Insights from "Why We Sleep", by Matthew Walker | The Sleep-Work Connection: Boosting Efficiency and Mental Health

Christopher: 0:36

So welcome to season three. In this season we're talking about books, we're going to be discussing insights relating to business and business leadership, and in this first episode we're taking a look at Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. So wish we start.

Ayo: 0:53

No, I mean welcome to season three as well. I mean, and I think the one thing that you haven't mentioned is the fact that we are, for the first time, going to be streaming this live on YouTube. So it's also season three is also a bit of an experiment for us.

Christopher: 1:07

You know anyways I mean Chris you.

Ayo: 1:10

I mean you got me onto this book and you had a lot to say about it when you got me onto it, and so so in this episode, i'm going to be asking you a lot of questions and I'll also be sharing some of my thoughts about a lot of questions coming your way. So get ready. I know I did tell you this before we started, but you know I thought I'd measure that Okay.

Christopher: 1:28

Brace myself.

Ayo: 1:30

Yep. So, and my first question is you know, if you, if you were going to pitch this to anyone, how would you pitch it?

Christopher: 1:37

One of the key things for me was how. The fact that, from a business perspective, was how, by forcing people into very specific time slots, you decrease the efficiency of the people who work for you, and that decrease could be somewhere between 40 to 60%. You know, if you've got people who are morning people and they come in early and they work I mean that tends to be the norm in business people are celebrated for showing up early. But there are other people who work better later in the day and they're just not that effective early in the morning. So you just lose all this efficiency.

Christopher: 2:13

So, if you can, where you can give more flexibility and I think the pandemic has helped in that respect, in the lockdowns helped to introduce more flexibility into the working environment has possibly meant that you get more efficiency from people choosing their own times to work. It doesn't work in every situation or in every industry. You know, if you've got crisis centers 24 seven operations that have to be staffed around the clock, then you do need people in those, you know to cover every time slot. But if you can allow people to perhaps self select into some time slots that work best for them and then don't keep rotating those shifts out of some notion of fairness, you know, is it fair to take someone who's a night owl and force them to work early in the morning? Doesn't seem fair to me. If there are other people who prefer to work in the morning, give them those. The give them the morning slots, give the night elves the evening slots and, you know, try and even it out that way and you'll get better effect. You'll get more efficiency out of your workforce.

Ayo: 3:14

Yeah, no, i imagine, you know. Yeah, that could. That could become a bit of a challenge, you know, especially for a business that doesn't lend itself to, maybe, shift type work, but I did, you know. I mean, i remember one job that I had where there were some folks who came in later in the day, but the reason that was done was more for to help with logistics and traffic, just because, you know, moving during peak hours for some people was a little bit difficult And that was why that was done. You know, by you suggesting, for instance, as a business leader, we know, we should maybe consider separating our workforce based on their I don't know their sleep profile.

Christopher: 3:57

Workforce? perhaps not, but I think it's a question designing the business, isn't it? Design the business around humans rather than force the humans to fit in around the business side? You can't. it's not an absolute, is it? If you, if you design the business and design the your business model around humans, you will have higher engagement from your staff. you will have higher stickiness. they're less like to leave you for a company that doesn't offer that human centered design And you'll have probably better mental health and better mental, you know, better mental well being, or just health and well being generally for people who can work more to their own rhythms. You know we can improve society in a sense.

Ayo: 4:45

No, i mean I look at you see how that potentially works. And you know, my brain is running quickly And I'm trying to figure out. okay, look, i've got a couple of clients and I'm probably going to see how you know, suggest, how you know how this could help their business. And so I mean, if I'm trying to figure this out, so if I'm trying to figure out, okay, look, who's who's an early person, who's a late person, are there tests that we could do? Or is this the kind of stuff where you just send out a survey, you know, tell us your profile Or when, or do we ask questions like when do you prefer to work?

Christopher: 5:20

I suspect that there are. So questionnaires or surveys one could do, or even design for that. There's quite an interesting thought create something like that. But I think generally, you know I mean I know I'm not a morning person, i'm an evening person I get my creative spurt at about eight o'clock in the evening. That probably helps that. You know, in the evenings you're probably not in the work environment, you haven't got lots of interruptions, and that's where the human-centered design thinking maybe comes into. This is how much of the efficiency loss that you get in a business is due to people working in their ideal times and how much of it is actually just the practices people have of getting each other's way that, creating interference in the job. So it's difficult perhaps to spot that without a bit more analysis. I think There may be some a bit of applied neuroscience that one could fit into this and have a conversation with someone around that. That would be interesting to think of one or two.

