Your need for sleep and your sleep pattern change with age. However, this varies considerably between people of the same age. Interestingly, workers over 50 years of age reported sleeping less than younger colleagues, and they regularly reported that sleep affects their work performance, physical health and social and emotional lives significantly less than younger workers.
It’s no secret that sleep deprivation and poor performance are linked. So, here are just a few reasons why not getting an adequate amount of quality sleep consistently can lead to a decrease in your health and productivity levels at work.
- Your Brain ‘Switches’ Off
If you sleep at least eight hours a night, your attention should remain stable throughout the day. However, if you suffer from or suffer from a sleep disorder for several days, you start to build up a sleep deficit that makes it harder for the brain to work.
Small business owners sleep better if they don’t consume caffeine late in the day, drink little alcohol, and avoid large meals before bed. Caffeine affects the quality of your sleep by reducing sleep with rapid eye movements (REM) and can affect your sleep wave patterns and breathing patterns during sleep.
- Repetitive Negative Thinking
A study into the link between work and sleeplessness shows it disrupts positive thought flow. Clinical psychologist at Oxford University, Prof. Daniel Freeman, who led this study, suggests that one of the reasons why our brain is so bad with sleep deprivation is that it promotes excessive negative thinking.
If sleep deprivation persists and negative mental symptoms persist despite good sleep hygiene measures, it is recommended to consult a doctor.It’s best to have comprehensive health insurance to help deal with any health symptoms early before they become serious problems.
- Stress and More Sleeplessness
Events of the day often penetrate your mind, and people suffering from stress or anxiety are more likely to have scary dreams which in turn often leads to disturbed and often broken sleep and is bad for not only your sleep, but your health in general.
Those who suffer from chronic stress sleep less, have poorer sleep quality and often find it more difficult to function efficiently throughout the day. Unfortunately, the only real way to deal with this is to sleep. It sounds like an obvious fix but if you can’t sleep you get anxious, but then you can’t sleep because you are anxious.
That being said, if you are having trouble sleeping and can’t seem to find anything that will help you can speak to a doctor who may give you sleeping pills or refer you to a therapist for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
- Weight Problems and The Risk of Other Diseases
Discoveries about sleep cycles have given researchers new insights into the specific roles that sleep plays in overall health and performance. People with chronic sleep deprivation are more likely to be overweight, suffer from strokes, cardiovascular diseases, infections and certain types of cancer than people with adequate sleep.
Research has shown that chronic sleep deprivation or poor-quality sleep further exposes an individual to the risk of diseases such as diabetes, depression, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease.
- Reduced Productivity and Creativity at Work
According scientific studies on sleep patterns, creative thinking is particularly likely to take place in dream sleep, which improves the integration of unrelated information and promotes creative solutions.When the human mind dreams, it can achieve an increased level of creativity, which enables people to combine different memories, ideas or information in new and effective ways.
Shift work is particularly problematic because constantly changing changes conflict with your body clock’s daily sleep cycle to preserve its natural rhythm.Other factors that can affect sleep are painful conditions, medication for other conditions as well as the increased demands and the connectedness of modern society.
