Senior executive failure[1] is often due to poor sleep. Other factors include anxiety, low self-confidence, low energy-levels and poor diet. In this paper, let’s address the very common issues of sleep which affect many executives, whether they have the stress of a new job or not!
Lack of sleep leads to poorer decisions. Our ability to pay good attention to others is poor when we are very tired. We may miss valuable information too, but the quality of our relationships may be damaged! Surely, we want to hear others and make better decisions? If so, let’s give sleep some attention and change up!
First, let’s revalue the importance of sleep to the level of ‘work importance’. Ranking sleep value to this level should ensure that we follow-through and make behavioral change and make a positive difference to our daily enjoyment and efficiency.
Tactical Starting Points
A number of individual actions and habits make a difference. Pick any below that you feel will assist you.
Bed is not a work-place
We have psychological states that are related, repeatedly, to a place/situation. As examples, how do you feel in each of these situations: standing on a hill on a beautiful day; exercising to a personal best; quietly listening to your favorite music? Each situation typically has a psychological state attached to it! Bed is no different.
Our positive psychological state that is associated by situation/place can be damaged by something unpleasant happening. That may take one, two or three unpleasant events to ruin our previously delightful ‘associated’ experiences. Our bed should also have specific and positive associations; one of these is sleep! Some things can spoil our experiences.
When we use the bed as an office, we are likely to have high levels of mental processing. This level of mental processing is not conducive to sleep! The bed is the WRONG place to do work as it will disrupt the ‘association’ that our experience has with going to sleep! It is better to work from a chair, but not in bed!
For the same reason, other mental processing activities, like watching a screen/film, social media posting and list-making may be best done in a different ‘activity space’ (see below).
Habitual Routines to Sleep
There are numerous routines (wind-down habits) that people have to help them sleep. When these are habituated patterns, there is no effort involved; sleep just comes like it always should. No routine is ‘the right’ way, so we need to develop our own, then stick to it, so that it becomes our habit towards sleep. Here are a couple of examples of pre-sleep, wind-down, patterns:
#1. Undress/change, toilet, shower, brush teeth, bed, read, turn out the light, roll to the left
#2. Brush teeth, toilet, undress/change, shower, bed, reflect, roll to the right and lights out.
Some people add extras into their routine. These can involve tightening and then relaxing muscles from toes to head, or doing a routine of stretches. If these become part of your habitual pattern for sleep, all is fine.
These patterns all avoid mental processing activities, especially screens. These activities can be done in the same room, but from a different (and specific) place. That space is then used only for mental processing activities, (therefore ‘associating’ alert work with that place). This specificity of place is because ‘associating’ our psychological state to a situation/place, routinely, helps to condition our minds to do the same thing in the same place.
If stress wakes you up and you think of an urgent work-action, then move to your ‘activity place’ to do that task. Afterwards, if still mentally aroused, maybe repeat the last two or three steps in your own established pattern of your pre-sleep wind-down, like cleaning teeth and the next steps in that pattern. This routine, will not need mental effort, it will quieten you down for sleep again.
A Visual Sleep Routine
Almost all of us have learning patterns that are visual. Others may include auditory, kinesthetic and verbal (reading/writing) styles[2]. This first routine approach uses visual focus.
Move into your most usual, comfortable, sleep position. With eyes closed, simply look for images. These may be clear and familiar, static, moving or maybe obscure; shapes that appear may be unique and different, or familiar. Our task is simply to keep looking, eyes closed. Watch, see and make no judgments; just experience the show!
If a train of thought comes up, let it go and focus again on looking for images. With some repetition, this visual approach becomes a habit and part of your sleep routine. You will find that the change from looking at images, to actual sleep, is completely unconscious. It also gets faster!
At this stage of proficiency, if you get up to urinate and return to bed, the same visual routine may have you fully asleep in minutes, if not in seconds. This is the result of creating a new routine without needing mental effort; you close your eyes, look for images and here they are behind your eye-lids, as always. Moments later the transition to sleep has happened without you noticing anything! In the morning you will have no recall where that transition took place; the habit is seamless.
Auditory Distraction from Thoughts
Few people never have visual dreaming and in day-time are not excited by graphics or diagrams. For these people alone, it may be that an atonal sound device may be helpful. These are electronic noise machines bought cheaply. You select a tone sequence that is relaxing, adjust the volume and close your eyes. You keep your attention on the sound, without effort. For auditory folks, this is just part of the sleep routine that they created. Sometimes thoughts may come up and we must just ‘let go’ of them and re-focus on the tonal sounds. Keep doing that and the switch to sleep can be automatic!
Conclusion
Better executive performance is predicated upon having rested sleep. When we do not sleep well, we are more prone to errors and mistakes. Unfortunately, the whole learning market about leadership is focused on organizational action and outcomes, not rest and recuperation.
Sleep is not that hard to get better at. The tricks above, involving creating a single routine that is fixed, whether visual or auditory, will help you to excel in sleep and high-performance too.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6196623/
[2] For example, see https://www.scienceabc.com/humans/what-are-the-different-learning-styles.html
Image, curtesy of ‘Unsplash’
