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Improve Your SleepGuest Post by Matt Shealy
Did you know that not getting enough sleep not only is detrimental to your physical health but can also lead to poor or risky decision-making?
That’s right, shortchanging yourself on those Z’s can affect how your brain works and in turn, how you think and act.
Many well-known accidents can be attributed to faulty decision-making caused by severe sleep deprivation, including the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the grounding of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker, and the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle.
Many studies have been done to understand the effect of sleep deprivation on our ability to make sound decisions. Here’s how sleep affects your decision-making abilities:
In a study conducted at Duke University, researchers found that an area in the brain involved in reward anticipation becomes selectively more active when high-risk, high-payoff choices were made by a subject that was sleep deprived.
While the number of high-risk decisions didn’t increase with sleep deprivation, the expectation of being rewarded for making the high-risk decision was elevated. Such perception can affect the likelihood of a subject taking a particular action.
Meanwhile, another study conducted by the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital of Zurich found that as sleep deprivation accumulates over the course of a week, participants tend to take on increasingly bigger and more impulsive risks.
Sound decision-making requires the ability to change our thinking based on new information, which is also called cognitive flexibility. Researchers at the Washington State University’s Sleep and Performance Research Center found that cognitive flexibility is particularly affected by sleep deprivation, more so than other cognitive processes involved in decision-making.
When we’re sleep deprived, our brain chemistry — namely, dopamine and adenosine — interact differently, causing cognitive flexibility issues. Essentially, sleeplessness short-circuits the brain, preventing people from making the right choice no matter how hard they try.
Sleep-deprived participants in the Duke University study not only take higher risks but also exhibit reduced concern for negative consequences. This led them to take actions that are disadvantageous or didn’t even make sense under normal circumstances.
When asked to self-evaluate, participants in the Zurich study consider the actions they took when sleep-deprived to be more risky than normal after they were given a few more hours of sleep.
Lack of sleep is also linked to attention deficits and ADHD, especially in younger people. In fact, research had pointed to the possible reinterpretation of ADHD as a sleep-related disorder. Since attention and decision-making operate from a shared axis in the brain, it’s not surprising that the inability to stay focus is likely to affect how we make decisions.
Researchers in Sweden found that sleep deprivation can lead individuals to make poor food choices by impairing higher-level thinking while increasing impulsivity, hunger, and cravings. The bad news is that the foods we crave when sleep-deprived are often junk food that will cause brain fog, send us on a blood sugar rollercoaster, induce mood swings, and impair our ability to think clearly to make sound decisions.
There’s no doubt that sleep deprivation is detrimental to our mental capabilities and abilities to make sound decisions. To make sure you’re at the to of your game every day, you need to get enough high-quality sleep every night. Here’s how:
Many people downplay the importance of sleep in today’s hustle culture, but the reality is that if we don’t get enough sleep, we can’t make the right decisions so we can work smart instead of just hard!
Getting high-quality sleep is one of the key habits of highly productive people. When you prioritize sleep and make it part of your success routine, you’ll be surprised by how much more you can accomplish during the day!
Matt Shealy is the President of ChamberofCommerce.com. Shealy specializes in helping small businesses grow their business on the web while facilitating the connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.
February 24th, 2020
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