SESSION REVIEWSESSION REVIEWJames Maas on why you should roll over and go back to sleep
Here's a productivity puzzle: If people typically spend seven hours of every day sleeping, what is the one sure way to enhance their job performance?
And the answer is: roll over and sleep another hour.
If that answer seems counterintuitive, and it flies in the face of everything you learned in business school and life in general, well, that just shows how much you know.
Cornell professor James Maas told The Masters Forum participants that, for all their vaunted productivity, they are not getting the sleep they need. In our effort to squeeze the last drop of energy out of each day, we may actually be hurting our productivity — to say nothing of our health and happiness.
When I heard Maas say this, I was taken aback. I get perhaps six and a half hours of sleep a night, and I get along fine. Well, pretty fine. I do go into that coma every day around 1:30 in the afternoon, and my attitude in the morning when the alarm clock goes off and I begin the long trudge to the bathroom is not quite oh-boy.
Maas says people fool themselves that they need less sleep than they do. We live in a time-starved world, and what sort of person "sleeps in" when there is important work to be done?
The science of sleep
This phenomenon is familiar to us today as REMs, rapid eye movements. Subsequent investigations using electrodes and an electroencephalograph machine showed that sleep is not an undifferentiated period of unconsciousness. Rather, it is a series of stages of sleep, deep sleep, and deepest sleep, with intervals of REM sleep that get progressively longer through the night — 9 minutes, then 18 minutes, then 30 minutes, concluding with an hour-long REM period, occurring between the seventh and eighth hours of sleep.
The kicker is that too many of us wake up before this seventh-hour REM period gets under way, robbing us not only of rest but also of mysterious benefits that this final hour bestows — physical and mental refreshment, improved memory, learning, concentration, and creativity. It is the time when the brain replenishes itself for the new day.
When asked to explain the phenomenon of nocturnal erection, one Cornell student, who had obviously slept when he should have been studying for a final exam in Maas' class, responded that the penis served as "an antenna for the reception of prophetic thoughts."
The other peculiar thing about REM sleep is that the brain shuts off the body's ability to locomote during these periods. Without this shutoff, we would be acting out our dreams and pummeling our bed partners. It is rare, but some people lack this shutoff mechanism, as in the case of the Briton acquitted a few years ago of shotgunning his wife to death while he was in the spell of a dream.
Then there are narcoleptics, people who fall helplessly into REM sleep, thus shutting their body down, for minutes at a time, usually during periods of excitation. Maas showed a video of a golfer collapsing after making an especially good shot, and of an older woman fainting away upon hearing a good joke.
The most dangerous sleep disorder is sleep apnea, afflicting millions of persons. Sleep apnea is characterized by heavy snoring interrupted by halted breathing. The individual's air pathways become obstructed, and there is a frightening cessation of breathing. This cessation can occur 100 to 600 times a night. Worse, people die of it in their sleep, asphyxiated. Severe cases must use a nighttime breathing apparatus to maintain continuous positive airway pressure.
Maas estimates that 100 million Americans are sleep deprived. "That's nearly every young adult, nearly every adult, and all senior citizens," he said. How to tell if you are one of them? "One benchmark is if you fall to sleep in just three to five minutes every time you go to bed."
Every high school and college student exhibits sleep patterns disturbingly similar to people with sleep apnea and narcoleptics, he said. Adults are even more troubling. Maas showed a tape of a high-level UN conference on disarmament. Here was a meeting with the future of the world at stake, and there were Caspar Weinberger, the Pope, and various other cabinet members, heads of state and ambassadors nodding off. President Reagan was positively snoring — which, in the light of Maas' talk, may indicate that the much-maligned president may actually have been a workaholic.
On a lesser scale, the rest of us are driving cars, flying jets, performing operations, giving medical consultations, operating heavy machinery, and making mission-critical business decisions with only a fraction of our wits about us. The Exxon Valdez oil spill catastrophe, and who knows how many other shipwrecks and spills, required only an overtired ship's mate and a few ounces of vodka, but it cost Exxon $50 billion. The accidents at Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island, Maas said, all occurred on the night shift.
Mass cited the remark made by a sleep-deprived NASA manager, upon being warned by engineers that the O-rings on the Challenger space shuttle booster rocket might be brittle at 36° F.: "Oh, the hell
with it, let's launch the damn thing." He recalled the frustrated comment of a medical resident after 70 hours of being on call: "Why doesn't she die so I can get some sleep?"
Net result: as human beings we are operating beyond our design specifications. By sleeping less than six hours a night, we lessen our immunity to infection by a full 50 percent. People who need sleep gain weight and become hypersexual; they lose verbal skills, creativity, the ability to concentrate and handle complex tasks.
When a job applicant boasts that he can get by with just five or six hours of sleep a night, Maas said, remember that you will be buying all those problems. "Corporations equate sleep with laziness," he said. "We must change that."
But if you still feel the need to nap — what the exalted call a power nap and the humble call a siesta — keep it short. Twenty minutes will get you right into and out of dreaming; longer takes you into deep sleep, which takes an hour or more to recover from.
Improving your sleep pattern may require overall attention to saw-sharpening. Maas ticked off the usual litany of self-care:
Finally, Maas said he doesn't mind badgering people to do the right thing for themselves. "The nice thing about this problem is that the cure is so pleasant. Good night, and sweet dreams!" §