Boosting Overall Productivity with Better Sleep Management with Dr. Els van der Helm

When leaders have a bad night of sleep so poor quality, they show up the next day and immediately they're rated as more abusive in their leadership style by the people below them.

Interesting.

So we often think of leaders as being either good or bad, abusive or not, and it is highly correlated with the quality of sleep that leaders have. And we see the same thing thing for individuals who doesn't have good sleep is starting to behave less ethically.

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspiration to help you operate at your fullest potential integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. I'm your host Ashish Kothari, the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad and author of the best selling book Hardwired for Happiness. I will be your personal guide on your journey to explore the many facets of happiness, well being and flourishing, from personal growth to building more positive environments at work. In each episode we will share powerful insight tips and stories from our guests who are leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge. Whether you're looking to overcome life's challenges, to go from good to great, or to enhance your team's performance through flourishing, this podcast is the place for you to find more joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Join us every week as we rewire for Happiness Together. Did you know that chronic sleep deprivation can make you cognitively as impaired as being legally drunk? In today's episode of the Happiness Squad Podcast, we're joined by Dr. Els Vanderhum, one of the world's leading sleep neuroscientists who has been named one of the top five Sleep Experts by Thrive Global. Els has dedicated her career to understanding the critical role of sleep in our cognitive function, emotional stability and overall well being, and she advises organizations worldwide on how to help their dreams thrive through better sleep. In this insightful conversation, we explore the profound impact of sleep deprivation on leadership, productivity and even ethical behavior in the workplace. Dr. Ells shares fascinating insights on how structural factors like early morning or late night meetings contribute to to a sleep deprived workforce and what organizations can do to support the employees sleep health. We also discuss some common myths about sleep, such as the belief that you can catch up on sleep over the weekend or the alcohol helps you sleep better. Wait till the end when else shares simple, actionable steps you can take today to start improving both your quantity and quality of sleep and boost your performance. You won't want to miss this episode filled with practical advice that can Transform both your personal well being and your professional success. Hi my dear friend. It is so lovely to have you on our podcast and I'm so looking forward to this really important conversation on sleep first thing in the morning. I can tell you I slept eight hours. My veltary meter is telling me I'm 95% on all levels. I've slept really well. It was a high quality sleep. So I'm really excited this early morning for me. So listen, you know, Els, share with me a little bit around your journey. You're one of the leading, you know, world's neuroscientists who focuses on sleep. Tell me a little bit about your journey into how you kind of fell into this field and what really inspires you now to do most of your work around this topic.

Well, it all started way, way back when I was just 16 years old and I read a book by Stanford professor Bill de Met and the Dutch version was basically called Healthy Sleeping. The American title of Anyone wants to dig it up is called the Promise of Sleep. I think it's still actually a good book, although of course some things are slightly out of date now. But in the book, Professor Dement really describes how much suffering there is in the world because people don't value it enough or you know, kind of struggle to get good sleep. And he describes everything that happens while we are asleep and how magical it is. And that just really drew me, you know, this idea that so many people see this as kind of a waste of time, yet there's so much value there if everybody, you know, would be aware and actually act on that knowledge. So there's no university study of sleep. So I ended up choosing psychology, so neuropsychology and also neurosciences and starts do sleep research in the Netherlands, then at Harvard, and then did my PhD at UC Berkeley. All focused on sleep and how sleep basically allows us to improve our cognitive function but also our emotional functioning. And then towards the end of my PhD, I was a little disillusioned, honestly with academia and I felt like I didn't have much impact, you know, that I was working really, really hard and I was producing these PA papers and yeah, I didn't feel like it really changed anything in the world. So I had no idea what else to do with my PhD and then joined McKinsey as a consultant. Thought I would never do anything with all of that sleep knowledge ever again. I always thought, you know, it'll be funny someday. I'll tell my kids that, you know, back in the day I did this PhD on sleep. But then when I joined the firm, it was very different, right from academia. And one of the things I noticed was how much employees received in terms of training and support. So I got stress management training, time management training, leadership training. And in none of those trainings did the word sleep ever come up. And that made no sense to me because, of course, at the same time, I also experienced that everybody was working really long days sacrificing their sleep. And I knew that that was kind of the stupidest thing to do if you want to do good works. So I kind of saw those two things, and not just within the firm, but also at all of my clients. And I love talking to them about sleep. So I started to give workshops internally and for clients on the importance of sleep and giving them sleep tips. And that was kind of where I saw, wait, I can bring these worlds together. You know, my academic career and the business world. And the great thing about doing those sessions is that you can immediately see these light bulbs, you know, go on. And then, of course, these were my colleagues. So I would see them months and years later, and they would tell me, els, El, because of you, I stopped snoozing, and I'm so happy. So it became clear to me that that was really my calling and my way to make a difference and help people. So after a couple of years, I left the firm, which is now more than eight years ago. And since then, I've been working mostly with larger organizations and leaders on this topic of sleep and kind of everything that comes with it, right? Because it's not just sleep. If you want to improve sleep for better performance and health, then you also need to think about all the ingredients that go into that. So your stress management, exercise, nutrition, your light exposure, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, it's so interesting. I always. I love that. I love that. You know, what I love about what you just shared is how. And this is so often this happens, right? Number one is we start to define ourselves based on the degree we have and then a career, right? And you consciously said, hey, the university career is not serving me anymore. Because, yes, I want to research, but I really want to have an impact. And so I'm going to leave. I know so many people who are at universities that are unhappy, but they still keep going because I put all this time into it. And you can think about this in every profession, right? I spent all this time learning it. I've kind of grown up, right? I had my own, Like, I'd spent you know, 12 years as into McKinsey, six years as a partner. I completely changed my practice areas, even though I was incredibly productive because very similar to you, I was like, it wasn't fueling my soul. That was not what I was born to do.

