New Year's Revolutions

As we return to work, school and our everyday lives after the hustle and bustle of the holidays, many of us start the year with a little extra debt. Now while many of you may think I'm talking about credit card debt from the overspending of the holiday season, what I'm alluding to is the increased sleep debt that we've accumulated by staying out late, drinking alcohol, overeating and generally adopting poor sleep hygiene habits during the holidays. I don't want to rain on anybody's parade, but eventually and especially if we want to perform at our peak levels, we have to pay back this debt. Sleep researchers have shown that accumulated sleep debt affects judgment perception and performance on both physical and mental skill tasks. It also has a negative effect on emotional intelligence (our ability to perceive, judge and respond to emotional stimulus as well as our ability to manage our own emotions). Just as credit card debt negatively affects your credit rating and your ability to purchase and can compromise future plans, so can sleep debt affects your ability to work or train at your peak levels.

In modern society we often pride ourselves on how well we can function with little or no sleep. We often hold up sleep deprivation as a badge of honor, using it to show how tough and resilient we are. Research has shown that sleep deficit does not make us intelligent, tough or resilient. On the contrary, it compromises our intelligence and our immune system. Instead of dividing people who go to sleep early or need their eight hours of “beauty sleep.” We should be holding these people up as examples of how to get the most out of life. Sleep deficit slows cognitive functioning and optimal sleep improves cognitive speed and creativity. In the same way that we admire those who can exercise regularly and eat well as paragons of health and well-being, we should admire and try to emulate those people who have good sleep habits.

Arianna Huffington, cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of 13 books shares her ideas of the power of sleep in this TED talk from the TED women 2010 conference.Arianna Huffington: How to succeed? Get more sleep | Video on TED.com

If you've accumulated a significant sleep debt and you're interested in paying it back (because there's no way to declare sleep bankruptcy) there are several strategies that you can employ. At first you must increase your daily sleep to your baseline minimum to stop accumulating sleep debt, that means that if you need to sleep eight hours a night to not increase your sleep debt, you have to sleep a minimum of eight hours a night. From that point any extra hours that you can cumulate will pay down your sleep debt and not before. If your baseline minimum is seven hours a night and you've been sleeping six hours a night for the last three years, with the occasional ten-hour weekend night, you might have a sleep debt on the order of 900 hours. That means you would have to sleep your minimum seven hours a night and add 1 to 2 hours daily for 600 to 900 days before you completely eliminate your sleep debt. These extra hours can be accumulated as naps or additional hours on nightly sleep, but be careful because too much sleep on any given day will disrupt the subsequent night's sleep (which would increase sleep deficit). CBC radio's science show Quirks & Quarks of November 14, 2009 features a fact or fiction segment on sleep debt and how to pay it off with Dr. John Kimoff, Director of the Sleep Lab at the McGill University Health Center in Montréal. You can download the audio of the show to listen on your iPod or iPhone from CBC radio website.

When thinking about your goals and targets for the new year, don't forget those baseline prerequisites which will make the bigger goals possible. Eat well, exercise and make sure to get enough sleep if you want to perform at your best in 2011.