Researchers have determined that humans need an average of eight hours of sleep a day. That works out to about 1/3 of your life (in the U.S.) spent unconscious. From a productivity standpoint, sleep is quite literally a waste of your time. Despite being non-productive, sleep has fought its way through countless years of adaptation in nearly every living animal on Earth.
So sleep must be important, right? It is. Researchers have found that sleep plays a vital role in the functioning of nearly every organ system in the body. Research from 2003 found that just one night of total sleep deprivation is the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk. According to the researchers, people who slept:
- 6 hours each night reached the impairment level after 10 days.
- 4 hours each night reached the impairment level after just 3 days. After 10 days, they were as cognitively impaired as if they had gone two days with no sleep.
- Eight hours saw virtually no change to their cognitive performance.
Americans need sleep
This explains why some people feel more tired than others at work. Staffing firm Accountemps polled over 2,800 American, adult office workers “in 28 major U.S. cities” and reports that:
- 31% of staff said they work while feeling tired
“very often,” - 43% say they do this “somewhat often,”
- 24% say that this happens “not very often,”
- Only 2% say they never work feeling tired.
The Accountemps 15 American cities where employees are the most tired are:
1) Nashville
2) Austin (tie)
2) Denver (tie)
2) Indianapolis (tie)
5) Des Moines (tie)
5) Phoenix (tie)
5) Raleigh (tie)
8) Boston (tie)
8) Detroit (tie)
8) Dallas (tie)
8) San Francisco (tie)
12) Cincinnati (tie)
12) Miami (tie)
14) St. Louis (tie)
14) New York (tie)
Michael Steinitz, executive director of Accountemps, commented on the research in a statement:
Though often overlooked, sleep is a critical component of producing good work. Errors and ineffectiveness can occur when team members are running on empty … Consider the underlying causes of why employees are sleepy. If it’s because they’re stretched too thin, retention issues could soon follow.
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So why does this matter? If you regularly get six hours of sleep and feel just fine, why should you waste your time getting more ZZZ’s?
Matthew Walker, the director of the sleep and neuroimaging lab at the University of California, Berkeley explains, “You don’t know you are sleep deprived when you are sleep deprived, … That’s why so many people fool themselves into thinking they are one of those people who can get away with six hours of sleep or less.”
Professor Walker argues that there’s no way you can effectively train yourself to need less sleep. You may get used to feeling tired all the time, he says, but that does not mean you can suppress that tiredness and perform as well on cognitive tests as you would if you received eight hours.
Berkeley’s Walker concludes, “Human beings are the only animal species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep. There is no storage system for sleep in the brain because life never needed to create one.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.