“Every important mistake I made in my life, I made when I was tired”
–Bill Clinton
The opening quote, sourced from a former United States President, Bill Clinton, signposts one of the central messages of a book, published earlier this month in the US by Ariana Huffington, Co-founder and Editor in Chief of the Huffington Post. Entitled,The Sleep Revolution: Transforming your life one time night at a time, the book argues that modern society has too often glorified outstanding achievers who run on little sleep and work long hours. As Huffington puts it, we must fight the “collective delusions that overwork and burnout are the price we must pay in order to succeed.”
Her insight and new lifestyle were obtained the hard way. As she told it, her outstanding success, as one of the world’s most important women, were powered by a hectic lifestyle in which she barely managed to get four to five hours of sleep every night. Permanently wired to tech gadgets and toys, she held several meetings a day, reproducing the lifestyle of several of the world’s great inventors and statesmen, such as Thomas Edison, and a former British Prime Minister, Margret Thatcher. Then, one day, she collapsed in her office and found herself lying in a pool of her own blood. Following a battery of medical tests, and anxious scrutiny of her brain to detect if she had tumour, it became clear that all she suffered from was sleep deprivation and burnout. That was the jolt she needed to transform her life, becoming an apostle of healthy work life balance, in which adequate and qualitative sleep, not less than seven hours a day, formed a major aspect.
I have often lamented the derelict nature of our work ethic as a country, slouching and laggard as it is, filled with too many off work days (See, Frozen in mediocrity: A nation’s dithering work habits. The PUNCH, April 5, 2013). There should still be an emphasis nationwide on developing our work culture, in order to reap productivity dividends. Huffington’s thesis however, shows another side of the issue by playing up the dangers, psychological and medical, of unremitting toil without adequate sleep and recreation. Before pursuing the matter further, I ask the reader to permit a little digression, by way of a short take.
One of the delights of the 24thAnnual Conference of the Nigerian Society of International Affairs held on Monday and Tuesday at the Obafemi Awolowo University, is the coming of age of the society, resurrected in 2012, after a decade long lull. As Prof. Jide Owoeye, immediate past President of the society who engineered its rebirth reported, the society’s journal, which was off the shelves for over a decade is now back in full bloom. It is noteworthy that the conference featured established scholars such as Profs Jide Osuntokun and Alaba Ogunsanwo, who were present at the society’s creation, as well as a host of emerging scholars, drawn from universities across the nation. Discourse, as the host Vice Chancellor, Prof. Bamitale Omole, admonished was skewed to policy relevant concerns, such as the need to reinvent Nigerian foreign policy, the opportunities and danger signals of growing Sino-Nigerian relations, the need to build a capable military organisation in the face of terrorists’ challenge, among others. On the issue of corruption for example, it was observed that the current reformist initiative of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration constitutes a necessary impetus for revamping Nigeria’s image, and soft power in the international arena. In other words, Nigeria cannot gain respect simply by its leaders jetting out of the country at every available opportunity; it must rather focus on resolving a host of bedevilling domestic problems, such as the national question, crisis of infrastructure, the energy crunch, and decaying social services. Nigeria cannot be ugly at home and beautiful abroad. It must synchronise and synergize its domestic and foreign policies, in order to regain the influence in global affairs which it once enjoyed.
To go back to the main discourse, the issue is not just about hours of sleep or hours of work, but the quality of both. For example, sleeping for eight hours says little about the effectiveness of sleep, especially in an age when several bedrooms are littered with technological toys of the Internet age, which can easily interrupt sleep. In this connection, Huffington emphasises that before going to bed, “I turn off the phone, take them outside the room to charge- the phone, the IPad, everything, no television. I lower the light, no overhead light.”
In the same vein, the expression, “Busy doing nothing” warns us that long hours at the workplace do not automatically guarantee higher productivity. Consequently, the author introduced several nap rooms in the office for her workers, where they can recharge themselves in between hours of hectic work. A related device is that she emphasises that she would rather have workers call her up, that they might come a bit late if they have an emergency than rigidly follow a routine while their mind is not at work. As she puts it: “We want you to come in recharged, and be your best and most creative self, rather than clock in at 9am exhausted and drugging yourself, sitting at your desk and updating your Facebook.” That is another way of underlining the fact that quality of work is not a function of long hours at the desk. As the quote from Clinton reminds us, it could be dangerous for leaders to take crucial decisions when they are drowsy from fatigue, overwork, and insufficient sleep.
With respect to Donald Trump, the frontline Republican contender for the presidency of the United States, Huffington argues that several of the mistakes made by Trump on the campaign trail could have been avoided if he took sufficient sleep. It is generally known that Trump drives himself hard, by sleeping for between three and four hours, on the average, every night and even then, with his phones on, so that he can monitor what is going on. Trump has famously written that: “How does someone that is sleeping 12-14 hours compete with someone that is sleeping three to four hours?” In contradicting this perspective, Huffington argues that Trump is a classic exhibit of the effects of sleep deficiency on leadership capacity, as he is subject to mood swings, inability to process information and a paranoid tendency to believe things that are not true.
To be sure, there are great leaders who are able to get by with little sleep; but there are also, a good number of highly successful people, such as Bill Gates and Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, who sleep between seven and nine hours every day. Here in Nigeria, Chief Obafemi Awolowo who had legendary work habits slept for about seven hours daily, including a one-hour nap after breakfast.
To adapt Huffington’s message to Nigerian circumstances, we must beg our leaders to make our sleep more enjoyable, by providing us with regular electricity in the face of unbearable heat, and ensure that we don’t spend too many sleep hours at fuel stations in search of the elusive product. That way, our productivity will notch up.
PUNCH
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