Sleep enough last night? If not, you may want to catch a siesta over the lunch break today. Why so?
A tired brain apparently reverts back to primitive behaviors, gets cranky and over-reacts emotionally, when stressors strike – and they will! Have you seen it?
Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of California at Berkeley used magnetic imaging recently ... to observe crankiness in sleep-deprived people.
This new study showed how lack of sleep causes the brain's emotional centers to dramatically overreact to what people perceive as negative experiences. Scientists warn that … while rested workers are more likely to create peace through popping good tone tactics into problems whenever conflicts arise at work … watch out for sudden barbs that come from sleepless grumps who find themselves easily angry or sad. How does it happen?
Exhausted workers suffer from a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe ... a brain region that normally balances emotions ... and that’s the reason for heightened emotional response in sleep-deprived people ... according to researchers’ discovery.
We’ve seen experts illustrate how to pay back our debt to sleep, and how sleep can help fight depression and can add to peak performances. We’ve been told how to connect the dots in our mental background with sleep. Many of us have felt the havoc of too little short term memory – when we lack sleep. And history points to avoidable national workplace disasters that resulted from sleep deprivation.
Will this new research change how you organize today for a better sleep tonight?
Gee, Ellen, looking at the clock I'm feeling guilty about still being up and working:-)
This is an area in which I have faced frustration with many, many clients. I see executives bringing people in from around the world for meetings. Then they start the meetings at 7 am and run them until 6 or 7 at night. Following that, there is a mandatory group dinner each night to "build teamwork." The rationale is that "If we're paying for all this travel and hotel expense, then we have to get the most for our money."
The problem is, no one is fully participating by mid-afternoon of each day. They act like they are because they are organizationally astute. But the sleepless factor wins out when it comes to decreased quality and increased edginess.
No matter how many times I use examples like your brain-based one above, the answer is always the same: "We have to be cost-effective."
Maybe if we stopped calling people "human resources" and went back to calling them "people", the brain-based processing would arrive at a different conclusion.
Must go now...it's late, I can't remember why I'm here, and I'm making barbed comments to myself.
Posted by: Steve Roesler | October 23, 2007 11:31 PM | Permalink to Comment