I think one, one fallacy that I definitely fell into is that I always continued until I felt like I was really good at the job before deciding whether it was something for me. And, you know, there's some, I think, merit to that. Like, hey, let's foresee, you know, the first couple of months at McKinley, I, I absolutely sucked. And I've, you know, I would have been very happy to walk away immediately, but I was like, no, no, no, I, you know, I need to learn how to do this. And then, you know, I, I waited until I was good at it to say, you know what? I still don't like it, but I think in hindsight maybe I could have sometimes made those decisions even faster.

But kudos to you for doing that. You know, and then the second important thing that you mentioned is like, yeah, like we don't actually talk about, we don't train people on sleep. And not just the quantity. And quantity. And you know, this reflection, I had the same. And so I had changed how our, so many of our teams when they showed up at clients personally, right? Because I'm like, imagine this. We would never get into a plane if you knew that the driver only, you know, if the, if the pilot only slept for six hours in the night before, we would never do that. They're not actually allowed to get behind the plane, right. And here we are paying all this money for consultants and they get up many times, 4 or 5am getting on a flight, caffeine, fuel, show up at the client. I'm like, what we are paying for is cognitive performance. And people are showing up drowsy and then all these late nights, we're not even at our best. And so this notion of how we don't prioritize, I would rather prioritize somebody showing up at the client than showing up actually awake and at their best. Right. And that's where I want to actually go. I want to go there, talk to us a little bit els around, why is sleep so, so important? And especially not just for our health, but more importantly in this world where most of our work is cognitive. What's the price we are paying as individuals and as organizations for a sleep deprived workforce?

Yeah, it's a great question because in a way it's kind of surprising, right? That this thing that we do every night, and you know, most people, even in the business job, they still do it every night. So why does it matter so much if we just eat off a couple of hours of this thing that we already do all the time anyway? And I think that that's been a, a long mystery for a long time. And I think in the last decades, we've kind of peeled away a bit more about what makes sleep so fundamental. I don't think that's kind of one reason why we sleep. You know, all organisms on Earth basically sleep, and there's probably all these different functions that kind of piggybacked on top of it. But I think what makes sleep so foundational is that it really impacts every cell of our body. You know, there's almost no function that you can measure. Like, you don't see any negative impact of sleep loss. So if you think about, you know, the knowledge workers, to kind of start with that, we really see that people basically knock off a bunch of IQ points. So with that, I really mean cognitive performance. So your ability to not just stay alert and stay awake, but actually to problem solve, to have new insights, to come up with new creative problems, all of that suffers when we don't get good sleep. And, you know, I, I always remember my time at the firm. It's like, okay, let's all go problem solving. And it's like, yeah, but let's also think about what preceded this problem solving session and how much sleep we've had the last couple of nights and how consistent that sleep has been and, and how high the quality has been. So that's on the iq. And by the way, I think the big danger there is, you know, why this still continues a lot, is that people get hired, of course, for their iq, and then we knock off much of these IQ points, but we often don't notice. So we don't notice our own performance slipping. And there have been so many, you know, beautiful studies where you can see people decrease in terms of their performance, you know, day after day after day of just losing two hours a night. And then after two weeks, you ask them, how are you doing? And objectively, they perform horribly, but they don't know this. They're blind to their own performance. And then they say, oh, I think I'm fine. I don't feel that sleepy. Right? So we often think that our subjective levels of sleepiness are a pretty good indication of how we're doing, but in reality, that's not a good indication at all. So I think that's a bit. This fallacy that we think, think we do fine and we think we come up with pretty good solutions, but in reality, you know, they could have been, you know, 20 or 40% better.

