Poor sleep can have a serious effect on memory and decision-making – hardly a recipe for success in business. Coaches need to be prepared to give some clients the ‘wake up’ call they need, says Vicki Culpin
You may be shocked to hear that 17 hours of wakefulness can bring down a person’s level of alertness to the equivalent blood alcohol reading of 0.05%, a level that would break the legal drink-driving limit in more than 90 countries.
Poor quality and quantity of sleep can have a dramatic impact, both personally and in the workplace. The behaviours an individual may exhibit when they’re drunk are certainly not the kind to ensure a productive working life!
Yet the issue of poor sleep is rarely addressed by managers at work or within the realms of the coaching conversation. But coaches can play a key role in tackling this issue with clients.
The impact of poor sleep
Busy professionals experience many pressures that impede their ability to obtain optimal amounts of sleep. Working shifts, working across different time zones and international travel are all common causes of sleep loss. In addition, the use of artificial lighting and handheld technologies at night, ever-increasing pressure to be ‘seen’ to perform and the lengthening of the working day, make the challenge of getting optimal sleep more difficult.
According to the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, an adult of working age should get between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, every night. And yet a 2013 study by the NSF revealed that in the UK, 39% of adults say they were getting less than seven hours sleep per night on a work night. For the US this figures increases to 53% and in Japan, two-thirds (66%) of the adult population are not getting the minimum recommended amount (http://bit.ly/2RqRfxD).
In 2016, RAND Europe reported that for individuals regularly sleeping fewer than six hours per night, at any point in time they had an increased mortality risk of 13% and for those sleeping between six and seven hours it was 7%.
If not getting the right amount of sleep can increase your risk of dying by up to 13%, it’s perhaps no surprise that it’s also been linked to seven of the top 15 causes of death in the US, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, septicaemia and hypertension.
The business case for sleep
It doesn’t take months or years of reduced quality or quantity of sleep for the effects to show themselves. Two weeks of poor sleep can lead to a
three-fold increase in vulnerability to the common cold, and just one night of poor sleep can adversely affect a range of cognitive functions such as
memory, attention, decision-making, problem solving, creativity, innovation and mood.
So, one night of poor sleep and your ability to do your job is reduced. One night of poor sleep, and the skills needed to fully engage in the coaching process – including communication skills, problem solving and learning – are impacted. In particular:
- Memory
Good sleep improves memory. Getting a good night’s sleep prior to learning new material and/or sleeping between learning the new information and needing to recall it, have both been shown to improve subsequent performance.
In a study where individuals were sleep deprived prior to being given new material to learn, there was an incredible 40% reduction in their ability to form new memories. Interestingly, this reduction was only across positive and neutral memories – the negative memories were still remembered.
This bias for negative memories is particularly pertinent to consider in a coaching conversation given the tendency, even with good sleep, for clients to wish to focus on ‘what went wrong’ rather than ‘what worked’.
Adding in a bias towards the negative as a result of poor sleep means the coach may have to work even harder to redress the balance.
- Decision-making
Divergent decision-making is not only a critical skill in organisational life, but also perhaps one of the most important components of a coaching conversation when discussing goals and actions.
It takes just one night of sleep loss to fundamentally affect these specific types of decisions and particular cognitive processes. Sleep researchers have found that if a person is involved in a decision-making process that involves divergent thinking, they are likely to be sidelined by irrelevant trivia, lose track of what was recently said, have difficulty in finding diplomatic words, become more distrustful and fail to detect subtle changes of emotion in others and less able to negotiate because of sleep deprivation. On top of this, their ability to reflect and have insight in to their own behaviour may already be reduced.
This isn’t a recipe for success, in the working environment nor in the coaching conversation.
Bed partners – the role of the coach in addressing sleep issues
Given the stark, and highly compelling evidence of the importance of good quality and quantity of sleep on long-term physical health, as well as the effects on cognitive and social and emotional functioning, being able to address the role of sleep in any coaching conversation can be critical with some clients.
The client may already be aware that poor sleep is a contributing factor to their current coaching issues, or addressing a lack of sleep may even be their primary coaching goal. With some clients, however, it may be the missing link that hasn’t been considered. And given that poor sleep leads to a lack of insight into our own performance, it’s highly likely that such clients haven’t yet considered that poor sleep practices may be affecting their health and/or behaviour, or indeed that their lack of sleep is likely to impede their ability to gain the most from any coaching conversation.
It’s also possible that the direction of causation is reversed: that is, the client’s behaviour may not be affected by poor sleep, but poor sleep may be a consequence of something that’s being explored or needs to be explored in the coaching. Along with a ‘busy mind’, worry or rumination in bed is one of the most frequently cited causes of difficulty in falling asleep.
Tips and techniques to improve sleep quantity and/or quality
Both quality and quantity of sleep are important, and both can be affected by a variety of causes, some of them within our direct control, some less so, and some being a temporary (such as pregnancy) or relatively permanent (such as gender) fact of life.
It’s important that the client is able to identify which factors may be impacting their sleep patterns the most. Here the coach can help.
The coach can also help focus the client on making changes to only one or two things at one time, monitoring the resulting changes, and reflecting on progress in the next coaching session.
Along with identifying specific causes of poor sleep such as the menopause, alcohol, caffeine, technology in the bedroom, exercise too close to bedtime and external noise, there are some basic sleep hygiene guidelines that can be shared with clients to help them gain more restful sleep:
- Establish a regular bedtime routine
A regular routine allows the body to build in consistent patterns of sleep, and helps improve both the quantity and quality of sleep. Ask the client to treat themselves like a small child – having a regular wind down routine, go to bed and wake up at the same time in the week AND at weekends.
- Use the bedroom for sleep and sex only
The body, both physiologically and psychologically, needs to recognise the bedroom as a space for sleeping. Any cues that can be connected to wakefulness, such as working, watching TV or using technology will not encourage ‘winding down’.
- Try not to ‘sleep binge’
Reducing the amount of sleep you get during the week, but trying to stay asleep longer at weekends to ‘catch up’ is, at best, not always effective, and at worst, counterproductive. If the client is staying asleep for long periods at the weekend this often involves larger periods of light sleep rather than the critical deep sleep they may well have missed out on during the week. In addition, sleeping late at the weekend may reduce their drive for sleep the next night, creating a vicious circle.
- Think about the levels of darkness in the bedroom
The sleep cycle is strongly determined by light and dark, so a bedroom that is too light early in the morning can bring the body in to a state of light sleep and wakefulness. Clients might consider blackout blinds (or an eye mask), but make sure they have a good alarm clock!
- Avoid napping too close to bedtime
While napping can be beneficial, napping too close to bedtime can reduce the drive for sleep (the feeling of becoming more tired as the day progresses). This may mean not being tired when it’s time for bed, struggling to fall asleep and potentially increasing the need for a nap the next day.
- Avoid heavy food close to bedtime
Heavy, spicy food can take a while to metabolise and may be the main focus of the body while you are trying to relax and fall asleep. Leave a gap of at least two to three hours.
- Vicki Culpin is professor of organisational behaviour at Ashridge Executive Education, part of Hult International Business School, and the author of The Business of Sleep: How Sleeping Better Can Transform Your Career (Bloomsbury Business, 2018). She specialises in wellbeing research, specifically related to memory and sleep.