Sleep Health = Personal & Professional ROI

Benjamin Franklin’s quotable advice to “watch the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves,” has endured through hundreds of years of people increasing their wealth through discipline, creativity, inheritance, and what another oft-quoted genius, Einstein, seriously joked to be the “eighth wonder of the world”: compound interest.

While this week’s SWORN Ready post is about sleep health, language and wisdom borrowed from personal finance can be powerful for those who seek to improve and maintain their health by investing in consistent and sufficient sleep.

From practical ways to account for, avoid and counter sleep-debt. Considering studies indicating that adding mere minutes a day of sleep can benefit mental, metabolic and hormonal health and well-being. The personal return on investment? from sufficient and consistent REM, Deep and Light sleep is among the top drivers for anyone becoming as “healthy, wealthy and wise” as they can be.?

For employers the ROI on employees who sleep well shows up directly in less illness, injury, accidents, incidents and their related costs, along with increased task and mission achievement and integrity.

So what would police, fire and emergency medical services - i.e., public safety - be like if the people doing the work slept better than they do now?? Depending on where a peace officer,? firefighter or EMT works,? overtime - forced and voluntary -? along with off-duty work can add up to an extra 1,000+ hours of annual work to a base schedule. By its very nature this work often occurs on different shifts that make the recommended consistency and sufficiency of sleep challenging, and can run alongside the cascading impacts of work-life imbalance that can challenge hearts, heads, bodies, relationships and wallets.?

In the face of these inherent challenges - including and not limited to when they’re exacerbated by staffing shortages -? some police and fire departments have implemented deployment, overtime and off-duty policies, procedures and systems that are mindful and strategic of when Officer Jones,? Firefighter Brown or EMT Smith work. Some give resources and run programs under varying titles of “health” and “safety” to literally comply with OSHA rules and norms, or in the absence of law and regulation, to make public service more attractive, sustainable and capable of the performance society demands.? The unfortunate reality is that too may departments have sleep strategies, policies and capabilities that are very limited or simply absent. The rules, limitations and incentives around sleep and hours that impact truckers, pilots, and certain operators of heavy equipment are plainer and more pervasive than those who carry guns, hoses and people in and out of cars, buildings and the criminal justice system.?

Meanwhile the circadian rhythms, cardiovascular, endocrine, nervous and musculoskeletal systems of the people who work these jobs push on. They flow or clog, become nimble and functional or brittle and broken based on what people put in their mouths, backs and minds - all of which is restored or diminished, and de-risked or risked based on how they sleep. As such sleep has a direct and measurable impact on daily readiness and a directional impact on resilience that shows up in life span and health span.

As SWORN helps first responders better track and manage their personal health, we are committed to sleep as a fundamental aspect for building personal health, wellness and resiliency through the SWORN Shield, and are impelmenting resources to advance sleep as the daily foundation of people, units and departments being SWORN Ready.