Yeah. In fact, you know, it's interesting, right. It's so true, actually. Else, just on this cognitive side. Right. So I remember the study by Matthew Walker which basically showed 10 days of six hours or less of sleep. By the end of those 10 days, your level of cognitive performance is at the same level if you went the whole 24 hours without sleeping. Exactly right. So if you really want to experience it, dear friends, go 24 hours without sleeping. See how clearly you're seeing and just connect with that and notice the next time you actually go for a long period with six hours, what's happening? And I saw that with my teens. Right. We see it all the time. Like every, every day, people get a little slower, a little, you know, it takes them a little bit longer. The thinking is not as creative by the end of the day, but we go further. So that's cognitive. Talk to us a little bit about the other aspects, like the emotional and physical damages that we are actually incurring on our bodies. Yeah.

So to add to your experiment, I have a more fun way to experiment this. You could also just have three and a half glasses of wine instead of staying up for 24 hours, because that's the level of impairment that you will get to. That's. That's.08 in blood alcohol level if, if anyone really wants to try this. Right. Which really goes back to show, like, you would never show up drunk like that at work. In fact, you'd be fired. Yet still, very often we see people who work very long days and send emails at crazy times as ambitious and dedicated instead of, you know, stupid and, and almost drunk in terms of their performance. Okay. But let's move on. Indeed. So it's iq, but then we have eq, so our ability to stay emotionally stable. This was a big chunk of my own PhD where it's just really fascinating to look at this. So this, this happens both, you know, after 24 hours of complete sleep deprivation. But my own study found that this is already slowly happening across a normal day of wakefulness, where we can see that people become much more emotionally reactive when they see negative stimuli. So we get much more sensitive to anything negative happening around us, and we, we get a more intense response. And if you look at the brain, we see that particularly the prefrontal cortex, though the part that, you know, makes us smarter than most other animals or maybe all other animals allows us for planning, organization, but also inhibition. So what we see is that the prefrontal cortex inhibits our emotional center, the center that makes us want to fight, flight or freeze. So when you get that nasty email, you kind of want to respond and type a really, you know, I don't know, curt response back. And then normally it's your prefrontal cortex that says, hey, calm down, let's reread this. Calm down, let's count to 10. Is it really, you know, is it really that bad? So really reappraise what's happening and kind of think of it in a different way. But that only happens when we're well rested and kind of the best part of the day for that is in the morning. And then we basically see that degrade a bit as the day progresses, and particularly of course, with sleep loss. So we are worse at managing our own emotions. But on top of that, we're also worse at interpreting people around us and their emotions and what, you know, what sort of emotions they're experiencing and how intense their emotions are. And then the final part. So iq, eq, and then what I call SQ or what's been called sq, so social intelligence. What we really see there is that it doesn't just impact you as an individual. When you have been tired and you show up at work in this exhausted state, we see that it impacts how you interact with others, but even how others view you without even interacting with you. So when you show up tired, you often feel more lonely. You will pee people at a distance, but people who look at you also think you look more lonely. And they don't really want to cooperate with you because they also start to feel more lonely themselves and they want to avoid you. So, you know, when we show up tired at work, there's no fake it until you make it. We can't fake it. You know, we show in many different ways that we are tired. And there's something evolutionary in us that makes us want to avoid other people who are tired, probably for good reason, because they're more likely to get sick, they're more likely to lash out at us, you know, to not have their emotions under control. So it has a really big impact on our relationships. And we see that couples who've had a bad night of sleep get into a conflict more easily and get out of the conflict. You know, I'm less likely to get to solve the conflict. So, yeah, it's a huge field. Basically, when you look at what sleep is doing in the workplace.

