Since time immemorial, a lot has been said about sleep and its importance.
Sleeping, like eating, drinking, and breathing, is a basic human need. Just like other human needs, it is essential for good health and an integral factor for your well-being as you go through life. That’s why it gets so much attention.
Chiropractic Doctors in Bellevue like Dr. Lonny keep advising people to get more sleep. There’s an increased awareness about the disadvantages of sleep deficiency, amongst other sleep disorders. People now know, more than ever, about how lack of sleep can lead to mental and physical problems.
However, it seems all of these have been falling on deaf ears in recent times, as people now sleep less than the required number of hours. In today’s fast-paced world, there’s always that deadline to beat, that late-night show to keep up with, or something else that eats deep into our sleep time.
If done over time, these activities become a habit. A deadly one which leads to sleep deficiency — that has been linked to several chronic health problems, including kidney disease, heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, and depression, amongst other things.
The National Sleep Foundation of the US suggests that adults get 7 hours of sleep every night, but 30% of adult employees record fewer than six hours of sleep nightly.
When life gets busy with tight work schedules, parenting duties, heavy workloads, and school responsibilities, sleep is usually the first thing to give up. At this point, it only makes sense to work late into the night just to beat the next deadline or finish that project, right?
Pushing sleep to the bottom of your list of priorities puts you at an increased risk of suffering injuries or missing out on essential details. It’s a long list, the things a poor sleeping pattern will do to you. And that list is popular too!
The advantages of getting good sleep are usually crowded out by the noise about the dangers of sleep deficiency. More people concentrate on what they stand to lose because of sleep disorders rather than focus on what the benefit of getting good sleep is about.
So, instead of talking about what sleep deficiency does, how about we discuss the benefits, and how it affects productivity?
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Good Sleep Improves Your Concentration
Sleep is vital for various aspects of brain function, including concentration and performance. When you get enough sleep regularly, your focus and attention will remain intact. Your focus won’t be drifting, making it easier to receive information.
Without good sleep and rest, your neurons become overworked, making it impossible for them to coordinate information properly. It can also affect how you access previously stored information in your brain.
With good sleep, your concentration level is intact, making it easy to make sound decisions, as you can accurately assess and plan for situations accordingly. The more sleep you get, your neurons fire more optimally. Also, your muscles will get enough rest, and your body’s organ systems will be synchronized.
Getting quality sleep helps to improve your problem-solving skills and enhances the performance of your memory.
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Good Sleep Improves Your Emotions
How well you perform on a job/task is primarily determined by your interest in it, and the emotions you show towards it. A lack of interest/enthusiasm about work can lead to a poorly executed work.
Getting good sleep helps you to wake up feeling better and ready to take on challenges. A poor sleeping pattern can cause you to be cranky and agitated. It also puts you at risk of being easily frustrated. And these emotions affect your productivity, to a large extent.
Good sleep helps your brain to function correctly. While you’re sleeping, your brain is preparing for the next day. It’s creating new channels to help you understand and retain information. Without proper sleep, there’ll be an increased tendency to feel angry and impulsive, have mood swings, feel depressed, or lack motivation.
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Good Sleep Improves Your Social Interactions
A lack of sleep will make you cranky and jumpy. You will find fault in almost everything that people do or say. This will hurt your relationships and reduce your ability to interact socially.
One of the primary keys to successful social interaction is your ability to recognize important social cues and process emotional information. Your social skills are crucial to successful collaboration in the workplace and increased productivity.
One study found that people who did not get enough sleep had a reduced ability to recognize expressions of anger and happiness from other people’s facial expressions, thereby reducing their social skills.
Getting good sleep gives you the advantage of being able to connect with your co-workers based on their emotions. This helps you to relate with them better, thus improving your productivity.
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Good Sleep Improves Your Learning
You can only be productive when you’ve learned what to do on the job/task. Without this knowledge, there is no productivity. The quality and amount of sleep you get has a significant impact on memory and knowledge.
Sleep has been discovered by the Harvard Medical School to help learning and memory in two distinct ways.
First, sleeping well helps you to focus optimally. something that allows you to learn efficiently. Secondly, it aids memory consolidation, which is essential for learning new information.
Learning involves:
Acquisition – Introduction of new information into the brain
Consolidation – The processes by which a memory becomes stable
Recall – The ability to access the information – whether consciously or unconsciously – after it has been stored.
Memory consolidation occurs during sleep. It also occurs through enhancing the neural connections which build our memories. This is where good sleep comes in.
Conclusion
Getting good sleep aids your productivity in many ways. This article underscores the effect of good sleep on your brain, your mental process, and your productivity. Become intentional about your sleeping process and cycle.
Instead of reducing your sleep hours, work on your time management skills, and schedule to accommodate good sleep. Doing so will improve your quality of life overall.