Thrive, page 8
Our current toxic definition of success and our addiction to our devices is having a particularly negative impact on the next generation. “Generation Y,” otherwise known as the millennials, could be given a third, more alarming, name: “generation stress.” A study commissioned by the American Psychological Association asked participants to rank their stress level. Millennials marched at the front of the stress parade.
Moreover, the findings were dismally consistent across almost every question. Nearly 40 percent of millennials said their stress had increased over the past year, compared to 33 percent for baby boomers and 29 percent for older Americans. Over half of millennials said that stress had kept them awake at night during the past month, compared to 37 percent for baby boomers and 25 percent for older Americans. And only 29 percent of millennials say they’re getting enough sleep.
In the United Kingdom, according to a study by Oxford professor Russell Foster, more than half of British teenagers may be sleep deprived: “Here we have a classic example where sleep could enhance enormously the quality of life and, indeed, the educational performance of our young people. Yet they’re given no instruction about the importance of sleep and sleep is a victim to the many other demands that are being made of them.”
Higher levels of stress put millennials at higher risk downstream for all sorts of destructive consequences. Stress, as we’ve seen, is a huge contributing factor in heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. And already, 19 percent of millennials have been diagnosed with depression, compared to 12 percent of baby boomers and 11 percent of older Americans.
Not surprisingly, one of the biggest causes of stress among younger Americans is work. Seventy-six percent of millennials report work as a significant stressor (compared to 62 percent of baby boomers and 39 percent of older Americans). Among the challenges facing millennials is the growing number of them who graduate college with massive student debt and find themselves entering a weak job market. So millennials more than any other generation are casualties of the stress built into our economy—either overworking and hooked on technology, or unable to find work and struggling to pay the bills and survive.
Of course, many of these are problems that require political action and economic reform. But whatever end of the spectrum one finds oneself, mindfulness, meditation, and assorted tools and practices not only help strengthen our resilience and ingenuity in the face of adversity, they also lead to greater performance in the workplace.
And, yes, I realize there is a paradox in using the idea of enhanced performance as a selling point for practices that would help us redefine success. What we are talking about, after all, is what’s ultimately important in our lives. In other words, meditation, yoga, getting enough sleep, renewing ourselves, and giving back make us better at our jobs at the same time that they make us aware that our jobs don’t define who we are.
Whatever your entry point is—take it. Right now you may just want to be better at your job, or help your company become more successful, and that’s the reason you start meditating, or practicing mindfulness, or sleeping more. But along the way you will likely also gain some added perspective on what matters in your life. Writing in The New York Times about the Third Metric conference we held in June 2013, Anand Giridharadas pointed out that “there is risk in this approach.… To make the case for greater attention to well-being in terms of its effect on work performance may be to win the battle and lose the war. The victor remains the idea that what is good for work is good for us.”
I believe we can win both the battle and the war. Paying greater attention to our well-being—for whatever reason—connects us with parts of ourselves that now lie dormant and makes it more likely that there will no longer be any split between being successful at work and thriving in life.
Sleep Your Way to the Top
The most basic shift we can make in redefining success in our lives has to do with our strained relationship to sleep. As Dr. Michael Roizen, chief wellness officer of the Cleveland Clinic, put it, “Sleep is the most underrated health habit.” Most of us fail to make good use of such an invaluable part of our lives. In fact, we deliberately do just the opposite. We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in. Sleep, or how little of it we need, has become a symbol of our prowess. We make a fetish of not getting enough sleep, and we boast about how little sleep we get. I once had dinner with a man who bragged to me that he’d gotten only four hours of sleep the night before. I resisted the temptation to tell him that the dinner would have been a lot more interesting if he had gotten five.
There’s practically no element of our lives that’s not improved by getting adequate sleep. And there is no element of life that’s not diminished by a lack of sleep. Including our leaders’ decisions. Bill Clinton, who used to famously get only five hours of sleep a night, admitted, “Every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.” And in 2013, when the European Union was working on a plan to bail out Cyprus, an agreement was reached during the wee hours of the night that was described by one commentator as “impressively stupid.” The financial journalist Felix Salmon describes the decision as “born of an unholy combination of procrastination, blackmail, and sleep-deprived gamesmanship.” The role of sleep deprivation in international negotiations would make an excellent doctoral dissertation (just don’t pull any all-nighters to finish it).
Our creativity, ingenuity, confidence, leadership, and decision making can all be enhanced simply by getting enough sleep. “Sleep deprivation negatively impacts our mood, our ability to focus, and our ability to access higher-level cognitive functions: the combination of these factors is what we generally refer to as mental performance,” say Drs. Stuart Quan and Russell Sanna, from Harvard Medical School’s Division of Sleep Medicine. I have been such a sleep evangelist for the past five years that I was asked to join its executive council—a role that has provided me with a great education in the latest sleep research, and that has, in turn, further reinforced my sleep evangelism!
