Berlin.
When you sleep, your body stays fit and healthy. Companies can also benefit from this, says sleep researcher Albrecht Vorster.
How long we live and how healthy we are is very much related to our sleep. He prevents Diseases, makes us smarter and provides life energy. The sleep researcher and neurobiologist Albrecht Vorster researches this unconscious state and says: You should sleep even at work.
Mr. Vorster, sleep gives us life energy. What happens when we sleep?
Albrecht Vorster: Sleep is an all-rounder for all processes that take place in the body. In the brain, the spaces between cells increase by 60 percent and protein residues are flushed out. This protects us from diseases such as dementia and Parkinson’s. During sleep, the nerve endings are clipped back. They can drive out again the next day and make new contacts. This keeps the neurotransmitters in balance and reduces the risk of psychiatric disorders such as depression. And sleep is important for a fundamental human trait: learning. We get smarter while we sleep and wake up the next morning with a different brain from when we fell asleep.
It is said that sleep has a crucial influence on mortality risk.
Foreman: The regeneration of the cell walls of the blood vessels takes place during sleep. If this does not happen, the risk of arteriosclerosis and thus heart attack and stroke increases. Sleep is also central to controlling tumor development. However, if the immune system cannot do its work at the time when it is actually most active, i.e. at night, the risk of cancer increases. This is why, for example, the risk of breast cancer is higher among shift workers. And then sleep is central to the immune system.
Who sleeps badly, gets sick more often?
Foreman: During sleep, the immune cells exchange information about which fragments of immigrating germs they have seen. In this way, the other immune cells learn what to specifically look for. This is also important for our vaccination protection. If I sleep through the night after a vaccination, I still have poorer vaccination protection a year later.
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Do parents of young children or caregivers have an increased risk of death?
Foreman: You cant say it like that. It doesn’t matter if we sleep too little or badly for a week or even a year or two. But if we mess around with our sleep for ten or twenty years, the risk of such diseases increases.
How does a sleepless night affect our life energy?
Foreman: We’ll put up with a good night’s sleep. Hence my advice to people who need to be particularly productive on a certain day: It is important for them to get a good night’s sleep the week before. Then they don’t have to worry for the last night. But if I have already accumulated a sleep deficit, my performance, concentration, mood and decision-making ability decrease measurably. And the performance does not gradually deteriorate, but there are drops in performance, our desired performance is interspersed with errors. But we don’t get that. If you let participants sleep only four hours in experiments for several days, they say after the third day: “Now I can get by with the less sleep.” In reality, they are getting worse from day to day.
Working people usually align their sleep with their job. Don’t employers also have a responsibility when it comes to sleep?
Foreman: That’s correct. Companies have company sports programs or they place fruit at the entrance. But so-called nap rooms, rooms for sleeping, only exist in a few pioneering companies. It is extremely rare for companies to include sleep in company health management.
For many executives, nap rooms are likely to represent a contradiction in terms: performance and sleep don’t go together.
Foreman: That’s just as farfetched as saying: My people shouldn’t eat at work. Nobody would deny employees a coffee kitchen – and it also serves to increase performance. Every company wants well-rested employees: they are happier, more satisfied, more productive, and sick less often. Sleeping at work should be allowed.
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How long does a power nap, i.e. a short sleep during the day, have to be?
Foreman: It should be at least five to ten minutes and a maximum of 15 minutes. If we sleep longer, we fall into a deep sleep phase and then need one to two hours until we are fully awake again. With a power nap, you just want to fall asleep, sometimes it doesn’t feel like sleep at all. Hence my tip for training: set the alarm, close your eyes for five to ten minutes and no matter what happened during this time – whether you had the feeling of having slept or whether you were pondering – then get up and carry on.
Keyword coffee kitchen: As a sleep researcher, what do you think of coffee?
Foreman: coffee is healthy The studies of the last few years are very clear. You just have to be careful from the afternoon. It works for a long time, even if we don’t even notice it. If we drink two more cups of coffee at five in the afternoon, one of them will still be in the blood at 11 p.m. This makes our sleep a little easier. But there is a much stronger pick-me-up than coffee.
Which?
Foreman: Light. Outside there are 10,000 to 100,000 lux, in a perfectly lit office it is 500 lux. That is very little. We sleep better at night when we get a lot of light during the day. So we should go outside in the morning.
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How do you feel about your smartphone in bed?
Foreman: I would turn off the cell phone an hour before bed because it is an emotion device and makes it difficult for us to fall asleep. We read work emails, chat in the family group or watch YouTube videos and this is associated with joy, sorrow and problems.
A good book is also connected to emotions.
Foreman: But a good book takes me out of my life. I distance myself from what happened during the day. I recommend the book to fall asleep to!
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