By Meredith Lepore
We can blame lack of sleep for pretty much anything going wrong in our lives. Unhealthiness, being passive aggressive, mismatching our shoes, etc.
And a new study finds it is really hurting your ability to not be distracted at work.
The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, looked at how well subjects could complete a task accurately after being distracted mid-way through the assignment in a lab at night. After the task was completed, half of the subjects went home to sleep, but the other half had to stay and remain awake.
It’s harder to come back from distractions
The results? Of those who stayed awake 15% were “unable or unwilling to achieve a modest level of accuracy that they were instructed to achieve and were able to achieve the evening before,” while this was only the case for 1% of the sleep group.
Now being tired at work and seeing one Instagram alert pop up on your phone which then sends you down the rabbit hole for 10 minutes it was one thing, but this can lead to more serious issues.
“If you look at mistakes and accidents in surgery, public transportation and even operating nuclear power plants, lack of sleep is one of the primary reasons for human error,” said study author Kimberly Fenn. “There are many people in critical professions who are sleep-deprived. Research has found that nearly one-quarter of the people with procedure-heavy jobs have fallen asleep on the job.”
In other words, go to sleep!
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