Sleep & Leadership

Anyone who tells you that s/he only gets 4-5 hours of sleep a night is either inaccurate, lying, or next in line for a heart attack or a stroke.

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, Ph.D. ?(Simon & Schuster, 2017).

Overview. What happens when you don’t get enough quality sleep? Bad stuff. However, a good night’s sleep of 7-9 hours helps you learn—absorb and store— information easier and longer. The healthy awake-sleep cycle is 16 hours awake and 8 hours asleep. Medically, quality sleep helps a host of issues, including overall well-being. Poor sleep increases our probability of cancer, diabetes, and heart attacks. Humans are the only creatures who alter their own sleep—we stay up too late and have poor sleep discipline. Emotional and mental health are affected by sleep or the lack of it. Indeed, the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, becomes 60% more hyperactive with poor sleep and leads to serious mood swings and irrational decision-making. Accelerated neurological research on Direct Brain Stimulation continues to promise hope for a sleep-deprived world. Later school starts to increase student performance by a significant factor—well worth considering for most school systems. Even our basic genes are impacted by sleep deficit. In “short sleep” people, particular genes get switched off and on, and that impacts their functioning. The message: Pay close attention to your sleep.

1.????Learning. You need sleep after learning and before learning to “future-proof” your brain. Without sleep, the brain cannot absorb information. In an experiment, a group that got sleep following learning and a deprivation group were placed in an MRI scanner to learn new facts and be tested on comprehension. A comparison of the two groups revealed a 40% deficit in memorizing facts without quality sleep. It essentially makes the difference between acing and failing an exam! Two key types of sleep are at work during sleep: Non-Rapid-Eye-Movement (NREM) and Rapid-Eye-Movement (REM). To explain, the hippocampus (home of short-term memory) is the inbox of your brain; it receives and holds all incoming data. During healthy NREM sleep (between 11 PM and 3 AM), data gets cleared out of the inbox—shifted from the hippocampus to the cerebral cortex (home of long-term memory). During REM sleep (3-7 AM), the brain is very active—dreaming and strengthening, associating and forming useful neural connections to integrate new data into the brain. Thus, healthy sleep is two-tiered. Tier one refreshes your brain (cleans the slate) during NREM sleep, allowing us to refill the hippocampus the next day with new information. Tier two—REM sleep integrates new information to add to our reservoir of knowledge.

2.????Medical. The deep quality of sleep gets worse with age. Disruption of deep sleep contributes to memory decline and Alzheimer’s as well. But we may be able to do something about it. Taking sleeping pills is not the best option. They can hurt us in many ways, become psychologically addictive, don’t give us REM sleep. But Direct Current Stimulation (DCS)—small electrodes through pads on the skull that transmit direct current to the brain—shows promising results and may double memory retention of new information. Although on a fast track at the FDA, DCS is at the experimental stage. [We are warned not to buy them on the Internet, because they can damage our brains if used incorrectly.] But when DCS is perfected, it may well be a huge help for aging adults with Alzheimer’s.

3.????Education. Strongly consider later school start times. For example, Adeana, Minnesota, experimented with moving school start times from 7:25 to 8:30AM.?As a metric, they used SAT scores from the top 10% of their students. SAT scores for the early start students averaged 1288. Those who started school later got average SAT scores of 1500! Such a leap changes the types of schools available to applicants. Further results: Academic success increases, behavioral problems decrease, truancy and psychiatric issues decrease. Car crashes (leading cause of death for teens) were lowered by a whopping 70%. By contrast, anti-lock brakes—heralded as a huge breakthrough—dropped car crashes by only 20-25%.

4.????Emotional and Mental Health. With sleep deprivation, we become hyperactive and irrational—our moods swing between anger and elation. A lack of sleep has a destabilizing influence on our brain. The amygdala, located close to the hippocampus, is the centerpiece (ground zero) for strong emotional reactions. Like a smoke detector, it protects us from harm with its quick reaction to potential and actual threat. With a proper amount of sleep, it’s controlled, but sleep deprivation makes it 60% more reactive! This is a neurological reaction but can look like mental illness—think temporary insanity. All mental illnesses, including depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, usually display abnormal sleep patterns. Indeed, healthy sleep may well prevent grave mental illness.

5.????Physical. Just one week of shortened sleep and blood sugar can test as prediabetic. One hour of disruption, such as daylight savings time, has a major effect on our bodies. In spring, when we lose just one hour of sleep, across populations humans experience a 24% increase in heart attacks in the ensuing months. However, in the fall, when we gain one hour more of sleep, humans experience a 21% decrease in heart attacks. Even small losses in sleep have catastrophic effects. Take our immune system.?We have natural “killer cells,” like secret agents—assassins for the immune system—that identify malignant cells and kill them. Sleep restricted to only 4 hours in one single night drops such killer cell activity by 70%, making you very, very vulnerable. There is a powerful link between short sleep and cancer—especially bowel, prostate and breast cancer. So strong is this sleep-cancer link that the World Health Organization has classified the nighttime shift, which interferes with sleep cycles, as a possible carcinogen. If fighting a disease like cancer, you must get sleep. Cancer in test mice that are sleep deprived showed a 200% growth as well as metastasis. Bottom line: Short sleep predicts a shorter life.

6.????Genetics. In healthy adults who were limited to 6 hours of sleep a night for a week as compared to the prescribed 8 hours, half of their 771 genes were distorted by less sleep. Some gene activity increased, but half decreased and were directly related to the immune system. The genes that increased promoted tumors, inflammation, and stress. Lack of sleep is genetic modification on ourselves! Unfortunately, 1 of every 2 adult Americans is trying to get by on only 6 hours of sleep a night. Sleep is a biological necessity—a life-support system—and sleep loss leaks into every part of our body, including our genes. By mandating schedules that disrupt normal sleep cycles, we are creating public health challenges in industrialized nations.

Sleep Recommendation: 7-9 hours at night and a ~30 min. nap in the afternoon.

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, Ph.D. ?(Simon & Schuster, 2017).

Watch Matthew Walker’s Ted Talk on Sleep https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpower\