Sleep Time

Hamlet:

"To sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there's the rub."

Do you experience apathy? Is your speech slurred, and your memory impaired? Does multi-tasking hurt your brain?  If so, you may not be drunk...you might be sleepy. I probably won't get many arguments by stating that we should all get more rest.  Who doesn't like to catch up on sleep?  What puzzles me is the fervor in which some workers regularly schedule sleep out of their daily schedules...and it is making you CRAZY.  


So why are people doing this?  Studies have shown that the people who regularly suffer from sleep deprivation have the following 2 things in common:

• They have others to care for at home
• Their job prevents them from obtaining regular sleep

The American Psychological Association says:

"Having a 24/7 lifestyle can also interrupt regular sleep patterns: the global economy that includes round the clock industries working to beat the competition; widespread use of nonstop automated systems to communicate and an increase in shift work makes for sleeping at regular times difficult."

The human adult is optimized to stay awake for around 15 hours a day.  How many hours to do you devote to work a day including travel time to the office?  10, 12 hours?  How many hours does that leave in a day to take care of your home, self, family?  Not very much if you ask  me, and I don't even have kids!  

As an IT worker, it is common for me to work long, strange hours.  This has often caused sleep issues for me.  At one job in my past, at a major Fortune 50 company, I was required to wear and respond to a pager.  One night, that thing did not stop going off all night and I got no sleep at all.  I was still required to go in to work the next day and be on call the next night.  It was at that time in my evolution of an IT worker that I developed the ability to answer and delete pages in my sleep. No joke! I was so stressed and exhausted that I think my brain was going through some desperate motions to save myself.  My boss wasn't very happy, though.

I ended up quitting that job for a better one.  I made it a point to never allow myself to be treated like that again.  I chose to quit because the reason why I was asked to do so much work was due to the inability of management to adhere to an SDLC for its products that caused many bugs in released versions.  They just expected their techies to support, report, and provide ad hoc fixes for the crap they shoveled out.  Heck we were making these guys look like rock stars!  As long as the support staff continued to function under those conditions, we would be expected to keep it up.

Not getting enough sleep causes people to become depressed, too.  And guess what?  Depression and anxiety are another major reason for people not to get enough sleep.  Some people don't get enough sleep, but don't even realize it.  That's because sleep loss also causes poor decision-making, especially if the decision is between making money and sleeping.

So what's another way to tell if you aren't getting enough sleep?  One way is to try to remember what you dreamed about in the morning.  If you aren't dreaming and remembering at least one dream a week, I'll bet you aren't sleeping enough.  That is your body is trying to tell you something and if your priorities continue to be skewed in the wrong direction, your health will suffer and so will your productivity.  


After all, Hamlet wasn't really waxing poetic about getting sleep, he was thinking what it must be like to die. Get some sleep and don't make yourself crazy.  Most of us will appreciate it even if your boss needs a reality check. You only get one life to live.