And you know, of course, all the physical. Right. All the physical costs we end up paying, you know, high level of dementia risk, Alzheimer's risk. You know, all this research, you know, which. Which I was reading, and that's why this is a topic we focus so much on as well. You know, sleep is when our brain is getting rid of all the toxic chemicals that are a byproduct of our natural process in our brain. And if we don't get enough, it's not leaving. And over time, they build up. Right. Which is kind of what drives it. But there is something that you just triggered for me right now which is really interesting and I don't see. I have not come across. And I'm curious if you've come across this else. There's a lot of talk about rise of incivility in the workplace, you know, people lashing out, people treating others badly. I have actually not seen a study that actually correlates and shows how much of that is actually because of people sleeping less, less and less. And my gut is that we will see organizations with high sleep debt also have a high civility debt. But I haven't seen any study like that. I'm curious if you have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's some excellent research in this space. You know, they all kind of use different terms for these behaviors, but to give you some examples, and I really like the work by Professor Christopher Barnes from the Foster School of Business. So he really looks at all these different ways that sleep is impacting the workplace and also specifically looks at leadership. So what you see there is that when leaders have a bad night of sleep, so poor quality, they show up the next day and immediately they're rated as more abusive in their leadership style by the people below them.

Interesting.

And what we also see is that the engagement amongst those team members immediately declines. So we often, I think, think of leaders as, you know, being either good or bad, abusive or not. But his study really showed. No, it actually fluctuates and it is highly correlated with the quality of sleep that leaders have. And we see the same thing for individuals. So not necessarily leaders, but kind of, you know, anyone at work who doesn't have good sleep is starting to behave less ethically. So this is partially because they also sometimes lack moral awareness. So they don't quite see that, you know, the choices that they're making could have moral implications. So I think in general it makes sense, right? If your IQ is going down, your EQ is going down, your SQ is going down that you're becoming, you know, a less great person to work with, probably because you're just, you know, functioning at such a lower capacity that it is harder to see the bigger picture, to notice those little red flags, that maybe something is off here to show empathy to the people that you're working with and at the end of the day, to really do the right thing. So he did another study where they looked at. I forgot the term. They used something like a corporate citizen, you know, like a good corporate citizen doing the right thing for the organization for the greater good, where they also found that when people didn't have good sleep, they were less likely to do that. And other studies have also found that we're less altruistic when we've had poor sleep. We're actually less likely to donate money to charity, for instance, when we're tired. So you really see this across the board. And, yeah, it's no surprise that if people, you know, start to get worse sleep, of course they experience more stress. And this is really this negative cycle, right? It can start with either more stress and then getting poor sleep, but it can also start with poor sleep, which then makes us more vulnerable to stress. So we can easily get into this negative spiral and where we also show up at work more cranky, more irritable, and less likely thinking about, you know, the greater good of everybody around us, as if we just want to get through the day and go home.

You know, what it brings up for me, Els, is this question that I'm sitting with, and I was thinking about, you know, I was going to ask you about more, you know, more research on, you know, what are some additional research findings. But I'm going to ask you a different question. What comes up for me is every, you know, you've done eight years of work implementing this work with companies, you know, and there's tons of, you know, you were sharing. We'll get to those stories in just a minute. What I get curious about is the reason people say, yeah, no shit, I know I should sleep more, but I don't sleep more because I have so much work to do. I have so much work pressure, and I don't know how to sleep more. And I think the second or like, in this today's world with, like, you know, global teens. I was actually just with somebody yesterday with a large global multinational. They're like, you know, my first meeting starts at 6:00am because I have a European team, or at 8:00am it's a European team. Like, my meeting is before 8:00am Right. And my last meeting might be, if you're working with Asia, might be 9pm or 10pm so there are structural, these things that so many individuals report. And then organizational leaders oftentimes will say, yeah, I want people to sleep more, but they're not. You know, somehow the work, the targets, everything else. So what I'm really interested in, in this work where you've made tremendous impact, have you helped people kind of address those structural factors, Right, Those big things at the job and the team and the organizational levels that are fundamentally resulting in people making poor choices?

Yeah, yeah. Well, yes, some of those structural changes have been made, but I would say that really only happens when the most senior leaders are on board with this. Right. Because the example that you just gave, like, oh, yeah, leader says, yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody, you know, should get really good sleep. And I'm very supportive of this, and I think it's really important. There's two ways of saying that. One, because you yourself have noticed what happens when you don't get good sleep. You've improved your sleep, and now you think, wow, you know, it's like, I've got the superpower and I want everyone else to have the superpower because I now know if everyone else doesn't get that, I'm going to be paying the price. Right. So you really need to start seeing this not just as, okay, we could maybe have a little bit of upside, but, you know, the business is more important. No, you should really see the other side, that the business is hurting as long as sleep isn't improved. And the examples that you just gave, I think, are very, very common. Right. These calls that kind of all days of. Or all hours of the day without any regards to people's personal rhythm. So what do we do with our clients is that we help them determine if they're morning or an evening type or kind of middle of the road. And then we help them determine, okay, what hours of the day are best for what sort of tasks. And. And that really differs from person to person what their optimal hours are. And with that also comes this realization that, sure, you could do, of course, a call at 6am or 9pm or whatever, but that you're going to be paying a price for that depending on how bad it is in your personal rhythm. And that's not to say that, you know, everybody suddenly now allowed to put blockers across their. Their calendars for all their kind of.

