Kenneth Nowack, Ph.D.

Without enough sleep, we all become tall two-year-olds.”  

JoJo Jensen

I woke up tired this morning and know exactly why…I didn’t get both enough sleep and good quality sleep last night.  Good thing I’m not making executive decisions, flying the space shuttle or doing delicate brain surgery not to mention being the third link in the security at one of our nuclear power plants.

It seems that just recently a federal  inspector found an armed guard asleep at a gate inside the Indian Point nuclear power plant located about 35 miles north of New York City.   A federal inspector actually found the 5 year veteran employee and tried for 2 minutes to wake the person before the guard “stood up and opened his eyes.”   It must have been one of those dreams you really want to stay in!  It seems the practice at this facility was to rotate guards during their 12-hour shifts to keep them alert (this guard had already worked two other posts before hitting NREM/REM land). 

Well, maybe you won’t be surprised that in a recent study of US Workers, the prevalence of fatigue (lack of sleep being one of the major contributors) was 37.9%.  Fatigue, when present, is associated with a threefold increase, on average, in the proportation of workers with condition-specific lost productive time¹.

In fact the top three causes of lost work time by employees in the US based on research from Ron Kessler at the Harvard Medical School (due to both absence and presenteeism) include: Sleep disorders, depression and fatigue (these three each account for approximately 425-490 lost workdays per 100 full time employees).

Even the prestigious Harvard Business Review last year (October 2006) conducted an interview with sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler on the relationship between lack of sleep, poor performance and impaired decision making and judgment.

My colleague, friend and personal sleep expert Dr. Mark Rosekind founder of Alertness Solutions has found that even two hours less sleep than you need at night (that certainly can vary!) has the following results:

1. Degrading critical judgment and decision making by 50%

2. Diminishing memory by 20%

3. Interfering with communication skills by 30%

4. Affecting mood by 100% (good mood goes down and bad mood goes up)

Well, any new parent can attest to these findings….Well, if we look at some provocative new research maybe lack of sleep does indeed have an upside. According to data from the Cancer Prevention Study II, individuals who average seven hours of sleep each night have a lower mortality rate than do those who sleep eight hours or more². These findings were also consistent with earlier research suggesting that the lowest mortality was again at seven hours of total sleep, with some increase in mortality associated with short sleep and an even steeper increase with long sleep.

Good news indeed given that the average American on weekdays sleeps about six and one-half hours.

All obvious you say?  Don’t blame me then when you wind up dreaming about this blog tonight.
zzzzzzzzzzzend….Be well….

Technorati Tags: insomnia, sleep, fatigue, depression, sleep disorders, fatigue countermeasures, REM, NREM, circadian rhythms, stress, dreams, dreaming, health, job burnout, kenneth nowack, ken nowack, nowack

1. Ricci, J., Chee, Lorandeau, A. & Berger, J. (2007). Fatigue in the U.S. Workforce: Prevalence and Implications for Lost Productive Work Time.  Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 49 (1), 1-10 [↩]
2. Kripke DF, Garfinkel L, Wingard DL, et al. Mortality associated with sleep duration and insomnia. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2002;59:131-136 [↩]

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