Why Sleep is the Secret Weapon of Effective Leadership
Leadership is about engagement, making decisions that have lasting impact, and building a strategy that brings the people and process elements together in harmony. All of those functions require intense concentration and powerful thinking. Wouldn’t it be scary if we knew that many leaders were doing those critical tasks impaired by something like drugs or alcohol? The reality is, often leaders are facing those types of decisions and important activities with something that creates a nearly equal impairment: sleep deprivation.
In our youth, staying up all night to cram for a test was something fun to brag about (maybe), when in reality anyone who does that likely set themselves up for failure. In all likelihood, they did worse on those tests than if they had just gone to bed early and received a full night’s sleep. Even today, we hear people wear four hours of sleep as a badge of honor. “I don’t need that much sleep” is a common refrain from people who think they are hustling to use every hour of every day. For the vast majority, that is simply not true. Almost every study you look at will show that adult human beings need between seven and eight hours of sleep every night. Less than that leads to impairment. Extended over time, that deprivation leads to an impact that can be equal to the effects of alcohol or drugs.
Sleep deprivation impairs the ability to focus attention selectively: Research shows that after roughly 17 to 19 hours of wakefulness (say, at 11 PM or 1 AM for someone who got up at 6 AM), individual performance on a range of tasks is equivalent to that of a person with a blood alcohol level of 0.05%. That’s the legal drinking limit in many countries. After roughly 20 hours of wakefulness (2 AM), this same person’s performance equals that of someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.1%, which meets the legal definition of drunk in the United States. 1
From that same Harvard Business Review article, the researchers found that key high performing leadership functions such as being results oriented, effective problem-solving, valuing different perspectives, and supporting others correlate directly to sleep. Over and over, the data comes back to the power of getting a good night’s sleep. It is more than our parents telling us when we are young that we need to get our sleep. There are mountains of scientific data that prove that Mom and Dad were right.
If we think of our bodies and how we function as a battery, a good night’s sleep is just like charging our mobile phones. It needs a full charge to get through the following day. If we forget to get the phone on the charger, it loses power, or we have to turn it into a ‘low-power mode’ which reduces the functions it can perform. Things are slower and some items just cannot be completed. We are the same way. Our sleep is like plugging in at night to move data around in our brain, moving short-term memory items to long-term storage. Complex information is processed into usable data for the next day or beyond. It is why ‘sleeping on it’ can yield such effective results in problem-solving. We wake fresh, fully charged, and ready to begin taking on new data.
From 10 Reasons Why Good Sleep Is Important, sleep can have an impact on so many areas of your life. As leaders, taking care of ourselves allows us to help support others. Sleep can have a significant impact on our weight, our immune response (seems really important these days), the health of our heart, and more. Beyond the physical health elements, we know lack of sleep negatively impacts different brain functions and can have a massive consequence on the ability to understand concepts, concentration, productivity, and our ability to perform basic job duties. In the article, How Important Is Sleep? the research they share from the University of Warwick found that getting less than 6 hours of sleep on a continuous basis makes you 48% more likely to die of heart disease and 15% more likely to develop a stroke. The basic conclusion from the study is that a lack of sleep is essentially a ticking time bomb for your health.
Sleep is not an optional lifestyle luxury. It is a non-negotiable, biological, necessity. It is your life support system. — Matt Walker
Matt Walker provides some scary, yet important insights on the value of sleep in his excellent TEDTalk: Sleep is Your Superpower. While the research he shares in this video speaks most to the health impacts on the body, it imparts the idea that lack of quality sleep will have an overall negative effect on all things that you do. Lack of sleep negatively influences on your health, day to day abilities, and ultimately the longevity and quality of your life. To see more of his work, you can find information at his website Sleepdiplomat.com.
Sleep is not just something that we have to do, it is something we must make highly important in our lives. It cannot be taken for granted. We should be bragging about how we were able to get eight or more hours of sleep, instead of boasting about powering through on four. As leaders, we must recognize our responsibilities connect to the support of others, and plan for the future. That is not possible to do effectively if we are fighting against a severe cognitive impairment. Ensuring you get enough sleep each night and making a routine of it can enable you to reach your full potential. Sleep is truly a secret weapon of effective leadership.
How can you make your sleep habits a high priority in your life?
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