No less than Harvard Medical School is urging people to get more sleep for the good of their careers. In other words, that “midnight oil” may grease short-term success, but at the expense of long-term career gain.
“According to the Division of Sleep Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, the short-term productivity gains from skipping sleep to work are quickly washed away by the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation on your mood, ability to focus, and access to higher-level brain functions for days to come,” wrote Travis Bradberry for Forbes. “The negative effects of sleep deprivation are so great that people who are drunk outperform those lacking sleep.”
A recent National Geographic Channel collaboration with the Public Goods Project and National Institutes of Health, aired a documentary about the silent and dangerous epidemic of sleep deprivation in America. Sleepless in America revealed that 40 percent of all Americans and 70 percent of adolescents are sleep-deprived.
Lack of sleep is linked to critical health problems such as “weight gain, depression, diabetes, memory loss, brain function impairment and stress,” as reported the San Francisco Chronicle and summarized in The Deseret News.
For people with full-time jobs, not getting the recommended 7 to 9 hours of sleep is detrimental to the worker’s productivity at the office.
“(A University of Rochester) study found that when you sleep, your brain removes toxic proteins from its neurons that are by-products of neural activity when you’re awake. Unfortunately, your brain can remove them adequately only while you’re asleep. So when you don’t get enough sleep, the toxic proteins remain in your brain cells, wreaking havoc by impairing your ability to think — something no amount of caffeine can fix,” wrote Bradberry