Not that long ago everyone was lamenting the slovenliness of the British public. We didn’t work hard enough, took too many holidays and anxiety was rising about how we would ever keep up with our harder-working, more productive peers in China and the East. However, the tides is changing and, guess what, slovenliness is back.
Slovenliness is not quite accurate, but these days we can’t read a paper without being told that we need to get more sleep, be more mindful, take better care of ourselves and quit our technology addictions. Apparently, our need to tweet, check email and watch the latest Game of Thrones is literally killing us. Experts from Harvard, Cambridge and Surrey Universities have put together a report on humans and our need for sleep, and have come to the conclusion that we are arrogant to ignore our circadian rhythms.
Mixed messages
This arrogance can’t all be blamed on the ubiquity of smartphones. For decades we have been told that really successful people don’t need much sleep. From Churchill to Margaret Thatcher, who both survived on between 4-5 hours of sleep a night, to more recently former Burberry CEO, now at Apple, Angela Ahrendts and Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer.
But now some experts claim that this is all rubbish: they must be lying about how little sleep they get as the human body just isn’t designed to work that way. While Churchill did admit to naps in the afternoon, he was also a notoriously late riser who would take early meetings in his dressing gown, you don’t hear of Ahrendts or Meyers dozing off at their desks for half an hour.
Don’t forget mindfulness
Not only is the necessity of sleep being rammed down our throats, but the concept of mindfulness is trying to influence our waking moments. Meditation is now considered the key to success. Focusing on the moment, letting go of office stress (and those pesky smart phones) are considered the new way to climb the corporate ladder. Even banks are offering mindfulness classes to their workers, and online media mogul Arianne Huffington, has written a book entitled Thrive, that actively encourages meditation, taking breaks and banning technology in the bedroom.
The idea is simple – if we are less stressed and more relaxed, our body and mind will be more useful to the global economy, better able to innovate and less prone to make mistakes. This all makes sense, but if mindfulness and sleep are the new must-have attributes for the successful CEO, will it go the way of sleep deprivation, with executives having to lie about how good they are at meditating and locking their phones away at night?
Is this advice counter-productive?
While no one needs to tell me that sleep is one of the most delicious things in the world, do we really need academics at the world’s leading universities making us anxious about not getting enough of it? They argue that in the past our forefathers were clocking up 9 hours a night, now that has dropped to 7 hours a night, with some people getting significantly less. My answer to that is this: back then people worked in fields, or as domestic staff – they needed the sleep. With all the sitting around we do at work and home, surely a couple of hours less sleep per night may be our circadian rhythms adapting to our changing, and infinitely more comfortable, lifestyles?
If you need to pull an all-nighter, pull one, but then leave work early the next day, and don’t do more than one all-nighter per month. If businesses can’t get by with that then they need to hire more staff.
And if we need more sleep to be more successful then someone may want to think about making TV a lot more boring. Already this year there has been the fantastic second season of House of Cards and series four of Game of Thrones, along with countless others that I’m too tired to remember.