Why sleep is key to high performance

When was the last time that someone picked you up and moved you to a different location while you were asleep - and you didn’t wake up? Probably not since childhood.?Children sleep so deeply and ‘Full On’ that you can pick them up, move them, and not risk waking them.?Yet, we struggle to sleep that deeply into adulthood. Sleep is the foundation of physical and mental health but many of our clients and community admit their sleep is limited and poor quality. Do you prioritise sleep like you do your career, family time, nutrition or exercise? If not, it’s time you did.

This article will explore the rise of sleeplessness, the risks associated with it, and what steps you can take to become a sleep master.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP

Have you ever experienced disrupted sleep when you are under stress or when travelling? It’s a common problem and being sleep deprived can become the norm for us. We forget what it feels like to be fully rested and so our base line or what daily ‘good’ feels like lowers. Tiredness becomes our natural state and therefore we normalise it. If you’re tired every morning when you wake up, you aren’t sleeping enough or getting the right quality of sleep.

It’s time for a wake-up call. If you are chronically under-sleeping, you are doing serious damage to your health, performance, as well as to your relationships and career.

If you’re tired every morning when you wake up, you aren’t sleeping enough or getting the right quality of sleep.

Studies have proven that not getting enough good quality sleep (between 7 – 9 hours for adults aged 26 - 64) each night can have a wide range of negative effects on our health, including impairing our immune system and significantly increasing our risk of heart attacks, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.? As neuroscientist and author of Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker, summarises: “The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.”

On the mental health front, a pattern of poor sleep can lead to depression.?It can even delete our memories by impacting how our brain sifts through all of the information you come across during the day to process our memories. This impacts our ability to retain new information and learn, while we will forget things we already ‘know’.

There are also knock-on effects that lack of sleep has on our thinking and emotions. We are all familiar with how sluggish and irritable we can feel when tired. I’m a fan of Arianna Huffington’s book Thrive, which focuses significantly on sleep and the way the identity and sense of status for an ‘executive’ (or any of us) can become wrapped up in the idea that sleeping very little is a sign of our ‘importance’, dedication to hard work and delivering results.?Huffington is a self-described ‘sleep evangelist’ and believes: “Rob yourself of sleep and you’ll find that you do not function at your personal best. This is true of work decisions, relationship challenges, or any life decision that requires judgement, emotional equilibrium, problem solving and creativity.” Later, in my tips on how to improve your sleep, I include an action from her book that I have implemented that works really well for me and those in our community I recommend it to.

“Rob yourself of sleep and you’ll find that you do not function at your personal best. This is true of work decisions, relationship challenges, or any life decision that requires judgement, emotional equilibrium, problem solving and creativity.” Huffington

Studies have shown that managing emotions, decision-making, and consolidating learning are deeply affected by how much sleep we get. Bill Clinton famously only used to sleep 5 hours a night. “Every important mistake I’ve made in my life,” he once said, “I’ve made because I was too tired.” By neglecting our sleep, we are sending the worst version of ourselves into the parts of our lives that matter to us the most. This is why sleeping less to work more is counterproductive.?

THE PHYSICAL AND CULTURAL CAUSES OF THE MODERN POOR SLEEP ENDEMIC

There are multiple reasons why we now sleep less. First, there are the physical causes, such as over exposure to caffeine and electric and LED lighting - these interfere with the hormonal system that runs our circadian rhythm. On a simpler level, having access to electrical lighting, as well as all of the devices electricity affords us, means that we are often staying up much later than we’ve evolved to do. My great grandmother (Little Nan who lived to 99!) used to describe how before, everyone went to bed very early. “Candles were expensive”, she’d say, “and when the wick ran out, it was time for bed!”

Secondly, there are also cultural factors. For example, Albibaba founder Jack Ma publicly endorsed what is known as the ‘996’ work culture in China (working from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week). “I personally think 996 is a huge blessing,” he said. “How do you achieve the success you want without paying extra effort and time?” Clearly in his definition, success doesn’t include mastering work-life balance and quality time with family, friends, and hobbies.