Preferred hours, but it's about being aware.

Exactly. This is how the conversations start, right? And then it becomes about, okay, well, are there some calls where maybe I'm not necessary or I'm not necessary every single week in that call? Or you know what, I'm gonna, you know, listen to the recording later on or I will dial in, but I'm gonna have my camera off because I'm already, you know, in my pajamas at that time and I don't want to look at my screen. I will just listen and that's it. So it's really about kind of starting this dialogue of when the best times are and if the trade off is worth it, right? If we all know that, I don't know Nancy is a morning type and now we're asking her to dial in at 8pm into a call that really is going to hurt her ability to wind down in the evening and get good quality sleep and be more productive the next day. Then we're really going to have to think, is it so critical that Nancy is there? Can she really not, you know, chime in offline and watch this later or anything like that? And sometimes you'll still have to say, no, this is really critical. And you know, we need her and there's no other time in the day. But what we see in reality is that a lot of these things are flexible if need be, but we just need to be aware of the cost before we're willing to make these trade offs.

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Yeah. So this is exactly what we did at one of the top consulting firms where we wouldn't just have, you know, the inspirational talk at the beginning, but we would say, okay, now all these teams are going to have to start making a commitment around what is going to be the norm from them going on. And everybody, every individual would pick their own norm.

Yeah.

But then across eight weeks, we had all of these teams track their sleep debt. So the difference between how much sleep you need and how much sleep you're actually getting. And we would really focus on the work week to basically look at, okay, what's their Friday sleep debt? And then we had teams track this every single week. We would also have them track their own subjective performance. And I already told you, you know, people generally are not great at estimating their own performance, but it, you know, it was hard to get a better objective measurement. And we also looked at stress levels. And then. And of course, I'm not necessarily advocating for doing this in any type of organizations. All these teams, you know, wanted to participate in this particular experiment. And what we did is every week we would publish the teams and their average sleep debt. And then at the end, we could also see that there was this direct correlation between their sleep debt and how productive they were. And what it also directly correlated with was whether or not the leadership was supportive of people getting good sleep. So, you know, we see this, of course, in all other research studies as well. What leaders do really gets magnified. Right. What they do themselves, how they talk about sleep, how they value sleep, and how they support, directly support the people below them towards getting better sleep. And you're so right. Right. You know, what you track and what you measure does tend to change just for the sake of measuring. And we definitely saw that. And, you know, I'm not saying this can be done in any organization because we've also seen organizations where people were like, I don't want to report my sleep data. I don't want to share that, you know, with the people above me. And I totally get that, and I also respect it. So I don't think that's always necessary, and it doesn't work in every organization. But in this particular organization we, yeah, we saw that it really gave great results in people really being focused as a team to say, how are we going to get our average down? What do you need this week? What do you need this week? One team. For instance, you probably, you know, remember this from your own consulting days. You go out for dinner as a team or with a client and these dinners are always then so long and it takes time and then you still have things to do. So what they did is they agreed, okay, when we go out for dinner jointly, you know, it's great, we can all socialize, but we're going to do it for max one hour. We're going to call ahead to the restaurant and say, can you serve as these three courses in one hour from you know, 6 to 7pm or 7 to 8pm Then we'll be there. Otherwise we'll go somewhere else. So that was, you know, one thing other teams would say. We're going to quit team dinners because we don't like them at all. And we're going to have team breakfast or team lunch and. Right. So every team came up with something else. And I think that goes back to what you were just saying. I every team usually knows what will serve them best. There's no one size fits all. But it starts with kind of creating this awareness and creating the discussion.

Yeah. And you know what I love about that Elsa? Is like oftentimes in this whole space around flourishing and well being and nutrition and sleep, oftentimes we're looking for permission from somebody out there. Right. Or we are waiting for somebody to do this. And my invitation to our listeners is the following friends, you don't need permission, right? If you're a team leader who's listening to this and says, huh, I knew this. But take this as an additional inspiration to say, go create a forums, go create a little survey that you with your team does every week consistently measure those three things that ELS is talking about. Amount of sleep that you're getting, the level of stress that you experience, your ability to manage your self reported productivity, measure it and have conversation around what can we do? Look, there's a lot that you don't control, but there is a lot that we all control. And if we even just start working on the controllables, you'll actually start to make a dent in this for you. Right. And hopefully that then starts to inspire other people. So we always, you know, I'm huge, I'm a huge believer and advocate for personal autonomy and agency because I don't think we can wait amongst all of the bureaucracies and the legalities of like doing something like this and oh my God, we're going to get sued. You know, forget that. Just start with your team. Right. Let's make it human. Because in the end, this is what it's about.

