Posts for tag: sleep

5 Sleep myths and 10 techniques to sleep better

There’s a silent epidemic creeping through society in the dead of night… studies have shown that at least 1 in 4 of us wake in the night or, find it hard to nod off.  Not only does this make you feel groggy but not getting enough sleep also directly impacts your performance at work and decision making skills. 

So what are the myths surrounding sleep and what can you do to help you get a better 40 winks? 

Sleep through Mental Health Awareness Week

The theme of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week running 18-24 May is sleep. A subject we’ve been especially engaged in for the past 15 years. During which time tremendous advances in the science of sleep have been achieved.

We now know better than ever before, why we sleep, how we sleep and most importantly the life-limiting effects of not getting sufficient sleep. One notable fact is that disrupted sleep is always a precursor to depression and many other psychological conditions. So it could be said that good sleep is a vaccine for mental illness.

A lack of sleep affects how you operate at work and it really impacts your ability to perform your job safely. Some of the negatives include increased risk-taking behaviour which can lead to an increase in work-related incidents. All this comes under the umbrella of serious mental health issues which can also arise from a lack of sleep.

Whilst a number of excellent books have been published on the subject in recent years, new discoveries are being made monthly and so publications go out of date faster than prawns in the sun. Instead, we’d recommend you reserve one of our Sleep Briefings during Mental Health Awareness Week, they last less than an hour and can be delivered in your workplace.

Write to us at mail@freshtracks.co.uk to check availability.

There is a vaccine for mental illness

Whilst mental health is highly complex, numerous studies have proven that in virtually every case of mental illness, there is pre-existing sleep disruption.

Poor sleep is, therefore, a reliable early indicator that our mental health is at risk. Whilst it is quite normal to lose some sleep during periods of stress, the danger is that the fact we are not sleeping well can further increase the threat to the health of our minds.

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Sleep Coaching

Coaching is now embraced by most leaders as a strategy for raising performance, largely thanks to the likes of Sir John Whitmore who adapted sports coaching to business leadership.
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Win at Sleep, Win at Work

This great new TV ad from IKEA encourages us to ‘Win at Sleep’. Whilst new furniture might help, we should note that the pocket sprung mattress came about at around the same time as the telephone, so why has one has evolved significantly more than the other?
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Sleep more to raise productivity

If you felt too tired to get out of bed this morning, spare a thought for Michael Lusher who was shot in the head during the early hours of Sunday 20th May 2007, but he didn’t realize it until he awoke nearly four hours later and noticed blood coming from his head!

You can't beat a good nights sleep!

In our 24/7 world, time spent sleeping is in decline so it’s little wonder that some of us find it hard to wake up in the morning.  It’s reported that we sleep at least one hour less each night than we did a half century ago.

A recent American study found that during a two-week period, 40% of workers reported fatigue. Of those, 65% reported health-related lost productive time. According to the researchers, workers with fatigue cost US employers $136.4 billion annually in health-related lost productive time.

Two-thirds of adults report frequent sleep problems, however only one in eight says those problems have been diagnosed.  The ‘sleep deprived’ are also more likely to suffer from obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular, psychiatric and gastrointestinal disease, and impaired immunity.  So it’s not just the quantity of our sleep that matters but also the quality; snoring loudly, daytime dozing, trouble falling asleep or waking unrefreshed are just a few of the signs that a person could be ‘sleep deprived’

“Sleep is sort of like food,” says Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School.  He adds, there’s one important difference: “You can be quite starved and still alive. But many of us live on the edge of sleep starvation and just accept it.”…