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Earth Info Now: This Is What Happens To Your Brain When You Work On Less Than 6 Hours Of Sleep

05 Nov 2020
AOM report: Sleep-deprived people or people who have poor quality of sleep are less effective at using self-control to guide their own actions.

Originally found at Earth Info Now.

Too many employees today are tired zombies, going to work sleepless. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends between seven and nine hours of sleep each night for adults, has found that 1 in 3 adults are falling short of this. In a 2016 CareerBuilder survey of 3,200 employees, 1 in 5 said they averaged five hours of sleep or less a night.

Yet many of us are unaware of the effects of sleep deprivation.

“If you got fewer than seven hours of sleep last night, you are a little bit sleep-deprived. And you will probably deny that and say, ‘No, I’m fine.’ But if we were to bring you into one of our sleep labs and have you do some performance tests, we would be able to see that you are not as good at doing those as you are fully rested,” said Jeanne Duffy, a neuroscientist and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders.

Once sleeplessness becomes a pattern, you may not even realize you are impaired. “Let’s say you are getting eight hours of sleep a night and then you suddenly start getting six. You really notice it on the first day or two after that. And then you stop noticing it,” Duffy said about chronic sleep deprivation. “And it’s not because you’re not impaired by it. It’s because you sort of have a new frame of reference.”

Continue reading the original article at Earth Info Now.

Read the original research in Academy of Management Journal.

Also read this AOM Insights summary citing this research.

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