Defence

Work Life

Awake is not the new Sleep

By Kathryn Fitch

Shall I tell you a bedtime story?

Once upon a time there was a Busy Executive. He loved his job, constructing such works of wizardry that his superiors were dumbfounded and delighted. His staff adored and admired him. Each night he went home and slept the deep, satisfied sleep of an honest day's work done well.

One night, very much like every other night, the Busy Executive climbed into bed and turned off the light. Staring at the dark ceiling he was surprised to find he just couldn't sleep. After several nights of not sleeping and when he started to struggle to spell words like 'and' and 'who', he decided he didn't love his job as much as he had thought any more. His ashen-faced staff hid under their desks as he snapped and snarled his way through the day. His superiors scratched their heads and wondered what had gone wrong and sent the Busy Executive to see the HR Fairy.

When the Busy Executive darkened the HR Fairy's doorway, she took one look at him, reached into her cupboard of tricks and gave him a magic pillow. She sent him home to sleep, which he did. After a good night's sleep he woke up refreshed. His employees were relieved to see him smiling again and came out from under their desks. His superiors were happy to see their star employee functioning once more and gave the HR Fairy a big fat pay-rise and everyone lived happily ever after.

Okay, so I made up the last bit about the HR fairy, but I'm sure the rest of the story might sound familiar to some people. We've all had an occasional bad night's sleep that left us hallucinating through an apparent out-of-body-experience the next day, but for 20-30 percent of the population, getting a proper night's sleep is a real problem. Unfortunately, research indicates it will impact on their ability to do their job and if it's ongoing, can eventually adversely affect their health.

"If people don't get enough sleep it can make them cranky and short-tempered, which can cause social problems like arguments at work," Dr Naomi Rogers from the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, says.

"It can have a serious impact on performance. People will start to make mistakes and have problems maintaining concentration while doing repetitive or boring tasks. Lack of sleep will also impact your memory and reaction times."

"It can also have an effect on a person's health, making them more susceptible to colds and flu. Research has indicated that people who sleep less than 6 hours have an increased occurrence of heart disease and some studies have linked lack of sleep with obesity and diabetes."

So who is Dr Rogers? She is the National Health Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Howard Florey Centenary Research Fellow at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in the Sleep and Circadian Research Group. When it comes to research into 'magic pillows', Doctor Rogers is your woman.

So if lack of sleep can cause serious problems, how much sleep should people be getting? Well, according to Dr Rogers, you should be sleeping long enough to wake up feeling refreshed. The actual length of time that will be varies from person to person, but is likely to be around 8 hours.

In exceptional circumstances, such as an emergency deployment, an average worker might suffer total sleep deprivation but this is usually linked to an event and not likely to be ongoing. The average worker is more likely to encounter two other types of sleeping problems:

• Chronic sleep restriction - routinely sleeping less than needed. This is usually voluntary, meaning that the person chooses another activity over sleeping often trying to cram more into an already busy life; or
• Sleep disturbances - having an interrupted sleep, so that a full night's sleep isn't achieved. New parents and people with medical disorders would be familiar with this.

A study conducted a number of years ago demonstrated the above situations should be a cause for concern. Groups of people whose sleep was restricted were studied and not surprisingly their performance deteriorated over a period of time. What was perhaps more worrying was that while the participants perceived their performance had deteriorated, they thought it reached a plateau when in fact it continued to get worse. This effectively means that if you are sleep deprived you are probably underestimating how badly it is affecting you.

While you might think that you are still able to function, your ability to make that judgement is actually impaired. To put this into perspective, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau says 20 percent of driving accidents on Australian roads can be attributed to fatigue.

Still not convinced? Poor decisions made due to a lack of sleep have been found to be a contributing factor in the Exxon, Chernobyl and Challenger disasters.

So if you can't trust your own judgement, how are you supposed to know if you should be getting more sleep? Telling signs include falling asleep in strange places like on public transport, or needing to sleep in on weekends. But face it, if it hurts when your alarm goes off in the morning, or you find yourself struggling to concentrate mid afternoon because you are drowsy, then get to bed early and see if it makes a difference. An extra hour or two is not going to hurt and it might just do you the world of good.

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