Dying to sleep
Between late-night excursions to dance clubs and keeping up with the 121,000-plus people he follows on Twitter, Justin Bieber probably doesn’t get a lot of shut-eye.
Lack of sleep has become the hallmark of an overachiever. Among the “sleepless elite” who need only a few hours of slumber: Donald Trump, Marissa Mayer, Bill Clinton and Lady Gaga.
“Five or six hours a night is a good sleep for me,” Gaga said in 2012.
She wasn’t bragging. In this 24/7 world, it’s hard to run a business empire or nation if one-third of your time is spent snoozing. But most people need more than a couple of hours of shut-eye to function properly.
A recent survey released by the Conference Board of Canada reported that two-thirds of Canadians would choose a good night’s sleep over a fun night out on the town. Even youngsters agreed — 55 per cent of those ages 18 to 24 said they would pick catching up on their sleep.
Nearly half of the sleep-deprived said it affects their work productivity or performance. The main culprits? Work stress or job demands and home stress or life demands, according to the survey.
Meanwhile, men were twice as likely as women to say they never go into work tired, and 22 per cent of workers with children said they go into work tired every day of the week.
In March 2013, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control called insufficient sleep “a public health epidemic.” The sleepless suffer from heart disease, diabetes, depression and there have been links to cancer, obesity and early death. And they can be a menace to everyone else: the bleary-eyed have been responsible for crashes, industrial accidents and medical errors.
Technology is partly to blame. Many teens admit to sleeping with their cellphones so they won’t miss out on an early-hours tidbits about their friends’ social lives. “Certified child sleep consultant” is now an occupation.
Expect to hear a lot about sleep in the next few years. Entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad, for example, explained its importance to his own productivity in his book, The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking.
Broad devoted a chapter to “how to work 24/7 and still get eight hours of sleep.” Among his observations: “I never stay anywhere — parties, museums, meetings — longer than three hours.”
Expect more finger-wagging about the discipline of good “sleep hygiene” — the habits that are conducive to a refreshing rest. That includes keeping regular hours, banning laptops and smartphones from bed, and eschewing caffeine and alcohol before bedtime. It’s estimated that 70 to 80 per cent of insomniacs can benefit from behavioural changes, according to the Canadian Sleep Society.
But what will really prompt change in a sleep-deprived world? Desire for status, of course. Sound, unbroken slumber is in short supply. When something is rare, it becomes a sought-after luxury — with its own bragging rights.