Category: Sleep

Research indicates that sleep deprivation causes weight gain and obesity. A CBS “60 Minutes” documentary aired on March 16, 2008, reported that four nights without sufficient deep sleep affects more than just performance, judgment and memory. It also presents a risk factor for diabetes. One of the interviewees commented that diabetes was now an epidemic. In fact sleep researchers were attributing some of the obesity problem being experienced in North America to sleep deprivation. Evidently lack of sleep makes us hungry and we overeat.

Researchers at the University of Chicago discovered that overweight dieters lost over 50 percent more weight when they averaged 7 and a half hours of sleep per night for two weeks than they did when they slept for only 5 hours a night. Too little time sleeping can also make you hungrier during the day.

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, also did a carefully controlled study in a laboratory setting where volunteers were closely monitored for three days to determine how much they normally ate and slept. Half of them were then allowed to continue their normal routine for another eight days, while the other half were allowed to sleep only two-thirds of their usual sleep time. Both groups were allowed to eat as much as they wanted.

Results showed that the reduction in sleep led to an increase in food consumption. The sleep-deprived group consumed an average of 549 additional calories on the days after their sleep was cut short compared to when they got their normal rest. Without compensating through additional exercise, this could add an extra pound to their weight in less than a week. It’s interesting that there appears to be two epidemics currently occurring in North America – obesity and sleep-deprivation.

There are plenty of studies that show a relationship between sleep and eating habits. Lack of sleep robs us of self-control and the brain regions required for complex judgments, and decisions become blunted. One study of 13,284 teenagers found that those who slept poorly also made poor decisions.

On the positive side, you can view good sleep habits as a way of controlling your weight and getting the proper amount of sleep at the same time. It’s certainly a lot less painful than most diet programs. As an example, consider the study conducted at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. 32 students kept diaries of how much sleep they got and which foods they ate over a 3-week period. The first week they ate and slept as they usually did; but on the second week they slept an extra two hours a day.

The third week they went back to their normal routine. The students who got an extra two hours of sleep during week two ate nearly 300 calories a day less than in week one. When they returned to their normal sleep-deprived routine, they once again ate more food.

And weight gain isn’t the only consequence of inadequate sleep. John Medina, in his book Brain Rules (2008) has a whole chapter devoted to sleep. He emphasizes that loss of sleep affects learning as well as cognitive skills. He described a study of soldiers operating complex military hardware. A loss of one night’s sleep resulted in a 30% loss of cognitive skill and a corresponding drop in performance.

Don’t sacrifice sleep in order to get more things done. That’s when the new things you have learned are being processed and memories are being organized and stored. Sleepless brains don’t perform well. If you don’t get enough sleep, you become dysfunctional.

Just as the old example of pausing to sharpen the axe will allow you to cut more logs in less time, so will taking time to sleep properly increase your personal productivity.

Your body is programmed to spend one third of its life asleep – and to sleep in specific cycles of light sleep, deep sleep, and active brain sleep. Each cycle takes about 90 minutes and each has a specific assignment that affects thinking, memory, growth, your immune system and even your weight. So what are the benefits of sleep?

Benefits of Sleep

We spend about a third of our life sleeping for very good reason — or I should say reasons — many of which are yet to be discovered. But what we do know is that sleep allows us to learn new things and transfers the significant ones into our long-term memory. Sleep prepares and replaces damaged neurons, calms disease-triggering inflammation, and keeps us mentally sharp, creative and productive. It even controls the aging process, helps keep our weight down, lowers our blood pressure and impacts our overall health.

Another important benefit of sleep was reported in the February, 2014 issue of Scientific American Mind. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that sufficient sleep not only restores cognitive functioning, but also may fortify the brain over the long term. During sleep, activity is increased in genes involved in producing brain cells responsible for coating neurons with myelin, the brain`s insulating material. This allows electrical impulses to travel quickly and efficiently to other neurons. Myelin deficiency is at the root of multiple sclerosis disease, and can contribute to symptoms such as fatigue, vision and hearing impairment and a loss of coordination.

