Sleep is for the Strong

In the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington and Glamour Magazine Editor Cindi Leive  launched a “sleep challenge” for the women of America. They challenge us to get a good night’s sleep each night for a month- what a good idea. FWI responded to the challenge with a suggestion, why not launch the challenge at your place of work, including with your boss! Ellen Galinsky wrote:

We applaud Arianna and Cindi’s call to action – but we have a suggestion: How about launching a sleep challenge to your team at work — including your boss? Sound impossible — why would our bosses want us to sleep more? Maybe they would if they knew that our company’s bottom line could be the better for it.
Poor sleep is hurting U.S. businesses. Since 2002, Families and Work Institute’s National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW) has asked employees directly about how often in the last month they have experienced sleep problems that affect their job performance. The latest data from a nationally representative sample that includes thousands of American employees find that 27% have experienced sleep problems that affect their job performance in the last month “at least sometimes,” and 9% report having sleep problems “often” or “fairly often.”

The 2008 NSCW also probes the nature of employees’ sleep problems. We find that two-thirds (66%) of US employees report having had trouble falling asleep at some point in the last month. Nearly one-third (31%) of employees report awakening too soon and having trouble going back to sleep “very often” or “fairly often,” with another 27% reporting “sometimes” having trouble. This means almost 60% of employees surveyed wake up too soon! In fact, only about one in five (21%) employees has never experienced awakening too soon in the last month. Women have more sleep problems than men. And not surprisingly, stress levels among have increased significantly since 2002.

Click here for the full article on the Huffington Post.