Ayo: 6:28

You know, I mean, it sounds interesting because I'm a morning person and I know once, you know, once it starts to get dark six, seven, you know everything kind of slows down. If I have to work late, I do, but it's definitely not my preference. And if at night, when it becomes quiet, I fall asleep, just like that, you know. So I know, if I push anything to late at the day, I'll probably have to do it again in the morning. If it makes sense you know, so it's okay.

Christopher: 6:55

No, i like that I think there's a lot to be if we think of us humans a bit like a smartphone, almost, you know you start off in the morning if you remember to stick it on charge overnight. You start off with the full battery. You know full capability, and then if you're trying to operate when your battery is drained, there will be mistakes, there will be errors. You know you introduce extra risk. So I think that's yeah. I mean the western world is chronically sleep deprived. I mean this is something which is discussed quite often in the media, but people don't, i think, realize quite how damaging and dangerous that could be. Driving jobs are one of the worst cases. I'm sort of heading off on a tangent here. Well, it's a related tangent. One of the experiments not experiments that one of the research pieces they did that are reported in the book, is where they tested the effect of sleep deprivation. Now why? let me just cycle back slight. Take a step back here. If you force people to work in particular times, let's say they have to get them up early, but they're night people, so they just don't go to sleep early enough to get a full night's sleep, to show up at seven in the morning in a banking job or something, then they're going to become chronically sleep deprived And one of the effects of that is people who are chronically getting enough sleep. It has a biochemical and physical effect on the brain. What does this mean?

Christopher: 8:33

Well, the experiment they did. They took four groups of people. One group full eight hours of sleep. Second group only four hours of sleep. Third group they took them to the legal limit of inebriation, so 80 milligrams per liter, whatever it is in the UK, but other measures in other countries exist, i'm sure, but it's an experiment. So, third group at the legal limit, so not over the legal, at the legal limit. And the fourth group sleep deprived and illegal limit. So four hours of sleep and, as I said, that alcohol concentration. They then tested them driving for what they call off road deviations. So that's where the driver is not driving. Well, they're going off road. It's done on a simulator, it's not done on a real road. Okay, important to note.

Christopher: 9:25

The first group had a negligible number of off road deviations. The second group, the sleep deprived group, four hours on that night was six times more likely to go off off road. The inebriated group, also about the same six six times more likely to go off road. The group that were both inebriated and sleep deprived, with 30 times more likely to go off road. Now, when you think about that, so you can see it obviously compounds when you have the two. But when are people most likely to have a drink late in the evening if they're chronically sleep deprived and it's late, is it any surprise that the highest number of road traffic accidents that are due to whatever either case are happening on Friday nights, saturday nights. Statistically, that's when most of them happen. It's no real surprise, is it? And the two factors that operate with the two of the factors that are going on at that time. One is if you're mildly inebriated, your reaction times are slow. So you know there's a situation developing. When you're driving your reactions won't be as quick as they would be if you were. You know, completely clear of alcohol in your system. When you're sleep deprived you get these things called microsleeps. So that's when you just momentarily sleep, your brain switches off, so there's nobody there. So with inebriation, reactions are slow, it takes you time to respond With a microsleep there's nobody there, there's no one in charge of the vehicle. So when you come back, as it were, you wake up again your position has moved. Because if you're driving, your position has moved, you've got to recalibrate, you've got to re-work out. Your brain has to re-work out the trajectories of direction and what's happening in front of you And it's got to catch up and it's tired, so it's going to be slower.

Christopher: 11:21

And if you've got both of those factors going at the same time, is it any wonder that the consequences can be rather dramatic? So how does that affect business? Well, there's a lot of businesses that have drivers It's worth thinking about. What's the effect? What effect is that having on your the safety, health and safety of your people, on the people around them? you know, if you're driving you could be driving on roads. It affects others. So there's the well-being aspect. There's your insurance. What would it do to your insurance if you could eliminate the accidents that happen in your fleet? And I knew a guy who was a new dad, right, and he worked in the banking industry. He was a trader. He was chronically sleep deprived because he had a new baby at home Common experience. But as a result of his impact on his cognition, he traded the wrong side of a trade a couple of times for the business, for the bank he worked for, with the resulting losses in the millions. So really this is really important stuff for the. You know the bottom line of your business.

