Please, go to sleep!

Allow me to start this newsletter with a warning: do not follow my example.?

For the past few years, work as the CEO of Medix has been significantly increasing. While it is overall a blessing for which I’m very grateful for (and worked very hard for!), it does come with a price- while work, travel, and business opportunities have increased, my sleep hours have decreased. You see, being a CEO of a company that manages offices and serves clients from North America to Hong Kong, it means I have to remain active in more than one time zone. This results in me going to sleep very late, and waking up very early. In a nutshell: it’s good for business, it’s not good for my long-term health.

Sleeping is important for both our physical and mental health. The average person spends about a third of their lives sleeping. Physically, our sleeping time allows our bodies to resupply and store energy for our cells, repair and heal injuries, and maintain our brain functions. It is important for our heart and lung functions as well. Lack of sleep has been linked to many physical and mental ailments; it increases disorders such as high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, depression and anxiety.?

We are not getting enough sleep, globally. With everyday life being increasingly stressful and the workload and working hours continuing to grow (remote work making it only worse for global workforces), we find ourselves more often sacrificing our sleeping time, so we can manage our daily to-do lists. While the medically recommended amount of sleep is 7-9 hours for adults over 18, just over a third of adults in the US sleep that amount.

4.8 of 10 employees in the US report being regularly tired during the day, and 7 of 10 employees feel tired when the workday is done.

The CDC concluded in 2022, more than 1 in 3 Americans were sleep deprived. In the US alone, insufficient sleep has an estimated economic impact of 411 billion USD.

The situation outside the US isn’t better; Phillips Global Sleep Survey from 2019 showed that 62% of adults around the world are not sleeping as much as they’d like, and 44% are saying their quality of sleep has deteriorated over the past five years. A survey conducted by Statista suggests that, on average, only people from The Netherlands, New Zealand, France, and Australia sleep more than 8 hours per night? (the Netherlands leading the chart with an extra 5.22 minutes). The lowest performing countries were Germany, Brazil, Japan, and Singapore (with Singaporeans placed at the lowest, sleeping 36.23 minutes less than 8 hours per night). In Japan, insufficient sleep has an estimated economic impact of 138 billion USD a year. In Germany, the impact was 60 billion USD a year, and in the UK it is estimated at 50 billion USD a year.

Many solutions to this have been put forward, which included changes in lifestyle and sleep environment habits (namely, keeping electronics such as phones and TV away from your night-time routines!), or different sleeping hours and methods altogether (for example, the 5 am club). And while all of these are helpful in many cases, they are all concerning the individual; hardly any of them involve the workplace. We should perhaps consider a more holistic approach to mend this worldwide insomnia wave. After all, the benefits greatly outnumber the disadvantages. When we sleep more, we become better family members, better friends, and better colleagues. We also become better employees, as our performance quality improves. Most importantly, we maintain better physical and mental health.

And on that note, go to sleep!