Here’s Proof You Don’t Have To Sacrifice Sleep to Succeed

Lightspan Digital, a Chicago based digital marketing agency did something quite surprising in past week; the company sent out an email to all its employees reminding them to sleep.

The initiative was from the president of the company, Mana Ionescu, who is a big fan of sleep. Being a devotee of fitness trainer Jillian Michaels, Ionescu forwarded an email from the trainer emphasizing the benefits of sleep to all staff in her company.

Sleep is often overlooked or is easily sacrificed so that people can advance their careers or meet deadlines at work. The ideal quantity of sleep should be about eight hours of sleep every night. The American work culture has been unfriendly often giving greater value and responsibilities to people who grind away at work at the expense of their sleep. People who place value on sleep are deemed weak and lazy for aiming to sleep the recommended amount of sleep hours.

A great deal of airtime is given to business leaders across the different sectors of the economy who claim to get by with very few hours of sleep. The individuals who get by with more hours of sleep are rarely given airtime. Instead, the population is bombarded with titles such as: “19 Successful People Who Barely Sleep”, “The secret of success: Needing less sleep?” and “Do history's greatest figures owe their success to sleeping LESS?”

Continued compromise of sleep quantity and sleep quality does not only hurt the executives but it is hurting the greater population. The lack of sleep causes people to function at a lower than optimal level. Research shows that in the work setting, the compromised ability to function will mean that money making opportunities are missed. The study undertaken in 2013 at the Harvard Medical School revealed that American companies lose approximately $63.2 billion annually due to sleep deprivation.

Business and corporate leaders are now getting enlightened and are following in the footsteps of trailblazers such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who have been bragging about getting eight hours of sleep a night at least since 1999.

These leaders are now supporting research findings and initiatives towards rectifying the sleep problem. The realization that bosses will become mean and workers become less productive in the situations when they don’t get a good night's sleep. Sleep has thus become an important predictor of the ability to get our jobs done well that getting one extra hour a night can increase wages by 16 percent a year on average, according to a study by economics graduate students at the University of California, San Diego. This is the equivalent of an extra year of education.

Sleep will have to be prioritized according to Pat Byrne, the founder of Fatigue Science, a company that works with athletes and companies to help them use sleep to increase performance. Pat insists that sleep is as important as water and food.

Read the full story here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/17/importance-of-sleep_n_6697650.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

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