Author: Gud Sleepz Team
Date:
The Crucial Connection Between Decision Making and Sleep
“Make your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears” - Nelson Mandela
Are you someone who prefers staying up all night before an exam or an important presentation at work? You might be hampering your problem-solving and decision-making skills without knowing it. Yes! Sleep is the most essential part of memory consolidation, neural connectivity and debris clearing mechanism. This provides the elements necessary for newer ideas, better connections and more emotionally well-informed decisions. Here we are going to discuss the connection between your brain’s decision making and your sleep.
We understand that our brains work in a specific way of organising, analysing and comprehending information. This means, it could never be an unending machine giving outputs day in and day out. It requires a certain amount of rest and rejuvenation to prepare for the next day. While many of us believe to overrule these body’s needs, it always shows up or catches up through ugly consequences. And these consequences could be, impaired attention, increased mistakes, daydreaming tendencies and poorer judgement. Over time these can cost impairment, poor performance or chronic attention deficit.
What Do We Know About Our Brain’s Decision-Making?
Christopher J Davis, PhD, Associate Professor found that, people tend to make repeated mistakes as a result of sleep deprivation and never are aware of it. In that case, they keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. This tells us that we aren’t just careless but ignorant about what happens to us too. This can be harmful because long-term consequences can be costly.
Sleep Loss and Impaired Thinking: Research indicates that, people who were at sleep loss after 49 hours showed increased uncertainty over their tasks, performed poorly compared to when they have slept. They were unable to use complex cognitions and executive functions.
Emotional Processing: Research found that, people who were sleep deprived tend to have poorer emotional processing and thereby, increasing their chances of engaging in risky decisions. Their ability to relate to people, engage in appropriate emotional exchange and make a well-informed decision in the midst of stressful conditions are significantly impaired.
Impulsive Actions: While a study found that, people who were sleep deprived fully or partially might put themselves at risk in taking impulsive actions. This would mean, if you are working in high risk situations or in a hospital where decisions have to be made quickly, you may put yourself in danger by taking impulsive actions.
Lack of Generating Ideas: While most workplaces require creativity and thinking outside the box in a short amount of time. This can come as a difficulty for people who are sleep deprived. The lack of neural connections or ability to consolidate ideas hasn’t happened overnight, can put oneself at a disadvantage.
Poor Communication: Communicating ideas are crucial for any kind of job at the moment. And most often communication is a key where you are modulating ideas, analysing circumstances, understanding people’s reactions (emotions) and formulating the right approach to share ideas. This often is impaired in people with sleep deprivation.
Hope this article could help you understand the need for sleep for better performance and better decision making. For more content, follow us on gudsleepz.
Tags: decision making , executive skills , job , self-help , sleep deprivation
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