Getting a promotion takes a lot of hard work, some luck, and a particular combination of keen awareness & perception. But how can you get noticed by your boss sooner rather than later?
The answer is… more sleep!
There are many myths about how successful people forego sleep and that helps them become more successful. This is absolutely wrong! Sleep instead is one of the most powerful currencies that we all traffic in. The relationship between sleep and career success is more symbiotic than many people would make you think.
A recent study showed that sleep helps us all regenerate our creativity and many other valuable business traits. Learn more about how sleep can help supercharge your career in the points below.
Sleep Helps Us Cognitively
Sleep boosts the brain’s cognitive capabilities, strengthening its ability to learn and analyze new information, and enhances long-term and working memory. Basically, anything you need to be a great worker is regenerated by sleep. Sleep also strengthens the brain’s associative networks, opening up the entrepreneurial mind’s ability for insight, and to combine individual pieces of information in fresh, novel ways.
Creative? You’d Be More Creative if you were Rested!
One of the best ways to show your worth to your company is by conceiving new ideas, and to see new potential in technology and products that already exist, an ability to imagine doing things differently, whether by introducing entirely new products or by re-imagining how existing tools might be used in new ways.
Recognizing opportunities is a big part of becoming a bigger part of your business. There’s an abundant amount research showing that lack of sleep significantly impairs the brain’s attentional capabilities; poor sleep makes us distracted, and less apt to notice details that may signal promising opportunities.
Risks that come with Restlessness
Lack of high-quality sleep compromises the brain’s ability to effectively assess risk. That’s true broadly, and it’s also true specifically for entrepreneurial risk. Studies show sleep lowers inhibition, increases both aggressiveness about seeking gains and expectations about what those gains will be. Not getting enough sleep makes us less risk averse, and more likely to pursue short-term gains even at the expense of longer-term advantages. Long hours of work broken up by a handful of hours of sleep doesn’t deliver the brain the rest and rejuvenation it needs from longer, deeper stretches of rest.
Lack of Sleep, Lack of Ideas
In one experiment, researchers had employees from around the world spend two weeks keeping daily diaries of their sleep. The less sleep they reported, the less able they were to spot the ideas that seemed superficially promising, but had structural vulnerabilities. On the other hand, the more sleep they logged, the more likely they were to give lower ratings to those ideas that looked superficially attractive. That’s a pretty essential, specific, quantifiable benefit—or impairment—that sleep delivers. Even just one bad night of sleep will cause employees to work lower because of their cognitive impairment.
You don’t need to be a genius to recognize the tremendous benefits from sleep in this realm of sharp, analytical, creative thinking. Investing in a full night of sleep—every night—pays big-time dividends to your cognitive performance, no matter what you do.
For more information, reach out to us at aidanm@restwell.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
Founded in 1990, Restwell sells its product line through National Retail & Independent Dealers in North America. Restwell also has a Hospitality Sales Division which services corporate accounts across Canada.
Restwell manufactures all bedding, at its state-of-the-art facility in Surrey B.C., to order through “just in time” production techniques which serves its dealers and customers more efficiently. Most bedding orders are scheduled, produced and shipped within 3 days of receipt with fast, friendly and reliable service on our dedicated trucking fleet.