Whilst Ma is far from alone in his thinking, some companies are starting to look at sleep from another angle. P&G and Goldman Sachs both now offer their employees ‘sleep hygiene courses’ (sleep hygiene is the habits and routines in our daily lives which influence sleep), while Nike and Google have gone further, allowing more flexible working hours according to employees sleeping patterns and even installing sleeping pods in their offices for employees to use when tired.

I have worked with one President of a global organisation who actively encourages her teams to prioritise their sleep, including taking naps in the day if they need to. She counts her own discipline of sleeping 8 hours every night as a contributing factor to her high performance. It’s interesting that many company offices now have sleep pods, yet they are rarely utilised. There is still a stigma around sleeping and working, despite research showing that because of our melatonin and circadian rhythm a nap in the afternoon improves our performance.

There are times when it’s not possible to sleep for as long as we need to, when the demands on us are high. It’s critical that we don’t allow lack of sleep to become a habit, and that we prioritise recharging time if this happens.

prioritise recharging time

5 STEPS TO INCREASE AND IMPROVE OUR SLEEP

Aside from sleep disorders and unavoidable bouts of insomnia, for most of us improving our sleep comes down to taking care of our sleep hygiene. Build a routine before bed, a habit, just like you would with a baby to help them sleep.

Find what works for you - a warm bath, reading in bed, meditating or sleep visualisation, this is a very personal process but it’s worth putting in the effort to create healthy habits that work for you. A few deep breaths can make a big impact. Huffington goes further and talks about the need to us to wholeheartedly commit to sleep preparation, including the recommendation to wear pyjamas instead of drifting to bed in sportswear. Send the signals to your brain that it’s time to sleep, not hit the gym!

Here are our 4 practical and easy-to-implement steps that you can make to improve our sleep hygiene, which will make an immediate improvement to both our physical and mental wellbeing.

1. Cut down on caffeine

In healthy adults, caffeine has a half-life of 5 - 6 hours, meaning that if we have our final cup of coffee at 5pm, half of its caffeine content will still be circulating in our system at 10pm. As caffeine works by suppressing our adenosine receptors, which play a crucial role in us falling asleep, the consequences of the day’s coffee(s) can be felt long after their consumption. It is also worth noting that decaffeinated coffee still contains between 15 – 30% of the caffeine of normal coffee, so though switching to it would be an improvement for most people, it wouldn’t be a total cure.

ACTION: I love tea and coffee. One of our biggest clients is the 2nd biggest coffee company in the world, so rest assured, I’m not suggesting you have to cut it out altogether. Instead, make a small shift and drink coffee up to 2 or 3pm. Notice what difference this makes to you at night.

2. Cut down on alcohol

Alcohol is often associated with aiding sleep. However, the sleep induced by alcohol is of a much inferior quality to natural, non-drug induced sleep. When the body metabolises alcohol, it produces by-product chemicals called aldehydes and ketones, which are two of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep (a crucial stage of sleep responsible for dreaming and memory consolidation). It also adversely impacts our heart-rate variability – the measure we can use to identify the quality of our cell recovery.?Therefore the more you drink, the worse you sleep.

ACTION: Again, drink earlier in the day (I don’t mean breakfast!) so that your body is able to metabolise the units before it’s time to sleep. And when you know that there is going to be a big demand of you, our recommendation is don’t drink at all. Notice how much more awake you feel in the morning compared with days when you have a couple of glasses of wine.

3. Limit very rich and heavy meals before bed

Initially, being very full can send us to sleep. When our bodies are working hard to digest a large quantity of different food groups at once, our body sends us signals that it’s time to sleep in order to prioritise using energy to digest instead of being awake. However, at night all this hard work digesting can reduce the effectiveness of your re-charging period and leave you tossing and turning or waking regularly.

ACTION: Eat a little earlier, a little lighter, or both, eat and chew slowly, and have a bigger breakfast instead.?

