Get your Zzzzzzz's

It was my final term MBA paper at the institute.                                        
Scoring an A on Business Strategy was the last leg of my run.
It was my key to the hall of fame for 8.point.something CGPA holders.
An hour left, it was time to start on the 40 marks C section. I literally saw the letters blurring out. A single line appeared twice. I couldn’t read. My head started spinning. I stood up, ran to the washroom, pop in a stemetil (thinking it was a migraine attack) and gingerly walked back to the examination hall. I attempted to write but how could I, if I could not read. To cut this story short, I submitted an incomplete paper and landed a C.

Wanna hear a funny story?                                                        
Here goes…

I attended a final job interview, looking (presumably) dapper in a salwar-kurta piece.
The interview went well. After the interview, I headed off to the job I was holding then.
Sometime later, a colleague walked up to me and pointed out that I was wearing my kurta inside-out.
I looked down.
Seeing the inside stitching standing out in all its glory, I shrieked!

Red faced, I realized what I had done.
I had attended an interview with the insides of my kurta all hanging out, so to speak.
This was 4 years ago. I laughed at it now of-course (Btw, I did get the job. Maybe, wearing clothes inside-out is my lucky charm. :P )

Walking into a room and forgetting why I got there, forgetting my employee number, atm pin, phone number, a friend’s name (not kidding), fumbling over words while speaking, are all not signs of dementia, for me.

They were simple signs of ‘lack of sleep’.
The night before the final interview, I was on a night shift. For two nights before my Business Strategy paper, I was up awake studying for other papers.

Last week, I was doing an almost all night-all day shift at work. Intermittent sleep, short stressful naps for 5 whole days, took a toll on me. My skin broke up zits, my back ached, my body retained water, in short, my body was screaming for rest. A deep sleep on Friday night, wasn’t enough. All through Saturday afternoon, I was still tired and drowsy.
I slept through the weekend.

The usual me would have called it a wash-out, flop, disappointing, complete fiasco weekend.
Why?
Simply cause I slept through the only 2 days in a week, the only days I can socialize, meet people, eat, drink and make merry!

But, no I wouldn’t say that.
Because by cutting down on sleep “we learn less, we develop less, we are less bright, we make worse decisions, we accomplish less, we are less productive, we are more prone to errors, and we undermine our true intellectual potential”
I read an article on sleep by Poitr Woiznak who studied student personalities for over 10 years now(http://tinyurl.com/23vqp3w). The crux of his findings can be expressed in this one sentence ‘Sleeping well appears to be one of the most important factors underlying the success in learning’.

Naturally, common-sense would tell us that this holds true for all walks of life. We are more energetic, optimistic, stress-tolerant, attentive and able to take quick good decisions only after a good night sleep.

Reading his article further, I was astonished by these startling facts:

• 40% of truck accidents are attributable to fatigue and drowsiness
• There is an 800% increase in single vehicle commercial truck accidents between midnight and 8 am.
• Major industrial disasters have been attributed to sleep deprivation (among these, at least in part, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the gas leak at Bhopal, Zeebrugge disaster, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill). (This fact was a shocker! )
           o Three mile island disaster -http://preview.tinyurl.com/2j92yt
           o Chernobyl gas leak disaster - http://tinyurl.com/yra55a

In all the above disasters, one common cause you’ll find is the human-factor. In general, a human factor is a physical or cognitive property of an individual or social behavior which is specific to humans and influences functioning of technological systems as well as human-environment equilibriums. The Human Factor Model, in its study of the science of understanding the properties of human capability, has highlighted the importance of ‘rest and proper sleep’ for the optimal performance of any worker in any industry.

Robert Stickgold, assistant professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center came up with 3 concepts:
• As we snooze, our brain is busily processing the information we have learned during the day.
• Sleep makes memories stronger, and it even appears to weed out irrelevant details and background information so that only the important pieces remain.
• Our brain also works during slumber to find hidden relations among memories and to solve problems we were working on while awake


How can a simple snooze make most of your problems lighter if not go away completely? Incredible!

But Robert Stickgold must surely know what he was talking about because he is a preeminent sleep researcher and has dedicated his life to understanding the relationship between sleep and learning (I wiki him out).

And then I found this video:




I guess I’ve said enough.
I hope I’ve equip you with enough food for thought (which you can process after a good night sleep, of course) on the importance of sleep.

I’ll leave you with a few statistics on sleep :
(FYI:- I tried to look for statistics by Indian researchers. But all I could find are by the AASM- American Academy of Sleep Medicine)

• Humans spend about 1/3 of their lives asleep.
• Newborns need about 16 to 20 hours of sleep per day.
• During adolescence a change in the body clock keeps most teens from feeling sleepy until 10 p.m. or later.
• Adults who don’t get enough sleep tend to act sluggish, but sleep-deprived children may be hyperactive.
• Sleeping less than seven hours per night increases your risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and depression.
• Drowsy driving is associated with almost 20 percent of all serious car-crash injuries.
• During a full night of sleep most adults go through four to six sleep cycles that each last about 90 minutes to 110 minutes.
• During the stage of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, your limb muscles become temporarily paralyzed to prevent you from acting out your dreams.
• It is estimated that 50 million to 70 million Americans suffer from a chronic sleep disorder.
• People with untreated sleep apnea have a higher rate of death due to heart disease.
• Insomnia is the most common sleep complaint, affecting about 30 percent of adults.
• For every time zone that you cross during a flight, it takes your body about one day to adjust.


Just a reminder (not a scare tactic ): The real killer of Ranjan Das, CEO and MD of SAP Indian subcontinent was lack of sleep. (http://jaipar.multiply.com/journal/item/1099)

Seriously, go get your Zzzzzz’s people!

If I live long, I don’t want to live alone :P

I am not a fan of fat sloppy lazy lasagne-crazy Garfield.  
But he is my sleeping hero.
Hail Garfield!