A study at Duke University has found that poor sleep is associated with higher stress levels and a greater risk of heart disease and diabetes. They also found that these risks are greater in women than in men. Till Roenneberg, a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, who is an expert on sleep cycles, coined the term “social jetlag” to explain the discrepancy between what our body clocks need and what our social clocks demand. Of course, plain old jet lag can also play havoc with our body clocks—so, as someone who travels a lot across multiple time zones, I am ruthless in enforcing my anti-jetlag rules. While airborne, I drink as much water as possible, strictly avoid sugar and alcohol, move around the plane as much as space and security restrictions will allow, and, above all, sleep as long as I can with the help of my meditation music playlist (and by putting away portable electronic devices—even when they’re allowed).
Like meditation, our sleep patterns can have a physical effect on our brain. A study conducted at Harvard Medical School found that people who got more sleep than the bare minimum they needed increased the volume of gray matter in their brains, which is linked to improved psychological health.
A 2013 study on mice showed that during sleep the brain clears out harmful waste proteins that build up between its cells—a process that may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s. “It’s like a dishwasher,” said one of the study’s authors, Maiken Nedergaard, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Rochester. Professor Nedergaard made an analogy to a house party: “You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you can’t really do both at the same time.… The brain only has limited energy at its disposal and it appears that it must choose between two different functional states—awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up.” Far too many of us have been doing too much entertaining and not enough cleaning up.
As the Great British Sleep Survey found, poor sleepers are seven times more likely to feel helpless and five times more likely to feel alone. These are consequences that can impact everything from our relationships and our ability to focus to our health. Our sleep deficit has significant economic costs, as well. A 2011 Harvard Medical School study found that insomnia was significantly associated with lost work performance, and when projected onto the entire U.S. workforce, the study estimates that the lost performance due to insomnia costs businesses more than $63 billion per year.
More and more scientific studies speak to the irrefutable benefits of sleep. A study published in Science even calculated that for the sleep deprived, an extra hour of sleep can do more for their daily happiness than a $60,000 raise. In fact, a number of studies have failed to find a consistent connection between extra money and happiness—as large increases of real income in the developed world over the past half century have not correlated with increases in reported happiness. University of Southern California economics professor Richard Easterlin conducted a study that analyzed the correlation between income and reported well-being, and found that in Japan, well-being levels remained constant between 1958 and 1987, despite a 500 percent increase in real income!
But what do we do if, despite our best intentions, we’re not getting the seven or eight hours a night of sleep we need? Researchers have found that even short naps can help us course correct. Throughout history, famous nappers have included Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and John F. Kennedy. Charlie Rose, a famous napper of our time, told me that he is now taking up to three naps a day: “I have a nap after we finish our CBS morning show, a nap before I tape my own show, and a nap before I go out in the evening. I don’t like the feeling of going through my day tired!” According to David Randall, author of Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, a short nap “primes our brains to function at a higher level, letting us come up with better ideas, find solutions to puzzles more quickly, identify patterns faster and recall information more accurately.”
Of course, getting more sleep is easier said than done—believe me, I know! This is especially true in a culture that’s wired and connected 24/7. And more and more science is proving that glowing screens and sleep are natural enemies. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently published a study showing that the light from computer screens obstructs the body’s production of melatonin, which helps govern our internal body clock and regulates our sleep cycle. Technology allows us to be so hyperconnected with the outside world that we can lose connection to our inner world.
We desperately need to purge our lives of the poison of what Anne-Marie Slaughter called “time macho.” She describes it as our “relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you.”
In January 2010, I convinced Cindi Leive, editor in chief of Glamour magazine, to join me in a New Year’s resolution that we believed would improve the lives of women everywhere in the world: to get more sleep. To us, sleep was a feminist issue. You see, of all the sleep-deprived Americans, women are the most fatigued. Working moms get the least sleep, with 59 percent of respondents to a national survey reporting sleep deprivation, and 50 percent saying they get six hours of sleep or less. Cindi admitted that between her work, her two young children, and her TV addiction, she was averaging just over five hours a night.
“Women are significantly more sleep-deprived than men,” confirms Dr. Michael Breus, author of Beauty Sleep. “They have so many commitments, and sleep starts to get low on the totem pole. They may know that sleep should be a priority, but then, you know, they’ve just got to get that last thing done. And that’s when it starts to get bad.” Cheating your body out of the R & R it needs can make you more prone to illness, stress, traffic accidents, and weight gain. (Dr. Breus swears that sleeping will actually do more to take off weight than exercise!)
But there’s more to sleep deprivation than physical problems. Rob yourself of sleep and you’ll find you do not function at your personal best. This is true of work decisions, relationship challenges, or any life situation that requires judgment, emotional equilibrium, problem solving, and creativity. “Everything you do, you’ll do better with a good night’s sleep,” says Dr. Breus. Yet we constantly push ourselves to get by on less until we often don’t even know what “peak performance” feels like anymore.
