummets to 62 per cent.
For those who just cannot get a full 8 hours of sleep, there is another way: they can nap. Although napping seems counterintuitive to executives, who do not want to be seen sleeping on the job, it can provide a valuable top-up. It is estimated that a 30-minute nap during the day can be worth 2′A hours of normal sleep and can dramatically boost evening work capacity.
In some parts of the world, people appreciate this very much. They know the body likes to doze off around midafternoon and Inspect the sound physiological basis for taking a siesta.
The business community might frown on siestas, but they do work. One study found that a 26-minute nap resulted in a 34 per cent improvement in performance and a 100 per cent improvement in alertness.
People who say they habitually manage on 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night are probably not telling the full truth. They may believe I hey have that little but in reality they drift off into mini-sleeps during the day.
Even Randy Gardener, the US student who managed to go without sleep for a record 11 days, had to be kept awake by minders. They had to pull him out of episodes in which he would lower his lids and slip away in a daydream. During these ‘micro-sleeps’, an electroencephalogram showed he was technically asleep even though his eyes were technically open.
Unlike birds, humans cannot sleep with one eye open and one eye closed. Birds have an astonishing sixth sense that, in risky situations, allows them to be asleep and awake at the same time so they can rest and watch for predators. Behaviourally, they can control sleep and wakefulness simultaneously in different hemispheres of their brain. To make sure both hemispheres get a rest, every hour or so they stand up, turn around and sit down so that the other eye can close.
This bird characteristic is the envy of many humans who are too exhausted to realise it wouldn’t serve them well at all. Humans need a good break – down time when they can relax and let unconscious and involuntary processes take over.
The new breed of American executive argues that sleep is the best – perhaps the only – escape possible from escalating work demands.
‘Technological change – email, voice mail, Intranets, the Web, hand-helds, notebooks etc. – has made the twenty-four-hour work day possible,’ says Andreesen. ‘It is important that the work culture of the future includes the ability to not work for a certain number of hours per day, or we are all going to burn out.’
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