Sleeping at Work

Sleeping at Work

            In today’s society, sleep has been seen as such an important aspect when it comes to one’s daily routine. Not only does sleeping or napping allow one to feel well rested and attentive, but it also allows one to be more prepared and ready to accomplish a certain task or work for the continuing day. The more hours of sleep we are able to attain, the more productive and efficient our workdays become. Though to some sleep may not appear as a dire necessity to get effective work accomplished, it has been found through different research studies that more hours of sleep or small effective naps in between work can allow for a more productive and alert day.

             Many companies today have allowed for individuals to take naps throughout the day to help combat unproductive hours later on. This has been able to show more productivity. Furthermore, occupations in Spain have all been known to operate on a similar system of siestas before lunchtime. By doing this, working individuals as well as students go home for roughly two to three hours, partaking in their lunch as well as sleeping for a set amount of time. Once awake, it is said that people who have taken a siesta or have slept for a set amount of hours during a day have been able to do more later on and feel more energized.

            In the New York Times article, “Take Naps at Work. Apologize to No one,” by Tim Herrera, the idea behind taking naps at a specific point throughout the day is emphasized heavily. Throughout the article, Herrera gives his own viewpoint of the problem that comes with not taking a sleep break as well interviews CEOs of companies that advocate for sleep breaks alongside psychologists, neuroscientists, and doctors who give their opinion on why sleep throughout the day can be seen as essential. In an interview with Josh Bersin, founder of Deloitte, Bersin explains in his interview with Herrera why he believes naps during the day need to be implemented. As stated by him, “Companies are suffering from tremendous productivity problems because people are stressed out and not recovering from the workday.” Bersin goes on to further explain that with the everlasting hours of continuous work throughout a given day, there’s comes a point where this stress needs to be combated with a break throughout the day.

From a neuroscience standpoint, Herrera interviewed and gathered information based on a study published in “Nature Neuroscience.” In this study, researchers decided to see how people’s perceptual performance changed throughout the day. They conducted this study four times throughout the day with two different sets of people. The first group of people didn’t take a nap throughout the day. The results obtained were able to show that with each test conducted, perceptual performance deteriorated. However, with the second group, the results were the opposite. The second group was given a 30 minute or 60 minute nap and with this time to sleep, their perceptual performance was seen to stay the same as it already was or with some, the perceptual performance was seen to have improved. According to Sara Mendick who was a co-author of this study as well as a professor of psychology at University of California, Riverdale and who was interviewed by Herrera, Mendick concluded that naps were able to have very similar benefits that overnight sleeping has. Along with this, she claimed that different types of sleep at different times can benefit an individual in different ways. She explained how 20-60 minute naps can help with memorization learning specific bits of information while a 90 minute nap in the day can give you a full cycle of sleep. These bits of information explained by Mendick showed the accurate representation of how much sleep is able to help in our day.

During a neuroscience seminar at Loyola University Chicago on December 5, 2017, Dr. Gail Baura presented her research work on truck drivers falling asleep on late night trips. In her research study, she examined four groups of people; two of the groups were truck drivers who were accomplishing trips in the United States and the other two groups were truck drivers who were accomplishing trips in Canada. Within this study, Baura examined the amount of sleep that these truck drivers were getting each night and was able to correlate it to late night accidents or the amount of times that truck drivers had to pull over during the night to rest. As a result, the truck drivers who got more amount of sleep (even if it was by an hour or two) were able to show less accidents on the road late at night and were also able to work a longer duration for driving late at night. These results from the study are able to correlate to Tim Herrera’s article in terms of how more sleep equates to better work ethic as well as more productive hours.

With the effort of Herrera’s article alongside Dr. Baura’s research, it is evident that more sleep and sleep during the day can give one better attentive effort as well as more productive hours during the day. Tim Herrera was able to show this with the interviews conducted as well as the studies that were conducted by Sara Mendick. Alongside this, Dr. Gail Baura’s research was able to demonstrate what longer sleep and sleep during the day can do for one. As shown, sleep is very important and it is able to determine the outcome of productivity as well as safeness for truck drivers.

Works Cited

·      Herrera, Tim. “Take Naps at Work. Apologize to No One.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 23 June 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/smarter-living/take-naps-at-work-apologize-to-no-one.html.

·      Baura, Gail, and Merrill M Mitler. “The Sleep of Long Haul Truck Drivers.” NEJM_TruckDrivers.Pdf | Powered By Box, 19 Nov. 2017, luc.app.box.com/v/neuroseminar/file/251218239087.