A study published by the National Academy of Sciences reports that even an hour or two less sleep a night can negatively impact more than 700 genes required for repairing cell tissue.

Chiara Cirelli, a neuroscientist and author of the paper describing the above research, suggests that sleep helps cells regenerate and repair themselves by helping the body produce new myelin after it has deteriorated.

When it comes to managing time, sleep can be classified as a time management strategy. I explain why in my book, Sleep: a time management strategy, available through Amazon.

Sleep will help extend the time you have available to get things done, and thus sleep is an important time management strategy. And as I continue to write, speak professionally, and develop training programs in my eighties, I can almost speak from personal experience. I say almost since there are a lot of things besides sleep that contribute to brain health and longevity. But just as I tried practicing what I preach in order to slow the perceived passage of time — as described in my book Slowing down the speed of life — I have recently brought my sleep time from six hours a night to seven hours a night with equally good results.

I didn’t always think this way. Over thirty years ago I had joined other time management consultants in recommending the opposite; sleep less and get more done. We urged our clients to set their alarms 15 minutes earlier each week until they noticed that they got tired by early afternoon, and then set it back to the last setting. We felt many people were getting more sleep than they needed (and some were), and that if they could get a head start on the day with an extra half hour or more of “prime time”, they could get more done.

This was before the holistic time management era — and before all the research now available on the role sleep plays in our health, longevity, and productivity. It was also before the digital age of speed. Now, people don’t even have to get out of bed to start working; they can sleep with their Blackberries, iPads, or smart phones, which can then accompany them from bedroom to bathroom to breakfast to bus or car to business and to the boardroom.

Today there is little concern about sleeping too much; the concern is about sleeping too little. The lure of the Internet, computer games, social media, e-mail and text messaging keep us from going to bed early. And the stress of the day, the worry of unfinished tasks lingering in our thoughts, and the widespread view that sleep is an inconvenience to be tolerated but not enjoyed, keep us from sleeping soundly once we are there.

Gary Small, who writes the Brain Bulletin, and speaks on that topic, says that sleep deprivation is one of the risk factors in Alzheimer’s. The June, 2014 issue of Scientific American Mind quotes neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin as saying that sleep helps clear the brain, flushing away waste products such as Alzheimer’s-related proteins. One sleep scientist claims that sleep is one of the most important predictors of how long you will live — as important as whether you smoke, exercise or have high blood pressure.

And I claim that through adequate sleep, you can increase your personal productivity and effectiveness by at least 20 percent, reduce anxiety and stress, and increase your health and well-being in the process.

In my brief book, Sleep: a time management strategy, I claim that sleep is one of the most important time management strategies for you and for your staff, clients and family.

Perhaps I couldn’t make this claim before the advent of electronic technology; because back in those days most people were probably getting sufficient sleep. The average person now gets 90 minutes less sleep a night than a century ago. In my lifetime, the average amount of sleep we get has decreased from just over eight hours to 6.7 hours. (I recently read a figure of 6.5 hours, along with an explanation that this is the average amount of sleep people say they get but by the measurement of brain activity while these same people were sleeping, the actual figure was 6.1 hours.)

62 percent of Americans report difficulty sleeping at least a few nights a week. About 90 percent of teens in the U.S. don’t get enough sleep. And children who don’t get enough sleep are often misdiagnosed with ADHD.

If you get less than six hours sleep a night you are considered to be sleep deprived. And even getting less than seven hours a night produces sleep debt that should be repaid by napping, which is also discussed in my book, Sleep: a time management strategy.

Yes, taking dementia and any current health issues out of the equation, getting an average of 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night will increase your personal productivity. I am referring to the amount of actual sleep you actually get, not the amount of time you spend in bed.

Both of the short books I mentioned in this article are available on Amazon as Kindle e-books:
Sleep: a time management strategy
Slowing Down the Speed of Life