Work problems, family issues, financial concerns or holiday stress- many reasons can keep you up at night. In fact, poor sleeping patterns can also lead to a number of health issues. For obvious reasons, sleep is crucial for our physical and mental functioning. Now, according to new research, poor sleep can also affect our performance the next day at work.
According to The Conversation, research in organisational behaviour has identified sleep as important for being effective at work. For research, they carried out diary studies in which employees complete surveys several times a day over several work weeks.
The findings demonstrate that on days with good as compared to bad sleep (that is, higher sleep quality or duration) employees perform better at their core work tasks, are more engaged at work, and are more likely to support colleagues.
Meanwhile, a lack of sleep makes employees more likely to procrastinate and engage in unethical behaviour such as claiming credit for someone else's work.
Another study found that on days after managers had poorer quality sleep, their employees reported more frequent occasions of abusive supervision, such as making negative remarks about them in front of other colleagues.
Sleep affects willpower. The research explained that sleep is particularly important for higher-level cognitive skills that we use to control and coordinate our thoughts and behaviour. A vital cognitive skill that particularly relies on good sleep is self-control or willpower.
A lot of what we do at work requires willpower. We need willpower to control our impulses and emotions, to complete tasks that are less enjoyable or outright unpleasant, and to resist distractions when working.
Examples of situations that require willpower at work might include someone in a customer-facing role providing service with a smile even though they're not really in a positive mood, or someone working remotely focusing on a challenging task while their children play in the background.
Not just our work performance, poor sleep patterns may reflect a higher risk of asthma. In a study published in the journal BMJ Open Respiratory Research, unhealthful sleep patterns and sleep traits at baseline were significantly associated with the risk of asthma in adults.
The authors of the study concluded that individuals with poor sleep patterns and higher genetic susceptibility have an additively higher asthma risk. A healthy sleep pattern reflected a lower risk of asthma in adult populations and could be beneficial to asthma prevention regardless of genetic conditions.
