Rise and sigh - sleep deprivation

HR Magazine, May, 1999 by Stephenie Overman

70 million Americans suffer from sleep deprivation: How many work for you?

You know the feeling: It's hard to get out of bed in the morning. You can't put together two intelligent sentences before your first cup of coffee. It takes longer than usual to complete your work duties.

It's called sleep deprivation and it affects some 70 million Americans, according to the National Commission on Sleep Disorders at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The commission's studies show that work-related problems such as increased stress, inattention and diminished productivity are caused by workers' lack of sleep or poor quality sleep. The cost for U.S. businesses is estimated at $150 billion a year.

And the problem appears to be getting worse. "It seems people are sleeping shorter amounts of time on average," says Ed Coburn, of Circadian Technologies Inc., a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass., that studies productivity and sleep cycles. "Sleep needs have not evolved - we're just getting less than we used to get."

The average person needs seven-and-a-half hours of sleep each night, but the average person sleeps for six-and-a-half hours. Plus, many people don't fit the average - some people need as much as nine-and-a-half to 10 hours per night.

"Everybody has read about some famous person who could get by on four hours of sleep and thinks he or she should be able to do that," says Coburn, who also publishes Working Nights, a newsletter produced by Circadian. "If you need more sleep, you're seen as lazy and unproductive, but the reality is some people do need that sleep. Everybody would love to squeeze extra hours out of the day, and they think they can do that by getting by on less sleep."

How do you know if you're getting enough sleep? "Any time you are relying on an alarm clock to wake you up, you are not getting enough sleep," says John Shepard, head of the Mayo Clinic's Sleep Disorders Center in Rochester, Minn. The Mayo Clinic defines adequate sleep as "that amount which, when you attain it on a steady basis, produces a full degree of daytime alertness and a feeling of well-being the following day."

The Mayo Clinic says there is growing evidence that sleep deprivation is cumulative, resulting in "sleep debt." For example, if an employee needs eight hours of sleep a night but only gets seven hours, his sleep debt is five hours for the workweek.

People try to repay that debt by "catching up" on sleep on the weekends. A survey conducted by the National Sleep Foundation in March found that 44 percent of 1,014 adults said they sleep more on the weekends - an average of 40 minutes more. However, research shows it is far better to have a set pattern of sleep - going to bed at the same time each night and waking up at the same time each morning - even on the weekends.

The result is that 40 percent of workers are so sleepy that it interferes with their daily activities, according to The National Sleep Foundation survey. And, the Sleep Research Center based at Loughborough University in Leicestershire, England, has found that sleep deprivation noticeably impairs the ability to comprehend rapidly changing situations, increases the likelihood of distraction, makes people think more rigidly and have less flexibility and reduces the ability to produce innovative solutions to problems.

The research even found that sleep loss reduced the words of both oral and written vocabularies, resulting in stilted conversations and more reliance on cliches.

Coburn agrees that when people are tired, they're more prone to make mistakes and less likely to find a better way of doing something. "They miss opportunities for improvement, which increases productivity costs," he explains. "There's a performance cost to being fatigued. You move more slowly; you may do things incorrectly. Sleep deprivation also has health implications" that can show up in health care costs.

Managers may find it difficult to recognize a problem, he adds, because companies can't effectively monitor for alertness. Devices are available for cockpits and locomotive engines, but they are too expensive to be practical in most other situations.

HR Alert to the Problem

To avoid sleep-deprived workers, employers need to understand the costs and recognize the symptoms of fatigue, as well as institute policies that help employees cope with lifestyle demands. Educate people about getting adequate sleep and teach them a little about human physiology, Coburn says.

HR needs to go beyond setting up nap rooms at work, which has become the accepted way to confront sleep deprivation in the workplace. But setting aside a room without properly educating workers and encouraging them to use it does nothing to alleviate sleep deprivation, nor does it get to the root of the problem.

Martin Moore-Ede, founder of Circadian Technologies, says HR has a role in talking to its workforce about sleep deprivation and taking the stigma out of it. Make sure that employees recognize how sleep deprivation affects their productivity and don't make them feel guilty about needing more sleep, he says.