DREAMING OF SLEEP
Travel companies help deal with jet lag
Tiredness comes with the territory when you travel for business, but new research points to long-term consequences for physical and psychological health and well-being when we regularly miss out on quality sleep.
On average, we sleep for two hours less than we did in 1960 and, according to a recent survey commissioned by insurer Direct Line, 48 per cent of us say we need eight hours of sleep but two-thirds of us only get six. Many frequent travellers get much less than this.
In the short term, a lack of sleep affects your ability to concentrate and make decisions, and renders you more irritable. Your family and colleagues often bear the brunt of that. In the longer term, it puts you at risk of several serious diseases.
“When you travel frequently, you undermine two aspects of your sleep cycle – your sleep homeostat, which regulates the drive to sleep, and the body clock or circadian rhythm,” says Professor Jason Ellis, head of the Centre for Sleep Research at Northumbria University.
New research from the University of Surrey has found that living out of sync with your body clock affects the activity of more than 700 genes, disrupting several metabolic processes, including how we respond to stress and the ability of cells to regenerate. This may help to explain why regular disruption to sleep increases your risk of depression, as claimed by the University of Washington’s Medicine Sleep Center, and puts you at higher risk of cancer and heart disease, as proven by a wealth of research.
Scientists at the University of Chicago found that after only a few days of cutting back to four hours’ sleep a night, people struggled to process glucose in a similar way to the early stages of diabetes. “Forcing your body to function when it’s supposed to be asleep puts it under tremendous strain,” Ellis says. “We know from studies on shift workers that it can lead to serious health problems.”
One of the latest discoveries is that sleep “detoxes” the brain. According to recent research from the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, sleep helps to flush out waste products such as amyloid-beta, the protein that has been linked with Alzheimer’s disease.
Thankfully, companies are finally taking the issue seriously, says sleep physiologist Dr Guy Meadows, clinical director of the Sleep School (thesleepschool.org) and author of The Sleep
Book: How to Sleep Well Every Night (Orion). He says, “We’ve still got a long way to go to create the cultural shift we need to fully appreciate the importance of sleep. But when we speak to HR departments of top companies, improving the sleep of employees is now as important as reducing stress – and the two tend to go hand in hand.”
Meadows runs a programme called “Sleep to Perform”, which provides company-wide sleep-need assessments, seminars, webinars, and one-on-one coaching for those staff who need it most. It’s no surprise that they are often frequent travellers. MartinSinclair, a contributor to our online forum (businesstraveller.com/discussion), writes, “Sleeping problems have affected me for the past 30 years of travel. My solution up until April 2013 was to take sleeping pills, which I fortunately recognised as being a serious problem. I kicked the pills 100 per cent and now conquer sleep problems with yoga.”
Ellis says the problems can continue when you get home. “It can take as little as two weeks of disrupted sleep to trigger a long-term sleep disorder,” he says. “So even at home, you wake up in the night or find it hard to drop off.”
What can you do if your job is ruining your sleep? According to the Economic and Social Research Council, one in 10 people in the UK take sleeping pills regularly. Meadows says, “People who come to the Sleep School have had insomnia problems for 10 years on average and I’d say 90 per cent have tried five or six types of medication to help them sleep. The catch-22 is that they become dependent and feel they can’t sleep without them, even though they realise they’re not sleeping well.” Last year, a University of California study found that even occasional use was as bad for your health as smoking, raising the risk of early death at least 3.6 fold.
Meadows doesn’t think sticking to a “wind-down” routine helps. “Sleep is a natural physiological process that can’t be controlled, and relying on unnatural night-time rituals
“Sleep is still the most under-rated performance enhancer out there”
or props – such as warm baths, pills and alcohol – can fuel sleep anxiety. You can lie there thinking: ‘I’ve had my bath and done my deep breathing and still can’t sleep, so what’s wrong with me?’”
It makes sense, he says, to avoid late-night caffeine and alcohol, and to try to go to bed and get up at roughly the same time every day (travel permitting). But acceptance is key – the irony being that it’s only by giving up the struggle to sleep that we are able to sleep better. “It’s about changing your relationship with your thoughts about sleep,” he says. “Rather than trying to control your anxiety about lack of sleep, allowing it to be there allows it to pass.”
Meadows says labelling your thoughts (“there’s that old fear that I won’t be able to cope tomorrow”) allows you to step back from them, rather than allowing them to affect you. “Most clients resolve their sleep problems within three months,” he says, although he points out that once you have them, it tends to be for life. He explains that insomnia remains in the memory like anxiety does, so during a heatwave, for instance, you’ll be affected more than most as it can trigger your old thoughts and beliefs.
Making an effort to upgrade your sleep is an investment in your health and mental well-being, both now and in the future. There’s also another welcome pay-off – you’ll become more efficient. As Meadows puts it, “Sleep is still the most under-rated performance enhancer out there.”