Ayo: 12:34

You know. I mean, i like that example because what I was going to ask you I was going to go to was okay, look, i could see the impact on drivers. but a lot of businesses don't you know, don't have you know drivers, or that's not a big component of their, of their business. So I wanted to test a couple of things, the first one being you know, on performance, how does you know, from you know, when you think of things like strategic decision making, how, what kind of impact does lack of sleep have on the business.

Christopher: 13:06

Well, apart from the the well-being things we were talking about, perhaps, i think that the more tired your brain is, the more difficult it becomes to take that abstraction from multiple sources of information. You know, when you're relaxed and refreshed you're able to synthesize information better. You're able to take many different sources and integrate them together to come to a decision about something.

Ayo: 13:35

So am I? so? I mean, am I able to? is it, is it that I'm not able to make decisions or my options are limited? I mean, i'm trying to kind of I'm thinking, you know, putting my shoes in someone listening who's running a business, who's someone who's, you know, maybe pride themselves on? oh yeah, i only go on four hours of sleep, i get my coffee on and I'm, and I'm golden. I mean, what impact, what potential impact is, what kind of damage potentially is happening to the business when you have that kind of combination?

Christopher: 14:04

I think one of them is likely to be missed opportunities, because I think, the more compromised your, your processing is if you think of a you know, think in terms of a computing system running on low power, because you've, you've, you've got, you know, low storage of energy. If you haven't had your sleep, caffeine's effect waking up effect doesn't increase your cognition, it just completely increases your alertness temporarily, chemically. So, if anything, it's narrowing your focus, which has its uses. You know, if you're, if you're doing a single, very precise activity of some kind, then yeah, it might, it might be beneficial, but in business, it's creativity that, generally speaking, is at certain levels of business, it's, it's the, it's what makes the difference to your success in as a, as an enterprise, is creativity, is is crucial to your success. I don't know why it pops into my mind, but Google has 20%, this thing called 20% time, where its engineers are allowed to work on anything you know, creatively, work on anything, anything they'd like to, anything that's interesting to them, and to be able to. You'll be at your most creative when you've got all of your, all of your assets available to you. All of your, your capabilities are fully, as it were, charged up.

Christopher: 15:32

Gmail, google AdWords. These came out of those creative 20% times, not out of some kind of strategic thing. Well, what we need to do next is invent an email system. No, it was someone in the in the environment at Google who said I don't like these other email systems, how about we make our own one? And they started building their first examples, their MVPs, and they built it up And it's the biggest mail platform in the world today. So I think the impact of poor sleep habits reduces creativity overall, amongst many other things, but creativity, i think in the business context, is one of the most important.

Ayo: 16:10

Okay, okay Now, thanks for that. The other thing I picked up from the book, as was written, it was the impact on you know, your ability to learn and your memory and all of that stuff. What do you think about that, or do you want to say more about that with respect to business?

Christopher: 16:27

Yeah, business, but yes, of course, it affects everywhere. In business we're constantly learning. You know, if you're new to a business, you're just joining it. You need to learn the culture of that business and you need to get under its skin. You need to learn what is actually in this new job. You need to learn your environment, your stakeholders, all of that. That's all learning.

Christopher: 16:45

What they discovered in the research is how sleep consolidates your learning. If you're learning a musical instrument and you're practicing and you're going at it again and again and again, you're trying to learn a passage and you just aren't getting it. The best thing you can do is sleep on it And then next day you come back to it and you discover that suddenly it's easier. Now, everyone's had this experience. They don't always know it was present to it, but they've had that experience when they tried to. It could be a technical thing, maybe it's your golf swing or you know, whatever it might be, something that has. There's a learning aspect to it that you work at it with repetition. But repetition alone isn't enough. You need your brain, needs time to unravel the bits that didn't work. Keep the bits that did and they become this. The effect of that is the next time you try it, you suddenly notice the difference, that suddenly this was, there was a step change, and all you did was sleep. The only difference was you slept. So there is an effect on that. It takes a full cycle of sleep to do it. Though If you're one of these four hours, six hour night people, you're not going to get the full benefit of that, because you're not. Your brain isn't going through all of the cycles it needs to do the different functions that the brain does.