Yeah. And you know, the kind of job off of that. So I'm, I'm working right now on a book that really focuses on sleep leadership. Right. Which on the one hand is okay as a leader, what can you really do in the space? But on the other hand, it's really for anybody who says, you know, I want to become a sleep leader, I want to be more proactive about managing my own sleep instead of, you know, letting the day happen and then seeing how many hours are left for me to get good sleep. Sleep. But also in that you can be the lowest person in the organization and be a role model for others in how you deal with sleep and you can, you know, share what works for you and what you really stick to. And, and, you know, what you've learned about sleep and problem solve with people around you, how you might be able to help them. Right. So you don't need to be a sleep expert to do this. You don't need to be a leader to do this. Anybody can kind of take the lead here and inspire other people around them.

I love that. So on that topic of personal agency, I think I would love to next go els on this question. A lot of times people don't do the right things because they have these stories, these myths that we hold. I'll tell you one that was my. This is like in consulting world, very common. I'm gonna, you know, focus and do all this, and it's fine if I'm not sleeping enough, but I'm just gonna sleep all weekend and I'm gonna be okay. Right. And you and I both know it's like the biggest fallacy. But what are some of the most common myths that you run into? Like maybe cover three, four of those.

Yeah. Well, I mean, let's start with the one that you just gave. Right. Because I think this one is very common. You know, let me get my work done during the week and then I will just catch up on the weekend. So I think how these become myths is that, of course there's, there's a tiny little bit of truth to it in that, you know, some people think that, oh, if I rack up a sleep debt, I can't recover, I can't catch up on sleep anyways, so there's no point in trying. That's not true. Right. You should try to catch up on sleep. So preferably as soon as possible. So if you've had a bad night, Tuesday night, then see if you can catch up Wednesday night or Thursday night instead of waiting until the weekend. But if the only option is for you to wait until the weekend, then please get more sleep on the weekend. But what most people do is sleep in in the morning instead. What's more preferable is if you can go to bed a bit earlier or two, if you can take a nap during the day. If neither of those are an option, then go for option three, which is sleeping in in the morning. And why that one is least preferable is that most of your deep sleep is in the first half of the night. So you're very unlikely to get more deep sleep by sleeping in in the morning. And the other reason is that when you sleep in in the morning, you're shifting your rhythm, so you're shifting your circadian rhythm. And then you can give yourself a social jet lag on the weekend, which is what a lot of people do. So you go to bed later on the weekend than you do during the week. You sleep in, and then I'm sure our listeners will recognize this Sunday night comes, you go to bed at your normal time and you're wide awake, you can't fall asleep. And very often that then coincides with anxiety because you can't fall asleep. And then people think it's anxiety about their job, but it's actually that their body clock has shifted across the weekend and they're just not tired yet. So that's one, one slight danger of the sleeping in in the morning. And hence I'd rather be going earlier or, or take a nap, but definitely try to catch up on sleep. And the reason being is that we really build up the sleep debt and our brain keeps track of about, you know, the last two weeks of sleep debt. And what we see is that, you know, chronic sleep deprivation, so not getting good sleep during the week is much harder to recover from than acute sleep deprivation, which is, you know, skipping an entire night or having one bed night. So as soon as it becomes chronic, our brain is starting to adjust and it makes it much harder to properly catch up and really get back to baseline in terms of our performance in terms of our mood, but also, for instance, in terms of our metabolic health. So we see that our insulin, since Tiffany, for example, goes down when we haven't had good sleep. And that two nights of unlimited sleep after five shorter nights is not enough to get us back to baseline. And we see this in many different measurements, whether we look at immune system functioning or attention levels or other cognitive performance. So I think the big myth there is that you. That you can fully catch up with these two nights on the weekend, where in reality, I see that people, you know, kind of go about it in a suboptimal way, but also that they are not back at baseline.

Yeah, no, I love that. I lived into that fallacy for a long time. Right. Not anymore. But then, you know, they do the second thing, right. Which is also a myth that you talk, and I want to go into that a little bit, is so then I can't fall asleep, right? So what do I do? I need to go to sleep. So either I'm going to take a sleeping pill or I'm going to have alcohol, because that's going to put me to sleep, and then I'm sleeping really well. But talk to us a little bit about the alcohol myth.

