Sleep: it's not optional.

• Author: Stewart, Heather
• Position: Executive Living

When push comes to shove, it's often our sleep that gets shoved aside. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day, and when you're juggling heavy work loads and family responsibilities, not to mention regular exercise, cutting into your sleeping hours seems reasonable, even praiseworthy.

Think again, says Dr. Robert J. Farney, head of the sleep medicine division for Intermountain Healthcare, Urban Central Region. Farney says this attitude is "biological arrogance" and warns there is a high price to pay for those lost hours of sleep.

For executives who routinely forego sleep, the impacts can be felt throughout their organization. Such execs "operate under a dark cloud," Farney says, and that dark cloud permeates the company.

Running on Empty

"For a very long time, people regarded sleep as an option," Farney says. In reality, he says, cutting back on sleep is "highly detrimental." He lists several negative impacts of long-term, partial sleep deprivation.

Impaired cognitive function. "Most people are aware that if you don't get enough sleep, you're likely to feel tired, sleepy and inattentive," Farney says. But those feelings are signals that your cognitive functioning is impaired. "By inattentiveness, that means whether or not you are staying on task mentally ... or whether the mind is leaving and doing other things, and time-sharing without you realizing it."

He adds, "We know that when people have that problem, they're less likely to persevere in working through problems; it's easier to just cut corners or do something without spending the time."

Impaired memory. "If you are not attentive, then your ability to take in new information and then put that into long-term memory is impaired. The first step in memory is attention. You have to be attentive, you have to be receptive, cognitively, and actually making efforts to remember things, and that doesn't happen if you are sleep deprived," Farney Says.

Impaired judgment. "People who are sleep deprived over days and days in an experimental situation get progressively worse--that is, their error rates increase progressively for every day that they are in a sleep-deprived situation--and I don't mean totally sleep deprived, I mean getting five hours of sleep per night rather than seven hours," Farney explains.

Damaged relationships. "The most common and perhaps earliest indication of sleep inadequacy is irritability, and so interpersonal relationships are affected. If you are in a situation where...