There exists a potion that can help you increase your efficiency at work, it comes absolutely free of cost and improves your overall health. Such a drink doesn’t exist in reality, but its alternative i.e. A Good Sleep does.
Though the two words, Sleep and Productivity, may sound contrasting to you on the surface level, the truth is that there are copious scientific shreds of evidence that good sleep improves productivity. This blog focuses on decoding sleep and derives understanding on how it can help bolster our throughput. Let’s dive in:
Decoding Sleep
On average, a human adult spends 36% of his or her life asleep. This is more than one-third of our time on this planet. Let us understand this transition from an active, aggressive, and thoughtful being during the day time to an inert, quit, and hibernation state at night.
Purpose of Sleep
Sleep serves multiple purposes that are crucial for the normal functioning of our physical and mental health. Let us drill down a bit on some of the most important ones.
1. Restoration
The brain is unarguable, the most important part of our body. All around the clock while we are awake, the brain accumulates a lot of waste. Our brain needs to get rid of this waste on a frequent basis. Sleep is a crucial process and instrumental in getting rid of toxins. While we are asleep, our brain shrinks 60% in size. This allows the waste removal system in our brain called “the glymphatic system” to clean the brain. Resulting you waking up refreshed and with a clearer mind.
2. Memory Consolidation
Good sleep helps in strengthening your long term memory and helps in its consolidation. Both emotional as well factual memory is highly contingent on the quality of sleep, viz-a-viz fragmented or no sleep affects your memory.
3. Maintains metabolism
Good sleep improves and boosts metabolism in multiple ways. Insufficient sleep of around 3 to 5 hours per night can lead to more of your energy burn from proteins and carbohydrates and almost negligible from fat leading to an increase in fat and muscle loss.
How much sleep do you need to be productive?
There is no objective answer to this question. You will get a dozen different responses if you ask a dozen people. Some may say that they require solid nine-hour sleep or some are content with just six. Researchers say that typically a person needs six to eight hours of sleep. There’s a small chunk of the population that requires only five hours of sleep and another group on the other side of the scale that requires nine to ten hours of sleep. So the answer to this question is “It depends”.
The past few years have seen the advent of technology around sleep tracking. It includes wearables like Fitbit, smartwatches like the latest apple watch, and specific sleep-trackers that are in the market like Nokia Sleep. These devices can give some level of analysis to different phases of your sleep.
To summarize:
- Try to seek six to eight hours of sleep to maximize your output at work
- If you’re sleeping for the prescribed timings and still feel tired, try using a sleep tracker of some kind
- If your tracker shows fewer hours of a deep sleep, you may consult a medical practitioner for deeper analysis
How to Improve your sleep?
No screens before bed
Learn to put down your computer screens, smartphones, television off. The light emitted from these devices can hinder your sleep. Exposure to the light affects the production of melatonin in your body and keeps your body from entering the ‘sleep phase’. Especially, the blue wavelength of light from screens drastically affects melatonin production. One should make it a habit to turn down all electronic appliances couple of hours before bed.
No carbohydrates or alcohol before bed
Carbohydrates are complex substances and can potentially keep you up, and negatively impact the quality of sleep if consumed just before going to bed. Even alcohol for that matter brakes down into complex sugar and carbohydrates, which can have similar results.
Prepare for sleep and make a routine
Contrary to the popular notion that sleep just happens. In reality, we need to get ourselves ready for it. We should create a routine at night that directs us to sleep better and wind down. Following are some behaviors one can adopt to increase the chances of getting good sleep:
- Dim the lights in the atmosphere, hours before the bed
- Do not lie down on your bed with any electronic device
- Change your clothes just before you are ready to go to sleep
- Once in bed, you should read a book
