Wellness for the Workplace: Part 1
Focusing on your sleep is more important than focusing on the customer!
“The customer is always first” is a fallacy to delivering truly impactful customer interactions and experiences in the workplace. Twelve years in the hospitality industry has taught me that you must focus on yourself first to thrive in this fast-paced, customer-facing environment. Creative, energized, and meaningful customer experiences only occur when we bring our best selves to work each day. This requires each of us to look inward and place all the emphasis on our own physical and mental well-being, which I term the SleepMindHeart Model. This article will focus on the Sleep portion of this model.
Managing both the internal and external customer’s expectations and tending to their individual needs and aspirations is a never-ending journey. These continuous interactions often drain one’s energy and sometimes even one’s very soul. I have been around the hospitality industry long enough to see a significant number of individuals experience high levels of stress, fatigue, burnout and even bouts of depression (myself included). This phenomenon, while not limited to the hospitality and integrated resort industry, seems to be exacerbated due to the pressures around workplaces with a continuous cycle of 24x7 operations and external market competition.
Volumes of research reveal that lack of sleep and overall physical and mental wellness leads to largely inefficient work habits and errors in judgement. For example, after a thirty-hour shift without sleep, medical residents make 460 percent more diagnostic mistakes in the intensive care unit than when well-rested after enough sleep. Additionally, throughout the course of their residency, one in five residents will make a sleepless-related medical error that causes significant, liable harm to a patient. A whopping one in twenty will kill a patient due to a lack of sleep. (Footnote: Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (p. 319). Scribner)
While most of our customer interfaces are not life-threatening, negatively perceived interactions due to lapses in personal judgement can leave lasting scars on our customers in terms of the quality and level of service. Just recall your own negative hotel or dining experiences in the past. These will clearly reveal why each individual interaction is critical to your overall satisfaction and propensity to return to that same establishment. What if the service level you received was not from lack of training, but a lapse in judgement from a long shift, poor sleep, or insufficient time placed on personal well-being by specific service team members?
The World Health Organization now labels lack of sleep a global health epidemic, with over 800 million individuals estimated to obtain insufficient sleep each week. This is the root of the problem in a modern society that encourages the sleep-deprived “warrior” to battle on for long hours and sleep-deprived nights (or days if you are a shift worker). And if the customer’s aspirational desires are not stressful enough, then add your boss or co-workers’ demands and it is no wonder our bodies become physically and emotionally shattered.
Now, if you want to bring your best, energized, well-rested self to work each day to cope with the ever-increasing demands, here are a few suggestions. First, stick to a sleep schedule of between 7 and 9 hours (as best as possible) by going to bed and waking up around the same time each day. Next, prepare yourself for bed appropriately each night by not eating or exercising within 2 to 3 hours of your planned sleep time. This simply leads to too much energy being expended either cooling down your body or digesting your meal before bedtime. Also, block blue light around you in order to allow your body to start producing melatonin, the sleep-inducing hormone.
Swannies Blue Light blocking glasses are my personal favorite
Blue light can be found emanating from LED lights, mobile phones, and laptop screens, televisions, and multitudes of other devices as the Internet of Things prospers. However, many individuals do not realize that these devices actually generate the same short wavelength of blue light that signals to the body that it’s daytime. Merely being around these light sources suppresses our melatonin production and impacts our quality of sleep. This is intensified in the workplace where LED lights are now omnipresent through the facilities, especially due to their brightness and energy-saving characteristics.
As for combating this blue light phenomenon of modern society, I recommend using the Night Shift or Night Mode features in iOS or Android phones, respectively to block the blue lights from your mobile screens. Use of “f.lux” software for your laptop or “Night light” setting now built into Microsoft’s latest OS, also provide the same benefit. Additionally, dimming lights and utilizing blue-blocking glasses, such as Swannies, one hour before bedtime provides additional protection from the ugly force of LEDs and blue light.
The bedroom sleep environment is also critical to a great, energizing night’s sleep. Recommendations include ensuring the bedroom is as dark as a cave through blackout curtains and blocking any sources of light in the bedroom like power strips, air conditioners, or other such sources. Keeping the bedroom cool around 18 Celsius (65 F) is also important to provide the body with ideal sleeping conditions. Where possible, try to make your bedroom device free, especially televisions, which cause melatonin suppression when in use.
Lastly, tracking your sleep data through a wearable device is also important to ensure the tactics you employ are working. Traditional bands such as FitBit and the Apple Watch are good but more sleep-specific devices such as Biostrap, provide a much deeper profile of your sleep patterns. These devices equip you with important data to be able to make better sleep decisions based on your own personal behaviors and patterns each day.
Other important sleep-inducing techniques you may want to consider include:
Utilizing a white noise-canceling device if there are many outside disturbances not under your control like street traffic or dogs barking. I utilize the LectroFan and it’s amazing!
Investing in a quality mattress and pillows.
Avoiding caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine, which can impact the quality of sleep. For example, alcohol before sleep may help you relax, but it impairs your deep REM sleep, thus keeping you in the lighter stages of sleep and also changes your breathing at night.
Avoiding excessive fluids, including water, just before bed. Drinking too many fluids at night can cause frequent awakenings to urinate.
Writing your to-do list for the next day or even creating a gratitude journal you can write in each evening to give yourself a fighting chance to avoid “monkey mind”.
With doctors’ approval, avoiding medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep. Some commonly prescribed heart, blood pressure, or asthma medications, as well as some over-the-counter and herbal remedies for coughs, colds, or allergies, can disrupt sleep patterns. If you have trouble sleeping, talk to your health care provider or pharmacist to see whether any drugs you’re taking might be contributing to your insomnia and ask whether they can be taken at other times during the day or early in the evening.
Don’t take naps after 3 p.m. Naps can help make up for lost sleep, but late afternoon naps can make it harder to fall asleep at night.
Take a hot bath before bed. The drop in body temperature after getting out of the bath may help you feel sleepy, and the bath can help you relax and slow down so you’re more ready to sleep.
Don’t lie in bed awake. If you find yourself still awake after staying in bed for more than twenty minutes or if you are starting to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy. The anxiety of not being able to sleep can make it harder to fall asleep. (Footnote; Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (p. 341). Scribner. Kindle Edition.)
Remember, focus on yourself first by getting deep, healthy sleep and your customers will be thanking you for it again and again.
For more information about the positive impacts of sleep on your wellness, visit SleepMindHeart.com.
