Did you sleep well last night? If you didn’t, are you aware of the consequences? Sure, you feel a bit foggy-brained, but there’s more to it than that. According to research by the thinktank Rand Europe, sleep deprivation costs the UK economy £40bn a year. In the US, the estimated cost of poor sleep is US$411bn.
But how can lack of sleep be quantified? “We built an economic model that simulates the real economies of those countries,” says Marco Hafner, the Rand report’s lead author. “Then we looked at three effects. One is mortality, because people who regularly sleep fewer than six hours a day have a 13% greater chance of dying at any point. That has a negative effect on the economy, because those people are then not in the workplace,” he says. Hang on, don’t they just get replaced? “Yes, but that can be costly, because new people are not as effective.”
Hafner got the idea for the research after he became a father. He realised he was driving to work, but not really understanding how he got there; sitting in the office, but not really functioning. Somewhere in that brain fog (and this raises a counter-question about the effect of sleeplessness on creativity), he thought: “Why has no one thought about how we can measure sleep?” The semi-functioning state he describes accounts for the biggest cost of sleeplessness: productivity. The third and final cost is the negative impact on lifetime earnings of young people who lack sleep.
So, what can be done to help workers sleep better? Some companies already offer nap rooms or nap pods – such as the Huffington Post, Uber, Google, Ben & Jerry’s and PricewaterhouseCoopers – but they are a long way from commonplace and beyond the means of most employers. Other aides to alertness include canteen menus that offer healthy food and regulating the temperature of the office, a topic explored in a Cornell University study of the effect of temperature on productivity.
Office design is increasingly blurring the lines between work and leisure. The proliferation of table tennis tables, foosball tables, massage chairs, indoor mini-golf courses, pot plants and kitchen and lounge areas suggests that employers want to make the workplace so comfortable, so much like home, that people almost forget to leave. All of this is designed to increase productivity, of course. But if increased productivity relies upon longer working hours, which lead to less sleep, which itself generates an economic cost, who is to say which cost or benefit is greater?
“We spend lots of time on our smartphones; that exposes you to a lot of blue light, which is bad for your levels of melatonin,” Hafner says. He suggests a curfew after which employees are not expected to respond to emails.
“Sleep is a public-health issue,” he says. “Make sleep like smoking. There are smoking cessation programs. But not many companies care about sleep in that way.”
After all, we spend about a third of our lives sleeping or trying to sleep. It would be nice to excel at it.