Christopher: 17:57

The whole circadian rhythm bit is incredibly important. I mean, if we think about how that works, genetically, as it were, evolutionarily, we've grown up through a rhythm. Up until the last couple of hundred years, in the Industrial Revolution, we grew up with rhythms which were determined by daylight. It was bright during the day, it was dark at night. You know, if you're lucky, you had candles, you had a fire or whatever. If you're in a cave, you had a fire, and the difference in light intensity between fire light and daylight daylight's 20,000 lumens-ish 10 to 20,000 lumens. Fire light is about six to 900 lumens. So it's massive, massive thousands of percent different here. Don't take my maths. But now, in the modern day, what do we do now? Well, we work in dimly lit offices and bright, and we at night we're in brightly lit homes. I mean, some officers are very brightly lit as well now. So that has a big impact and evolution hasn't had a chance to necessarily catch up with all of that. It's only given a couple of hundred years since we've had electric light. So that's a major difference in how the body reads what it needs to do, when You may have heard of experiments done where people were prevented from sleeping at all and the body just starts to break down after a few weeks It just everything shuts down and breaks because it hasn't had a chance to do the repair cycles.

Christopher: 19:26

And your brain's the same. Your brain needs to clean out every day, ideally every night, and that cleaning cycle, that brainwashing that should happen every night that you've chosen the wash cycle, but that brainwash only starts to happen after six, six and a half hours of sleep. So if you never get to that six, six and a half hours, your brain never gets a chance to do the clean out, to wash out all the byproducts of respiration in the brain, which is the process of turning sugars into energy and that leaves. That's a combustion process chemically, it leaves residue That's got to be cleaned out. There's a strong correlation that suggests that if you can't do that, the brain doesn't get the opportunity to do that. That what you're probably looking at is Alzheimer's and dementia, because that's where you find this buildup of the myeloid and amyloid plaque, and this is what gets left over if the brain can't clean it out.

Ayo: 20:19

That's very interesting. So, basically, sleep cleans your brain. Well, no, no enough sleep, that's it, your brain. So you got to get enough good night rest, which is anything between seven to eight hours. I mean one of the lessons I mean I wouldn't say from the book, but one of the lessons I've observed from my career has been around the impact of sleep on productivity.

Ayo: 20:41

Because what used to happen you know, it's really when I was in banking, i was a consultant is when you walk late into the night, one of the things I discovered was the rate of mistakes in the document increases significantly And then you end up. When you wake up, when you get back to the document, you have to do rework. And if you're familiar, you know, if you're in a manufacturing environment, rework is what everybody frowns against because that's very expensive. But obviously in a you know, in a people business, no one is specifically measuring rework so long as it doesn't get to the clients, right? Because if it doesn't get to the client, well then it's fine.

Ayo: 21:21

But what I found was I started to. You know, when I start to feel tired when I'm working, i just stop, you know, and I go to sleep, and then as soon as I wake up, i go back to what I was doing, and I did it much faster than the rate at which I was going when I was getting tired, and I used to put that down to Oh yeah, i'm getting tired and stuff. But I also see how, you know, look, the body recognizes it's time to sleep. Go to sleep right Now. The body expects you to give it a certain amount of sleep.

Ayo: 21:54

If you don't give it that amount of sleep, it's almost as if you didn't go to sleep. You know, and I've noticed that on days where I don't get enough sleep, i mean throughout the entire day, i'm having to rely on, you know, coffee or some other stuff. I'm not falling sleepy, i'm not feeling sleepy, i'm just just to stay awake, like you know, stay switched on. So so, yeah, look, i mean I think for me, you know, i get all the benefits and all the lessons that that are in there. I guess the real question is first, as a business leader, how do I start to think about?

Ayo: 22:33

you know, because it's okay, if you, as a business leader, if you sleep well, why do you start to get a culture of you know well rested people in your business? What are practical ways of starting to think about that and get into the business? Because it's not when I'm good to know all of the benefits, but if we, if you can't implement it, you know probably, if you can't do it, then it's kind of useless to you.

Christopher: 22:56

Yeah, i think there's a very strong culture, business cultural element of this. I mean, as you say, in banking there was this, this, this culture, i suppose you know, macho kind of culture where you know, we, we party late into the night but we're still, you know, up early in the morning And that, bizarrely, when you understand what, what the damage it does, it has been celebrated for years, hasn't it? So I think there's work to be done to break down that idea as a positive. It's not a positive thing to be running on empty.

Christopher: 23:32

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were famous for their boasts about minimum sleep and what happened to them. They both had very serious dementia at the end of their lives and that's no fun for them, it's no fun for anyone around them. The cost of society is huge. So I think education is the answer. It was usually the answer and it certainly the answer in this case. Education so that people are aware of the need for proper rest, proper sleep, and you lead from the top.

