The Good Egg: Sleep Hygiene

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Rise and Shine you sunnyside up Good eggs!

We are back after a wonderful (8 hour??) night’s sleep continuing the topic of the week… SLEEP!

Did you get your 8 hours? As we’ve learned… sleep is doing your busy-work for you! Your memory and performance improves with healthy sleep.

Andre Iguodala (yesterday) taught us how much it can help our alertness, attention, and of course ability to excel in whatever we’re doing.

Today, we have some startling data showing the potentially damaging effects of not prioritizing sleep. I typically keep to positive messages, however if this data can help us live healthier lives, then sharing this information is well worth the scariness of the studies.

First question: does the amount of sleep we get each night affect our susceptibility to injury? Yup, we’re back with learnings from Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep”:

Pretty simple: sleep more get hurt less. Even SIX hours of sleep (which many of us deem healthy) increases our chance of injury more than two fold when compared to the healthy 8 hours.

Ok, now we get even more startling:

Did You Know: studies show that driving after 19 hours without sleep (and NO alcohol) is EQUALLY dangerous as driving at the 0.08% BAC alcohol limit.

Taken further, cognitive driver performance nosedives after just 15 hours awake (i.e. wake up at 7am and drive at 10pm).

Finally, does the amount of sleep you get each night affect your risk of accident? Time for your head to spin (see below):

So let’s wrap up: we know sleep can increase our performance… but hopefully we’re now well aware how poor sleep hygiene can also increase risk in so many elements of our lives.

Happy snoozin’ :)

-The Good Egg 🐣