Working to sleep

Title:

Working to sleep

Deck:

Working, working and more work. Caffeine in the morning, two cups in the afternoon and even more ‘caffeinated work’ before bedtime. More often than not, the chief suspect of why we can’t get to sleep can be watered down to the involvement of too much work and too little sleep. Work is the new caffeine.

Body-copy:

It’s that time of the night again, the part where we begin to count sheep so as to fall asleep. Can’t miss it, since it’s right before all that tossing and turning.

But instead of having the flock get smaller, as it ought to, you ended up with more sheep than you had first begun. Talk about a shepherd’s nightmare. And to top it off, daybreak is just but a couple of hours away and you know for certain it’s going to be another exhausting day at the office. That’s because it’s already three in the morning and you’ll have to be up by seven. Bummer.

Questions start to race through your mind as you ponder on the reasons why you are unable to sleep. Thus, you begin to recollect the activities you did right before bedtime. One super sized fast food dinner – checked. Watching an action movie on DVD – checked. And while watching that movie, finish up on final preparations for tomorrow’s presentation to an important client – checked. If there were the Ten Commandments on what you are forbidden to do right before bedtime, guess what? Most of us would have broken all of them in one night.

Sleep experts SCOOP spoke to highlighted to us a trend they noticed over the years. A poll conducted on the predominant activity engaged in right before bedtime isn’t tucking in the kids or watching the TV. Unsurprising, almost 75% of respondents pointed out that most of the activity done right before bedtime is work. And the higher up we climb on the career ladder of success, the more time we’ll spend on the job. That also means less time for everything else.

Sleeping peripherals aside, assuming comfort of the mattress is not an issue (read our side story on the humble origins of the mattress), being unable to sleep is more often than not, the overcrowding of daily activities of which work takes up the most significant chunk of it. “There is just never enough time to do everything,” says Rupert Anton, a senior transport sales manager.

Rupert starts his day in the office very early. Arriving at about 6am, he does a morning meeting with the rest of his global sales team, all having already worked for more than 11 hours straight. They plough through the meeting with copious amounts of coffee and after the hour meeting, the rest of the team heads back home for the end of the day to catch up with some muchneeded sleep while Rupert just starts his day.

During the high peak season, a typical working day for him starts at 5am and ends at about 7pm and sleep to him is a luxury he cannot afford. Work simply keeps him away from beauty sleep, not caffeine. “It’s common to see everyone walking around with dark patches around their eyes during this ultra high peak period,” Rupert jokingly replies. “The peak season usually lasts for about 3 months but the staff will be adequately compensated with additional benefits like time off and overtime pay.”

Besides monetary persuasions, are there other reasons why people would voluntarily choose to work so many hours and sacrifice sleep? Like cab driver

Ajah Mehra in Dublin, Ireland puts it, “I try my very best to put in up to 12 hours for a good day. But sometimes on bad days, I put in more than 12 hours straight so as to pay off the rental for that day. Sleep? I need to pay my monthly bills, put food on the table and have a roof over my family’s head.

Bills can’t wait, sleep can.

This is a similar statement echoed by Rupert, “more than just being a workaholic, nowadays bosses want to see their employees putting in those extra hours. It shows dedication to the job and means the employee is spending more time at work and is also seen as someone who is productive.”

When we work, we seek to achieve maximum productivity. On a day-to-day basis, we also have a tendency to accomplish the last task (that can include typing up that weekly report) before we sleep so that we can be satisfied and say that at the very least, we have done something productive for that day and that the day itself wasn’t ‘wasted’. It’s all done in a mistaken belief that more time spent at work equals higher productivity. And when there are more worked hours, the number of hours allotted for sleep also decreases.

A policy paper by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed that in some countries like South Korea where worked hours is the highest among OECD members, the productivity as measured by the output per hour worked is really the lowest. The statistics seem to indicate that as more hours are spent at work, the less productive the employee gets.

In contrast, results from a 2004 employee survey by OECD showed an increase of 5% of people saying yes, to a question like, “can time be taken off work when necessary?” The personal choice to take time off from work for a much-needed rest is widely believed to be a critical factor in increasing workplace productivity.

