Does Sleep Impact Work Habits?

Have you ever been in a situation where someone tells you that you need to have better sleeping routine so you can reduce stress in your life? Or when you have been trying to lose weight, and someone tells you need to focus a lot on getting proper hours of sleep? Well, believe it or not, power nap plays a huge role in your life. Not getting enough of it can lead to numerous issues; long term and short term.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), sleeping is the first thing that disrupts when you get busy with life. It is one of those things we tend to take for granted. When your work schedule gets too much to handle, or you are loaded with parental duties, we tend to not to give our body enough resting hours. If you are wondering why you aren’t sleeping enough, there could be numerous reasons for it. One of them is not giving sleep the importance it deserves. It is important for people to have boundaries between their home and work life.

If you are into fitness, for example, you may have heard how sleep can actually cause hindrance to your weight loss progress. On an average, an adult needs 7 to 9 hours of sleep to aid them in their fitness regime. And not just fitness – do be aware mentally of your surroundings and to be perform well at your work, you need to be in a state of mind where your brain is functional and aware. Getting enough sleep can get you these privileges.

But let’s talk about how sleep can affect your productivity. Aforementioned we have established how poor sleep can raise negative impacts on your body. The longer the hours of work are, the more you get tired, which means you are prone to making more mistakes, be sluggish towards your work and even experience creativity blocks. The thing about not getting enough sleep is that even if you are not putting an extra amount of working hours, you won’t have the required mental state to devote yourself to work with the concentration and effort it requires.

Number 1 Killer of Productivity:Insufficient Sleeping Hours

The biggest, perhaps the foremost barrier towards the productivity of an individual is having insufficient sleep. When you are not feeding your body enough hours of sleep, the productivity suffers. You will react slow and have less energy. You will find it difficult to solve problems and make effective decisions. If you know colleagues (or maybe you are that colleague) who is always yawning at workplace and is never participating at workplace, maybe sleep deprivation is the answer for you.

Most often, sleep deprivation drains us emotionally, physically and mentally. Lack of sleep loses the focus throughout the day. Whatever we learn during that time, we forget it instantly because that is how our brain functions.

Number 2 Killer of Productivity: Irregular Sleep

When sleep is inconsistent, it leads to lack of productivity at work and in life in general. When sleep gets irregular, the cognitive abilities of an individual decline. Conclusively, getting regular sleep is as important is the amount of hours needed. One should not ignore the internal body clock as it can lead to serious shocks to one’s productivity. This can be seen from those who work at night as night-shift workers. Their schedules are flipped and there are studies that reveal the performance challenges that vary from on-the-job challenges to impaired focus that can lead to loss of productivity, and consequences such as drastic weight loss, drowsiness and more.

Having a healthy lifestyle is very important. When we talk about a healthy life, we do not mean just diet and working out. Sleep is also factored into the proportion. The relationship shared between productivity and sleep goes both ways. When poor sleep reduces your productivity, good nap increases it. When you give your body enough sleep, here are some benefits you will get out of it:

• Better reaction time
• Better decision-making skills and judgment
• Improved well-being of memory
• Better creativity and flow
• Better problem-solving performance
• More accuracy, few errors
• Low chances of burnouts

What you need is good sleeping hours to enjoy these benefits to the fullest. But here’s the catch: despite sleeping enough, if your sleep is not deep enough, you won’t be able to reap the advantages to the fullest. Another example in this case is that those who suffer from nasal congestion may experience that their breathing is often impaired during sleep, which causes disrupted sleep, leading to reduced efficiency and productivity at work.

How to Fix Your Sleep Schedule

Now that we have established that sleep effects your productivity, it is now time to see how you need to fix this to give maximum performance at your jobs.

1. Understand your chronotype: you need to know whether you are early bird or a night owl. This is done by understanding the body clock; whether you are productive at day or at night. Instead of forcing yourself on the societal standards, do what makes you comfortable.
2. Have a calm routine for bed: you should train your mind that it is time for bed, therefore it needs to sleep. For every night, you need to do same activities on regular basis. This trains your mind to associate a set of activities with bedtime and hence, it will lead you towards sleep in no time.
3. Give yourself a peaceful environment: you just reserve your bed for just sex and sleep, nothing else. No TV, no hobbies, no work. Bed should be the place where you relax and therefore, you should bring any other activities to it.
4. Switch off your phone: it is true that electronics play a huge barrier towards sleeping patterns, and smartphone is a bigger blocker. Before going to bed, turn off your phone so you are no longer exposed to wavelength.

So, now you know everything there is to know about fixing your nap to have maximum productivity towards your work. Follow these tips and you will as active as you once were.

About the Author: This article is written by Vasy Kafidoff, who is a passionate IB extended essay writer at WritingMetier and likes to talk about sports and politics. He loves to sleep just as the person reading this.