Surely, as professionals, we need to value ourselves first and value our contribution so that we can value the lives and contributions of others? While working with people often in a crisis themselves we need to be maintaining our own emotional stability, drawing on our emotional intelligence to facilitate a professional intervention. Howe (2008) notes that if our emotions are negative, we can become psychologically defensive, which can lead to us being absorbed in our own distress, potentially creating a lack of compassion.
It’s not only the quantity of sleep we need to get right but also the quality of that sleep. During the night we go through different stages of sleep, all of which are essential. As we have seen above, our bodies are ‘programmed’ by the chemical reactions going on inside. If our brain chemistry is responding to the light–dark cycle, then we should sleep in tune with this cycle. As the level of melatonin is on the rise in our brains from about 9pm we should be trying to achieve a bedtime of between 10 and 10.30pm. Our eight hours of sleep would then take us to 6 to 6.30am, perfectly in sync with the rise and fall of melatonin governed by the available light. This needs to be developed as a routine night after night, seven days a week.
One of the things that always puzzles me is the way as parents we completely understand how giving babies and children routine is good for them. I remember as a parent, for my children, it was bath at 7pm, supper at 7.30, story at 7.45, bed at 8. And it works wonderfully for many. For some reason when we become adults, we laugh in the face of routine; yet intuitively I feel we know it works. This seems to be another one of those things we have knowledge of but do nothing with and then wonder why we are cranky in the morning.
Throughout the night we establish a pattern of two sorts of sleep – non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep – which do different things. What is notable here is that throughout the night, in an approximately 90-minute cycle, we move between the two (there are actually four stages of NREM sleep but that’s a little technical for what we need to know here). NREM sleep dominates the early part of the night and REM sleep dominates the later part of the night, or early morning, depending on how you want to look at it. These two forms of sleep are crucial to memory storage.
Walker (2018) describes the need for this pattern beautifully, using the metaphor of a sculptor working a block of clay. To start with, all of the raw material is available to him, the same way all of our memories from the day are stored in our short-term memory. The sculptor then starts by deciding what superfluous matter can be removed, what pieces of clay are not required. During this period, early details are made. Finer structures are then worked on to reveal details and ‘store’ those details in the beauty of the finished sculpture. If we apply this to sleep, the early part of sleep (NREM) helps us with the processing of information and making the big decisions about what is important. Unnecessary information is discarded with a little transfer of details. REM sleep, which comes later in the night, deals with the details and the storage of these memories. It is the REM sleep that does the work of forging connections with older memories and it is during this period we dream.
Your brain is trying to achieve this process whether you are awake or asleep based on the biological rhythms controlling your brain. Being awake gets in the way of this being successful. So, as we have seen, your brain is ready to start work on this at around 10pm and needs to be done by about 6am. If you decide to stay up until 2am to binge watch the latest TV series, you have lost that early NREM heavy/REM light sleep, meaning there’s been no culling of the big information to leave you with the finer details. If you need to get up at 4am to get the train for a meeting at 9am then your brain hasn’t finished achieving what it needs to do in the REM heavy/NREM light sleep period. Either of these scenarios is compromising your ability to store memories and make connections with older memories. This process, in Walker’s words, is like pressing ‘save’ on your computer and is therefore crucial. This was shown to great effect in a study by Ji and Wilson (2007) from MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. He showed that rats presented with a maze that led to rewards repeated the same patterns of brain activity when asleep as they had when engaged in the task, encoding this important memory from the day so it could be recalled.
What this also shows is that sleeping less during the week and trying to catch up on a weekend doesn’t work. Trying to buy back sleep by having a lie in on a weekend doesn’t offset those lost hours. ‘The brain can never recover all the sleep it has been deprived of’ (Walker, 2018, p 297).
Productivity impact
Lack of sleep leads to lack of productivity, with typically lower work rates and therefore slower completion of tasks. It is estimated that lost productivity in America costs between $2,000 and $3,500 per sleep-deprived employee per year. This is as a consequence of being less happy and lacking in motivation. Sleep-deprived people can be volatile, rash and prone to making poorly conceived decisions, because lack of sleep impacts on the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that manages our emotional impulses and mediates our self-control. Broken or disturbed sleep is also problematic and can lead to lower activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain according to Schilpzand et al (2018). The impact of this is poor cognitive processing, planning and problem solving. Moreover, Schilpzand et al (2018) discovered that sleep-deprived workers shy away from setting themselves proactive goals in terms of complex work, defaulting to easier options. The risk, I’d suggest, here is that difficult tasks are deprioritised repeatedly until finally they must be done. This is often last minute, at the end of the day when our brain resources are at their lowest and needing to be ‘recharged’ by sleep. Not the best way to be working on important tasks!
We can understand then how lack of sleep is a dangerous business… and dangerous for our business (Walker, 2018). Our ‘business’ is work with vulnerable people often in a state of heightened emotions themselves, needing us to be in charge of our own emotions to be effective practitioners.
Think about a time when you had not had much sleep
How did it make you feel?
What strategies did you use to get through the day (positive or negative)?
How productive were you?
Chronotype
It’s worth mentioning here that how we respond to the onslaught of the day is different for all of us, as we are all a particular chronotype. We respond to the relentless march of the clock differently. Some of us are morning larks and some of us are night owls. Thinking about what chronotype you are can have a dramatic effect on your productivity and how you work. I’m a morning person. I’m good from about 6am to about 11am when I tend to get a slump. Getting outside and having some lunch invigorates me then I’m good from about 1pm to 3pm. But after 3pm… don’t ask me to do anything that requires me to think!
Some people are the opposite and take a lot of time to get going. Now, I can’t simply leave work at 3pm, citing my chronotype as the protagonist in my early departure, but what I have done is constructed a way of working that plays to my strengths. I try, as far as I can, to do my writing and thinking work on a morning in the 6am to 11am window. Then, less challenging tasks that still require thought I do from 1pm to 3pm. When I hit 3pm then it’s simply routine admin tasks like printing documents ready for tomorrow and the week ahead, straightforward phone calls and appointment making, photocopying, or data entry type tasks. I do a lot of planning in the later part of the day as this means I leave with everything in order ready for the next day. I’m not saying planning is easy but it’s not as difficult