According to sleep experts, sometimes, when the body has been well rested due to a decline in the number of working hours, the individual’s productivity at work the next day improves. They are able to accomplish more tasks in a shorter amount of time due to the individual getting more rest.

Work, is a major activity for those living and working in cities all around the world and can take up an average of more than 8 hours daily. It is therefore not surprising to see that it is also the number one activity that keeps us past our bedtime, robbing us of a good night’s sleep. As long as it remains to be a significant activity, it will be increasingly difficult for us to get the muchneeded sleep our bodies yearn after. This is not counting the other activities in our lives like taking care of the kids, relaxation time, catching up with friends or household chores. Just like caffeine’s ability to keep us awake, work has that same characteristic to keep us from that much needed rest.

Sometimes all it takes is a little sleep to achieve better productivity in the work place, in a shorter amount of time.

Box:

Lineage of mattresses

Perhaps the very reason behind why we can’t get to sleep would be the type of mattress we sleep on. Now before I continue sounding like a public relations person or a commercial ad for mattress manufacturers, hoping you’ll buy their product and play your minor role in the global play called capitalism, let’s examine the origins of the humble mattress.

As I rampage through heaps of old documents, I’ve managed to retrace the history of how we first came to sleep on these very undeniably comfortable oversized cushions. And, guess what I found, lo and behold, how good ol’ mattresses came about was nothing short of the inventions of mattress capitalists. Now if you were to follow the evidence trail, you’ll most likely find the earliest use of modern day mattresses present in historical records tracing back to Middle Eastern cultures, right at the beginning of the middle ages.

Back then, much of Arabic culture and Jewish culture predominantly centred on the traditional practise of being seated on the floor, à la Japanese style.

Meals, entertainment and almost every other activity at home were engaged from the ground up. Large cushions were also tossed all around a rectangular table for comfort with soft fabrics like rugs and mats thrown in for good measure.

Later, when Europeans came to the holy land during the crusades, they gradually adopted this Middle Eastern practice of sleeping on layers of soft fabric and ever since then, down the path of history, mattresses continued to take on different forms as people made improvements to what went into them.

First they experimented with chicken feathers since those were in abundance due to the agricultural way of living back then. But it was too much of a hassle to obtain the feathers. So, they resorted to using other types of stuffing like horse and human hairs, hay, old rags and even soil. And for more than obvious reasons, the type of stuffing used was unsuitable as that left unpleasant smells, insect infestations like lice and bedbugs and, had an overall undesirable image. Therefore poorer people usually used old clothing like rags since those were readily available and cheap while the rich had the luxury of sleeping on fine horsehair mattresses that were, needless to say, a lot more comfortable than smelly old rags.

As a matter of fact, mattress comfort in those days was so short in supply that instead of actually providing recuperation and comfort, people still felt tired and exhausted after the night’s sleep. As a result of the discomfort, people also spent longer hours sleeping on it since it took much longer for the human body to recuperate.

It wasn’t until the nineteen-century that good ol’ matt was mass-produced commercially and people needn’t resort to sleeping on uncomfortable mattresses any more. But the true lineage of mattresses can be found not in Middle Eastern cultures but in American culture. In today’s developed world, spring mattresses are the most common type of mattress most people sleep on.

And the person most responsible for them is none other than Zalmon G. Simmons.

In wasn’t until 1889 that Simmons brought comfortable mattresses to people through mass production. By using spiral coil springs as stuffing for his

mattresses, it provided unprecedented levels of comfort and also tackled ageold mattress problems. Depressions in the mattresses or inconsistent texture caused by wear and tear were far less common. Most importantly, Simmons’ mattresses provided people with a good night’s sleep, something that had eluded many other rival mattress manufacturers for years due to the difference in the type of stuffing he used. The springs also provided the appropriate mix of comfort, softness and flexibility, keeping the spine in its natural position and prevented backaches caused by improper posture during sleep.

The golden age of the mattress has finally arrived.