Christopher: 24:01

You know you lead from the top and you, you encourage an environment in which people can question those practices in your business and if you find that your business really needs people at certain times, so think about how can you design around that, how can you either, maybe, if it's a time, so if it's a shift time, shift thing, could you staff that proportion of your business from a different time set. You know we live in an international, always on world with you know, connected by the internet. If you need someone who's going to be working, you know, from five o'clock in the evening till midnight London time, do they have to be in the UK or could you pick some could you work with work with you know someone in in the Americas, because they'll be. That's their normal natural daytime in America's connect connectivity is not really that much of an issue now, really Okay now I mean it's interesting, so I mean.

Ayo: 24:55

So the lessons I'm kind of taking away, first of all, is, as a business leader, you know you've got to promote, you know, this idea of you know, getting enough rest and refreshing your bearing as a way, as a lifestyle. First and foremost, you know, because if you, if you're not doing it, there's no point talking about it. The second bit is then education. You've got to just educate people on the importance of sleep in terms of, you know, the ability to perform better work and to you know to do, you know to do things better. Oh, the one thing I also say as a business leader is you can't be asking people to sleep and then be promoting the I guess a damaging environment of, yeah, we get things done in, you know, in there's this idea of, or we can get things done irrespective of the cost, so we walk till whenever to get whatever you need to get to you. So you know, i mean you get the point I'm making.

Christopher: 25:50

Yeah, i do, and I think we can it. Culturally, i think it. Why not ask your own people, you know, ask the people who are doing the job to come up with better ways of fitting it into into that model of a well-designed work environment that's not going to be physically and mentally damaging? I think there are companies who are going to really worry that if they admit to this being an issue that they could be leaving themselves open to to to legal challenges on well-being.

Ayo: 26:23

But you know, i'd say sort this out now, don't leave it, don't leave it till later and I think I mean there are ways to deal with it, without necessarily saying it's an issue which you know. We're learning new ways and we're saying, okay, look, you know, i think we think it's important for people to start to get more sleep and you know you can implement that culture change yeah, can you imagine?

Christopher: 26:44

you yourself to liabilities can you imagine how, how sticky that makes your work environment for your staff? if you're doing that, you know your staff will never want to leave because they where are they going to get this elsewhere? you know, at least for the next several, who knows how long and and when you think that. You know if you've got an employee that's earning around, you know 40k to replace that employee is going to cost you as a business.

Christopher: 27:11

According to the calculation number one of the the HR groups and I'd have to find the link for you that the real cost of that isn't just Okay. We've got twenty five percent of their salary for recruiter to find a new one. There's the cost of the hiring manager, the leaders in that organization. You have to redefine the role, interview people, make offers, train them when they arrive and all the distraction time. The real cost is about a hundred and thirty thousand to replace one person who salaries around forty came up. So every time you keep someone, it's protecting a hundred and thirty plus grand of your bottom line as a business. So how can you afford not to consider things like this that are gonna make your business more attractive to keep people, to keep you good people?

Ayo: 28:02

No, i mean no, i completely agree with you. And then you know, for anyone listening, i mean they got it. The power of sleep is that you know it's an exciting book for you to read, you know, and there's so much to learn from that book. So I mean, we've been discussing, we've been going for a while now. So, chris, i mean I will give you, i'll give you the final one, and this is your, the expert on sleep. What would you? I'll give you the final right.

Christopher: 28:24

So I think for me the biggest takeaway on this is the is is how getting that seven half to eight and a half hours of sleep opportunities it's called how important that is to your own health and well being and, as a consequence, how important it is to your Performance and, ultimately, your opportunities, the creativity it's. You could say it's a no brainer If you don't get the sleep, you're gonna end up, you know, having no brain.

Ayo: 28:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah, i guess the book gets some sleep. And then, you know, i guess I don't know, chris, you know folks not subscribe to our, to our podcast. I guess we could put the link in the show notes.

Christopher: 29:15

Where they're in all the usual pod grabbers. Just search for biz and coffee and you'll find us, nice red tail with a microphone on it, and the book will put link for the book in the, in the chat, and there's lots of resources around that you can Google. For I think the key thing is Realize the importance of it and make sure that you're nearest and dearest. Get this to, because it's it's too important to just let it. Let it go by, do like and subscribe. If you get the, if you have the opportunity to do a review, that's great. Please do apple podcast, do it spotify, you can do reviews. That really helps us get known and get out there. Yeah, so without, i guess it's a. That's a wrap for today and we'll see you next time.

Ayo: 29:59

Alright, bye for now.