There’s a reason why sleep deprivation is classified as a form of torture and is a common strategy employed by religious cults. They force prospective members to stay awake for extended periods to reduce their subjects’ decision-making ability and make them more open to persuasion. So the choice is ours. Do we want to be empowered women and men taking charge of our lives? Or do we want to drag ourselves around like zombies?
Back to our New Year’s resolution. For a month, Cindi and I committed to getting a full night’s sleep—in Cindi’s case seven and a half hours of sleep, in mine eight (arrived at through trial and error as the number of hours it takes for each of us to be at our most creative and effective).
Getting a good night’s sleep, of course, is an easier resolution to make than to keep. We had to tune out a host of temptations—from Jon Stewart to our email in-boxes. And most of all, we had to ignore the workaholic wisdom that says we’re lazy for not living up to the example set by notoriously self-professed undersleepers.
Of course, the truth is just the opposite: Each of us is much more likely to be a professional powerhouse if we’re not asleep at the wheel. The problem is that women too often feel that they don’t “belong” in the boys’ club atmosphere that still dominates many workplaces. So they attempt to overcompensate by working harder and longer than the guy next to them. Hard work helps women fit in and gain a measure of security. And it can work, at least initially. So they begin to do it more and more and more often, making long hours part of their professional lifestyle. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory: The workaholism leads to lack of sleep, which, in turn, leads to not being at our best. Too many of us are fueled by the fear that getting the proper amount of sleep means we must not be passionate enough about our work and our life.
By sleeping more we, in fact, become more competent and in control of our lives. It gives new meaning to the old canard of women sleeping our way to the top. Women have already broken glass ceilings in Congress, space travel, sports, business, and the media—imagine what we can do when we’re all fully awake.
Having a buddy certainly made our efforts to get more sleep much easier and more fun. I remember Cindi emailing me on day three: “I got seven and a half last night but it was very stressful to get myself to bed on time! I was rushing around like I was trying to make a train!” She helped me identify that same feeling in myself. One night, I was discussing a potential HuffPost headline with our founding editor Roy Sekoff at 10:30 p.m. and I started getting nervous that I was going to miss the train. So Roy and I sped up our brainstorming so we could get the new headline up on the site without me missing my sleep deadline (it felt as if we were defusing a bomb in an action movie). Most important, as we were hanging up, I was able to laugh at myself—always a great stress buster.
And I discovered a number of great sleep aids: for starters, the yummy pink silk pajamas Cindi sent me as a gift. Just putting them on made me feel ready for bed—so much more than the cotton T-shirts I usually wear at night. Those pajamas were unmistakably “going-to-bed clothes,” not to be confused with “going-to-the-gym clothes.” Too many of us have ignored the distinction between what you wear during the day and what you wear to bed. Slipping on the PJs was a signal to my body: Time to shut down!
An even more important signal that it’s time to shut down is turning off our devices: I made sure I had my iPhone and my BlackBerrys (yes, I have more than one!) charging far, far away from my bed, to help me avoid the middle-of-the-night temptation to check the latest news or latest emails.
And Cindi came up with a new trick to use if she was having trouble falling asleep: “Counting backward from 300 by threes—it works like magic and you never get below 250.” On the few occasions when I feel too wired to sleep, my panacea is a hot bath with my favorite bath salts.
On day four of our “sleep rehab” I actually woke up without an alarm. I looked around anxiously to see what was wrong, wondering what emergency my body had summoned my attention for. It took me a minute or two to realize that the reason I was wide awake was because … I didn’t need to sleep anymore. Imagine that.
Professor Roenneberg explains that although 80 percent of the world uses an alarm clock to wake up on workdays, discovering how much sleep we truly need is fairly simple: “We sometimes overeat, but we generally cannot oversleep. When we wake up unprompted, feeling refreshed, we have slept enough.”
He goes on: “With the widespread use of electric light, our body clocks have shifted later while the workday has essentially remained the same. We fall asleep according to our (late) body clock, and are awakened early for work by the alarm clock. We therefore suffer from chronic sleep deprivation.” It’s like we’re going deeper and deeper into debt, and we’re never going to get out.
One of the benefits of getting enough sleep was starting my day feeling like one of those horrible “rise and shine” people you normally want to throttle when you are among the sleep-deprived majority. I hit the ground running, minus the morning mental fog.
Many of us know that regular exercise helps us sleep better, but what I discovered is that it’s a two-way street: Regular sleep also helps us exercise better. It’s a truth that I felt, quite literally, in my bones, and that has been borne out by science. According to a recent study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine by researchers from Northwestern, after a bad night’s sleep, participants reported having shorter exercise sessions.