4. Control our temperature

In order to fall asleep, our core temperature needs to fall by about one degree Celsius. The ideal room temperature to attain this is 18 degrees Celsius. In our modern world of central heating, double-glazed windows and down duvets, the need for a cooler room at night is often overlooked.

ACTION: As part of you sleep hygiene routine, check your thermostat is at the correct setting and that your sheets are right for you. When you’re travelling ensure that you cool or heat your room early enough so that you’re ready to hit the lights quickly.

5. Manage your light exposure

“Despite being just 1 to 2 percent of the strength of daylight,” writes Matthew Walker in Why We Sleep, “[the light of a subtly lit living room] can have 50 percent of the melatonin-suppressing influence within the brain.” LED lighting has an even more powerful sleep-supressing strength, which is why anyone struggling to sleep should avoid all screens in the hours before they go to sleep.?

At the other end of the spectrum, getting natural sunlight into your eyes during the day, preferably in the morning, is important for helping your body to regulate your circadian rhythm. Spending all day indoors without getting out and about could make it harder to fall asleep come night time.

ACTION: Turn off all visible lights emitted by chargers and appliances to secure a room dark enough for a decent night’s sleep. Get rid of digital alarm clocks with illuminated displays and night lights. Turn off your mobile phone or put it on airplane mode so you don’t get notifications during the night and make sure it is face down. One client I have worked with in the device industry recommends keeping the phone in another room while you sleep and getting an old-fashioned alarm clock instead… because how many of us check emails or Facebook on our device before bed? “Just in case”? Our phones have been designed by tech-geniuses to get us to check them and interact with them.

Trial a ‘digital detox’ - no screens - for an hour before bedtime; work with our bodies and help to give us the physiological signals that help us.

BREAKING-THROUGH BARRIERS TO SLEEP

At Breakthrough Global we practice what we preach, and we are champions of the benefits of quality sleep. In fact, it forms a critical part of how our Programmes are designed, ensuring our participants get the most out of their time with us, and therefore the best return on investment of their own time.

First, our Programmes are residential, working like a retreat, and there are many reasons for this. Having several full nights of quality sleep, away from the ‘business as usual’ of our daily lives, allows participants to focus fully on themselves and build in recovery and regeneration time. We’ve found that sleep also breaks down our barriers to change and transformation. With a full night’s rest before a Programme, participants can be fully present, demonstrate less resistance, and be more open to new experiences and perspectives. And the behavioural and neuroscience of how our brains re-wire overnight backs this up. No school runs in the morning, no early morning meetings, no late-night calls. Our participants are there and ready to work ON the business and ON themselves, not IN the business or busy-ness of life.

We work directly with our clients and hotels to design healthy menus, food that isn’t too heavy and focuses on slow energy release, to ensure participants have the best chance of staying energised during the day and sleeping well at night. Most importantly we don’t serve alcohol. This is often a surprise for some of our clients (and something they always seem to remember years on!). However, when it comes to performance, and the demands are high, we know this is the best way to set them up for success. Those who choose to take this on gain valuable insights from the experience and recognise the numerous benefits to their energy levels, ability to concentrate on the business, improved mood, less hunger, and even better-looking skin.

Over the last 3 years resilience has become the go-to desired outcome for organisations and the teams and individuals who make them a success. We started to implement optional resilience sessions before the pandemic, but since then have incorporated these valuable learnings into our Breakthrough Programmes, to help leaders to take control and ownership of their resilience, starting with how we sleep. These sessions have been so popular that we have designed a new Healthy Organisation Programme, focused on improving leader and organisation health in order to raise performance.

Want to learn more about our new Healthy Organisation Programme, find out more about Breakthrough, or ask a question about this article? Get in touch with us?at [email protected] to start the conversation.

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/mental-health

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/memory-and-sleep

https://www.amazon.com/Thrive-Redefining-Success-Creating-Well-Being/dp/0804140863

https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/napping-may-not-be-such-a-no-no#:~:text=As%20you%20might%20expect%2C%20the,way%20to%20accommodate%20that%20hump.

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