by Our Sleep Problem and What to Do About It
BY BETSY ISAACSON / JANUARY 22, 2015
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Sleep is perceived to be the enemy of efficiency: inescapable wasted blocks of time that can’t be converted into anything of broader use to society.
Entrepreneurs and capitalists have known this forever, of course. The growth in popularity of coffee and tea during the Industrial Revolution was, as Tom Standage argues in The History of the World in Six Drinks, tied to the working hours and conditions brought on by that revolution. In the early days of factories, owners, Standage argues, saw what the long hours were doing to their employees’ sleep. But instead of offering more time in bed, they’d give them free tea and reap the reward: "Tea kept workers alert on long and tedious shifts and improved their concentration when operating fast moving machines,” he writes. “Factory workers had to function like parts in a well-oiled machine and tea was the lubricant that kept the factories running smoothly.”
It’s worse today. Even those of us who would never check our email at midnight now live in a world where being on call 24 hours a day is commonplace. In 1992, Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American, made headlines by revealing that U.S. citizens worked, on average, a month more in 1990 they did in 1970. Since then, the numbers have gotten worse. From 1990 to 2001, Americans added another full week to their working year: That was 137 hours longer than the Japanese, 260 hours longer than the British and 446 hours longer than the Germans, according to a report put out by the United Nations’ International Labor Organization. Fast-forward to today: The Bureau of Labor Statistics says Americans are working longer hours than at any time since statistics have been kept.
It also bears noting that nearly 7 million Americans are currently stringing together part-time jobs: That’s 3 million more than in 2007, when the Great Recession began. These people are likely to have erratic and often inconvenient work schedules; not exactly a recipe for getting proper R&R. Shift workers, in particular, have it tough: In December 2014, the Health Survey for England found that in the U.K., those who worked outside the 12 hours between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. were substantially “sicker and fatter” than those who worked daytime hours. A 2014 study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that shift work substantially increased the risk of dementia.
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Again, millennials seem the most vulnerable: 40 percent of young people work part-time, contract, temp or onetime jobs, with more than half living paycheck to paycheck, according to the 2014 Millennial Study conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Wells Fargo. The Health Survey for England found that 16- to 24-year-olds were the demographic most likely to be stuck doing shift work.
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Today’s youth are also at tremendous risk for long-term, sleep-related health impacts. Sleep-related disorders are on the rise, creeping upward among older workers and becoming staggeringly common in young adults. We've long known that sleep is crucial to good health: Bodies subjected to sleep deprivation undergo an ugly metamorphosis until they are in many ways fundamentally different from their sufficiently-slept counterparts. A study published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showed that chronic sleep deprivation caused “shifts” in the expression levels of more than 700 genes. “Many of these [genes] are related to inflammation and immune and stress response, and overlap with the program of gene expression that is generally associated with high stress levels,” explains Malcolm von Schantz, a researcher at the University of Surrey who helped conduct the PNAS study.
Sleep loss has tremendous cognitive consequences: Dozens of studies have connected lack of sleep to deficits ranging from poor insight formation to diminished working memory. Chronic sleep deprivation is also associated with increased mortality and especially obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and impaired cognitive function, says von Schantz.
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Full article at:
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/30/our-sleep-problem-and-what-do-about-it-301165.html
