The Effects of Lack of Sleep on Performance

It's estimated that sleep deprivation costs Americans more than $16 billion a year from medical expenses associated with conditions caused by sleeplessness, according to the Cleveland Clinic. But depriving yourself of sleep may have much greater costs than that figure indicates, as sleep deprivation impacts both physical and mental performance, causing you to be less productive at work, to be more prone to accidents and even make costly and dangerous mistakes you wouldn't normally make if you had the shut-eye you needed.

Basics

• You should get seven or eight hours of sleep a night if you are an adult, according to the Mayo Clinic. You need more if you are a child, teen or are pregnant. Sleep is divided into four stages, known as Rapid Eye Movement or REM. Not all sleep is created equal. If you are sleeping eight hours a night but are awakened throughout the night, then you aren't getting the quality sleep that your body needs.

History

• Google "Nathaniel Kleitman," and you'll quickly see he is considered the father of modern sleep research. As such, he connected the dots between lack of sleep and diminished cognitive prowess, starting in the 1930s. Kleitman balled mood, focus, higher level cognitive functioning, logic and working memory into what's called "mental performance," and found that it took longer for people who didn't get the sleep they needed to access these parts that contribute to the whole of mental performance.

Mental

• You need to be in tip-top shape mentally to perform job and school functions. According to Harvard Medical School, sleeplessness contributes to an increase in workplace errors; 50,000 to 100,000 deaths a year have been blamed on medical errors caused by sleep deprivation. Work-related disasters like the Chernobyl and Challenger explosions and the Exxon Valdez oil spill have something besides tragedy in common: Sleep-deprived employees were found to play a key factor in these disasters. In addition, the Public School Review found that children who didn't get at least eight hours of sleep each night didn't learn as quickly or perform as well in school due to impaired cognitive functioning.

Cause

• Lack of shut-eye harms a number of regions of the brain. Some regions are more damaged than others, according to Harvard. The prefontal cortex, in particular, is at risk. The PFC is responsible for complex thinking, such as math calculations.

Physical Performance

• Much has been made of how sleep deprivation impairs driving. In fact, some studies have likened the effects of driving sleepy to the effects of driving drunk. Estimates for the number of crashes caused by fatigue range from 100,000 to more than 500,000, with the Institutes of Medicine reporting that drivers falling asleep at the wheel accounted for 20 percent of all crashes in the U.S.

Athletic Performance

• U.K.-based sports publisher Peak Performance reports that cardiovascular performance drops 11 percent. Performance in sport is further impacted because sleep disrupts information processing. For example, if you're a coach, your athlete may not remember the tasks you gave him the day before, or he may appear "slow on the uptake." Science Daily also reported that students traveling from one coast to another (in the States) were at a disadvantage to their home rivals because the different time zones impaired their circadian rhythm, in turn negatively impacting their reaction time and the alertness necessary to win the match or game.