Yeah. Well, actually, both sleep medication and alcohol indeed often help people fall asleep faster. That's also how sleep. Sleep medication gets judged by the.

How fast you fall asleep. Yes.

Yeah. Does it make you fall asleep faster than placebo? So we see that medication does that, alcohol does that. But then comes the issue, which is the rest of the night. So with alcohol, we see that people fall asleep faster, but then get worse sleep quality, particularly in the second half of the night. So, of course, it depends a bit on how much alcohol you've had, because the more alcohol, the more sedated you are, and that means that you're knocked out. And if we would look at your sleep, it looks like you've got a lot of deep sleep, but this is sedated deep sleep. This isn't the natural deep sleep. And then we see that you go into withdrawal the second half of the night, and that's when we really get very restless. We see more awakenings. And in the first half of the night, your dream sleep gets suppressed, but then you get a REM rebound the second half of the night. So people can get really intense dreams and wake up, you know, actually quite more exhausted than otherwise. So, yes, it makes you sleepy, it helps you fall asleep faster, but what you then get is nothing like the good stuff of good sleep. And we see something very similar with sleep medication in that there is no sleep medication on the market that really mimics sleep, that can really give us all the benefits of sleep so we can be Unconscious. But being unconscious is very different from all the processes that happen during natural sleep. And I really want to stress here that if you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep during the night, that the best therapy is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. So CBT I and I really urge you to either find a therapist trained in cbti. There's also some digital apps out there. One of them is Sleep Podcast, has been approved by the FDA to kind of help you step by step. And what we see with people who get CBTI instead of sleep medication is that they improve their sleep. But this is really long term benefits, really beyond, you know, the first couple of weeks.

I love that. What might be a third myth that you want to talk about?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think one myth that I so often hear about that I always need to kind of press people on is that they think that leaders don't get much sleep, that in order to reach the top, you have to be able to get by on, you know, five or six hours of sleep. There's been an excellent study by the founder, a potential project called Rasmus Hogarth. Yeah, yeah, I love Rasmus. So they did this excellent study where they looked at a really big database of people across, across organizations and across levels and looked at how much sleep they were getting. And they found that the leaders were actually sleeping more than everybody else. And this is something that I've also often seen in my own research with clients. And secondly, they interviewed a lot of those leaders to kind of figure out, okay, well, are they now sleeping more now that they are at the top and they can outsource everything? Or if they kind of look back, have they always prioritized their sleep? And they found in these interviews that it was the latter, that people really had always prioritized their sleep. So you can literally sleep your way to the top, basically. And also makes a lot of sense because you're not going to last throughout a career by always being sleep deprived and always kind of running behind everything else instead of, you know, really being able to get to this peak performance that is needed to really, you know, get promotion after promotion.

Yeah. And I mean, it's, you know, it's another version of the classic if then else game. Right. Because that's the story people fall into. Yeah, you know, I'm, I'm right now just entry level and I need to really, you know, I need to go all in. And when I make manager, then I'll sleep more and then become now a manager. I want to make director and then I'll sleep more and then it's a VP and then it's an SVP. And now I'm a CEO, but I'm a CEO of 100 million company and I want to see a billion dollar company. And you know, this never like it's not going to end, friends. So I. So either we make a choice. Just like with happiness and flourishing, you can make a choice here and now to say this is what I'm going to do. And you can look at the research just like we look at research for everything else, right? You will never take something, you will never take a medicine unless it is research that it works. You will also not take a medicine that is proven that it has ill effects. And in effect, so many of us today are choosing to take a medicine or rather, you know, because it's a choice, I think about choice as a medicine. You are choosing to ingest something in you that is creating all these long term effects on health, but short term effects, I mean we are sabotaging ourselves in terms of what we need to deliver, how we relate with others, you know, our level of creativity, like all of those four, you know, the iq, the sq, the eq. We are literally, I mean, why would you want to do that? You don't do it in any other aspect of your life. Why do we want to do that? Because we somehow feel that, you know, this is luxury, not a necessity.

Oh, totally. And I often hear this from people that, you know, I just don't have the time and it sounds stupid, but I always think, no, no, no, no, no, it goes back to your real priorities, right? And I think very often people think, you know, I need to do all these other things in my life, so do really well at work and then have all these other things in order to be happy. Right? To someday get the life that I deserve. But in that process, they're totally shortcutting themselves on the immediate happiness. And I think that's just, you know, that really irks me because I just think you could have immediately such a big bump in how happy you are, right? How many positive emotions you're feeling towards or versus how many negative emotions you're feeling. Wouldn't you want that immediately? Right? Have better relationships, have more patience with the people around you. Usually people don't get motivated by, oh, you're gonna increase your risk of cancer or cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes dementia decades from now. But really think about right now, right now.

