A lot of us trade some amount of our physical and mental well-being for our devotion to our jobs.

Every time you go to bed too late or wake up too early, every time you skip exercising because you're on a deadline or eat junk food at your desk because you lack the time and energy to provide yourself a healthy meal, every time you let the stress of work eat away at you or you go for days without spending any time outdoors, and every time you spend hours sitting in the same spot, you are chipping away at your good health. You may not suddenly fall over, but in time, this chipping away is liable to catch up with you and cause serious harm.

That's one excellent reason we all should work less. Here's another: Getting enough sleep matters more than you think.

---

In 2007, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington collapsed from exhaustion and sleep deprivation while reading emails on her phone. She woke up in a pool of blood with a broken cheekbone. Since then, she's been a self-proclaimed "sleep evangelist," writing two books about the importance of getting enough rest and founding Thrive Global, a website devoted to health and stress reduction.

Bragging about how little sleep you get has fallen out of fashion, which is a good thing. Sleep tracking, on the other hand, has taken off, with health-conscious people increasingly obsessed with the quantity and quality of their sleep. Eight hours of sleep a night became the ideal, often sought after and rarely achieved (at least by me). Then, in 2018, a Penn State sleep expert named Daniel Gartenberg upped the ante by arguing that eight hours of sleep isn't even enough, because most people spend some of their time in bed either falling asleep or slowly waking up, so that you need more time in bed to get eight hours of actual sleep.

If you're failing to get enough sleep because of devotion to your job, that's a really bad (and counterproductive) idea because being sleep-deprived will affect your work performance — a lot.

According to the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, being awake for twenty-four hours causes the same level of mental impairment as a blood alcohol level of 0.10 percent, which would make it illegal for you to drive in all fifty states. Sleep deprivation particularly affects your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for logic and complex thought. One result of this is that people who are sleep-deprived often don't know that they are because their judgment is too impaired for them to realize it.

You may think none of this applies to you because you never stay up for twenty-four hours straight. But you can achieve the same effect by not quite getting enough sleep for enough nights in a row. According to the Harvard Medical School website, sleeping for just six hours a night nine nights in a row will give you that same level of impairment on the tenth day as staying up for twenty-four hours — or being drunk enough to have a 0.10 percent blood alcohol level. Have you ever gone nine nights in a row with no more than six hours of sleep? Even if you felt perfectly fine and well rested, you weren't. Your prefrontal cortex was simply too impaired to tell you how tired you really were.

All of this might be disturbing enough to make you start taking sleep seriously, and I haven't even gotten to the really scary information yet. Here it is: sleep deprivation, even a small amount of it, increases your risk of Alzheimer's disease. Scientists have learned that, during deep sleep, cerebrospinal fluid washes through our brains, removing the beta-amyloids, protein fragments that are believed to cause Alzheimer's.

Have you ever been close to anyone who had Alzheimer's? I have. My mother lived with it for more than fifteen years while it slowly robbed her of everything, including her ability to walk, speak, and feed herself. Since reading about this research, I've thought a lot about how she spent weekends in the country with my retired stepfather, then rose at 4 a.m. to beat the traffic back into Manhattan, and how she stayed out late at night, then rose early for work the next day. This is not a disease you would wish on your most hated enemy. I don't care how wonderful your job is — it isn't worth it if it keeps you from getting a healthy amount of sleep.

Copyright ©2022 Minda Zetlin. All rights reserved.

---

Excerpted from the book Career Self-Care: Simple Ways to Increase Your Happiness, Success, and Fulfillment at Work ©2022 by Minda Zetlin. Printed with permission from NewWorldLibrary.com.