We’ve all experienced it: the crushing weight of trying to drag yourself through a workday when you just haven’t had enough sleep the night before.
It’s not just unpleasant; it makes everything harder and erodes the quality, accuracy, and creativity of your work (not to mention affecting your ability to collaborate with colleagues).
And if you manage people, their sleep issues can invisibly undermine all the good things you do: someone who’s suffering from sleep problems will be far less receptive to even the best management and culture in the world. If your people haven’t slept well, it will be hard even to get their attention, much less their full engagement.
Few things in work are more important—but few are so rarely discussed. We’d like to help change that. Your workday demands energy that only sleep can provide.
Consider the many demands your workday makes:
- You have to maintain focus, solve problems, make decisions, and recall important information.
- You have to collaborate with your colleagues and empathize with their concerns.
- You need to be “on” for client calls or internal meetings.
- And you need the physical stamina to make it through the day.
For all these challenges, sleep is brain food. And it’s not just the quantity that counts—it’s the quality too. It has a profound impact on your neurological performance.
Said simply: the better you sleep, the better (and happier) you work.
You notice this most on days when you’re flat-out exhausted. But the effect is always there.
You may not notice the difference between six hours of sleep and eight—but your brain and your body most certainly do.
Sleep affects your workday. Every day.
If you’re suffering from poor sleep, you’re not alone. More than one-third of Americans aren’t getting enough sleep, and the Centers for Disease Control has designated lack of quality sleep as an official public health problem.
The first step in solving a problem is to understand it. So let’s step through seven of the less obvious ways that sleep affects your working day.
Cognitive ability and task focus
Cognition is your ability to reason, plan, learn, and solve problems. Whenever you come up against a new or challenging situation at work, your cognitive skills come into play.
The most basic cognitive skill is attention: the ability to focus on the task at hand. But when you haven’t slept enough, your mind loses focus, gets hazy, and wanders off topic.
To colleagues, that can look like you’re not engaged or just don’t care—even if that’s the opposite of how you really feel.
Memory and recall
Think about all the things you know about the work you do. Everything from working processes and practical techniques to names of contacts is stored within your brain. If you can’t recall vital facts, you can’t use them. And without quality sleep, your recall suffers.
Problem solving and decision-making
Lack of sleep puts your rational brain out of whack. You’re more likely to make poor decisions, which makes it harder to plan projects, define goals, and evaluate risks. You’ll also find it tough to come to grips with complex problems.
As work becomes more and more complex—and more interdependent—your ability to navigate everything depends on healthful sleep.
Creativity
REM sleep is when your brain is most active and your dreams are most vivid. This phase is essential for building creativity—in fact, people even solve creative problems in their sleep.
So make sure you get enough REM sleep, or you won’t be throwing out any great ideas in a brainstorming session or delivering standout creative work.
Mood
Without sleep, you’re more susceptible to mood swings and even depressive episodes. These could spiral into more serious mental wellness issues.
At work, that could translate into grouching at a coworker without good reason or flying into a rage over a minor issue. When you’ve had a good night’s sleep, you’re far more likely to respond to all sorts of situations with balance and equanimity and to give your colleagues the benefit of the doubt.
Reading emotions and empathy
Sleep deprivation affects your ability to recognize what other people are feeling and can also erode your emotional empathy.
Emotional literacy is a key workplace skill. If you’re not in tune with the emotions of those around you, it will be harder to lead a meeting, manage a team, negotiate a deal, or conduct an interview. And any highly sensitive interactions—such as performance reviews—could more easily tilt the wrong way.
Physical effects
Poor sleep has a real impact on your body, especially if it continues for several nights in a row. You start getting sleepy during waking hours, attention drifts, and reaction time suffers.
If you work in an office, feeling drowsy might make you slump down in your seat. Over time, poor posture can lead to headaches, back pain, and disrupted digestion.
In some settings, since daytime fatigue affects your ability to react to hazards at a moment’s notice, it could be a matter of life or death. If you didn’t sleep well, don’t get behind the wheel or operate heavy machinery.
How to sleep better
We’ve looked at a whole range of problems that can result from poor sleep. But on the flip side, they all represent opportunities to improve your physical and mental wellness—and your work—through better sleep.
Above all, respect your sleep. It’s more than just downtime. Alongside diet and exercise, it’s a vital part of your wellness regimen.
Creating a better sleep environment—a supportive bed and a cool, dark room—will definitely help. But the most important step is to adopt better sleep habits, such as adopting a regular bedtime and choosing activities that slow you down before bed, and let your mind let go.
Calm’s Sleep Stories, meditations, music, and soundscapes can help, too—and we’re big believers in the short, restorative nap (working from home makes that a lot easier).
Let’s put sleep on the management agenda
Given how important sleep is to everyone’s happiness and well-being at work, it’s surprising how little it’s discussed at work.
We can all be part of the solution, with open conversations, recognition of the challenges, and wellness programs that play an active role in improving everyone’s sleep.
So instead of being an invisible inhibitor of workplace happiness and engagement, sleep can be a major force for good.
Explore the impact of sleep on employee well-being in our infographic, here. And to learn how Calm can help your employees rest better, book a demo here.