Exactly.

Better if you got to sleep. So for me, often What I will do when I've had poor sleep is that I really, I, you know, I clear my schedule and I make time for a nap in the afternoon. And it's really hard because, you know, I have to take something off of my to do list and I'm just going to do nothing. I'm just going to go to bed. Even me, right? Even for me, it's still like a thing to do, that to say, no, no, no, this is going to be the best thing. And to me, it feels like I take this magical medicine because I just know, okay, this is an investment. And afterwards, maybe not immediately after the nap, but later in the day, I feel like, yes, that was the right decision. And particularly the next morning, I feel, okay, I'm back on track. I can do everything.

I love that. You know, I love that. Else think about. Many people every morning wake up and take multivitamins, right? This is my multivitamins for my. Physically, I'm working and all of that stuff. Think about going to bed and the sleep is. This is the medicine that I'm taking that is going to keep working. And it's free, right? You don't need a prescription for it. You don't need a doctor. You don't need any. But it has side effects. The side effects are you're gonna wake up fresh and you're gonna be kinder and you're gonna be able to collaborate more and you're gonna have more access to creativity. You're gonna live longer. I mean, this is the best multivitamin you can take is sleep eight hours or more. Right.

And I want to stress that this isn't always about making really big changes. Think about some small changes that you can make, whether it's starting to become just a bit more consistent in your rhythm. Right. Just saying, you know what, let's try, you know, five out of the seven nights. So during the week that I want to be in bed by a certain time, whatever time is best for you, or you say, you know what, I just can't do this during the week. Well, I'm going to take a Saturday afternoon recovery now. Right. I'm just going to clear that in my schedule. That's my time to recharge. Particularly for people with young kids, that can be a really good one. So it can be really small things that help you to improve your sleep. And then you'll start, you know, you'll slowly start noticing the impact.

Yeah, I love it. I'll add one and then we wrap up. I'd love to have you back another point, because there's so much we can talk more about this topic, and this is a very simple one. This is about doing something less, right? So taking something out. Stop drinking caffeine after two. Don't drink caffeine after two. Right. Caffeine has a six hour half life. For some it might be four, for some it might be eight. But literally think about if you can't sleep, here's what you're doing. If you have caffeine at 4, and I spent 20 years having my Starbucks run at 4 o', clock, right. If you drink coffee at 3 or 4 because your energy's thinking and you're like tired, just know that at 10 o' clock, half of that is still in your body and it's fundamentally counteracting your ability to sleep. So just literally this is about doing something, take that out. And instead, you know, if you're feeling tired, go out in nature, move your arms, do some jumping jacks, do some other ways, you know, call somebody. There are other ways in which you can get that energy boost back rather than the standard that we have fallen to is that afternoon coffee.

Yes. And you know what I personally do is I love decaf and it's like a placebo to my brain. You know, I drink the decaf and it smells like coffee and it tastes this really good decaf these days. So if it's really about this craving and taste for you, then go for decaf.

I loved it. Els, thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for this beautiful conversation, which is also a very real, you know, I love the realism in our conversation because these are things that people can go do right now and it doesn't ignore, you know, the broader shifts that need to be happened and the support people need. So thank you. I so love this. And, you know, we'd love to have you back at some point and we can go deeper into some of the corporate programs and, you know, for leaders to kind of really think about integrating this into their journeys.

Yes. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been great to kind of bounce back and forth with you and I really hope that this will inspire some people listening to, you know, make a change either at work or make a change in their personal life or maybe just tell someone else around them to listen to the podcast and, you know, adopt some of these changes because I often see that people know very well who around them could use some help when it comes.

Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you, my friend. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

Yes. Thank you for having me. And by the way, if anyone wants to learn more, I have a monthly newsletter. It's very easy to find if you look me up online or on LinkedIn where I also often post so that people can really kind of get these tips, you know, on a regular basis.

We will add those to our notes to our to our podcast notes as well as you know, when we release the podcast, it'll be there. So we'll help people find you Els and I know for all the work I'm doing with clients, you will definitely be one that I want to bring in on just this. Such an important topic.

I'd love to. Well, all the best with your work and everybody listening with, you know, getting over the hurdle of kind of starting.

With that one change that wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of the these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.