Tips and tech to help you improve the quality of your shut-eye

We all have ways of dealing with jet lag, but what are the long-term effects of sleep deprivation and how are travel companies trying to help? Sally Brown investigates

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 Medicine Sleep Centre, 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 Centre in New York, sleep helps to flflflflflush 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 ( business traveller. 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 fififififind 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 ten people in the UK take sleeping pills regularly. Meadows says: “People who come to the Sleep School have had insomnia problems for ten 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 or