Improving Your Physical and Financial Health with Better Sleep

In a world where society is constantly obsessing over the appearance of age, you’d think that more people would prioritize a solid sleep regimen. As researchers from UCLA point out, even one night of insufficient sleep can make an adult’s cells age faster. There’s a reason they call it ‘beauty sleep.’

Despite the AMA recommending adults consistently sleep 7-8 hours each night, the CDC has found that 1 in 3 Americans are not getting sufficient sleep. 1 in 5 Americans report feeling sleepy during the day.

Conversations about our sleep deficit usually revolve around what it does to the individual’s mind and body. Those consequences certainly matter, but did you know there is also a correlation between sleep and cold, hard cash?

By understanding the impacts of sleep deprivation and how you can address the problem, you might enjoy a healthier bank account instead of just dreaming about one.

What Sleep Deprivation Does To You

We all intuitively understand that not getting enough sleep is a bad thing. We feel it in our bones, our demeanor, and the pace of our day. Yet it’s only when we actually examine the impacts of poor sleep on our person and lives that those feelings take on an uncomfortable depth and texture.

Physical Health

The most easily recognizable consequence of sleep deprivation is the toll it takes on our bodies. Sleep is necessary for our various bodily functions to recover, and a lack of sleep limits the time our bodies spend on recovery. The problem compounds as restless nights add up. Your body never gets a chance to restore its energy reserves.

Without restorative rest, our bodies become vulnerable to a wide range of health complications, including:

• Obesity
• Diabetes
• Heart Disease
• Chronic Illness
• Compromised Immune System
• Mental Health Symptom Exacerbation (anxiety, depression, ADHD, and mood/personality disorders)

All of this can directly impact our state of mind and work quality. The very human cost of a shorter life expectancy, though, is arguably the most important consequence. Men who get adequate sleep live five years longer than those who don’t. For women, it’s two years longer. Your insistence that you’ll sleep when you’re dead could hold more truth than you realize.

Focus and Memory

During the course of a regular workday, you are learning new information, performing tasks, and using technology. Doing these actions well requires a certain level of focus that sleep deprivation denies. Experts have found that sleep-associated focus problems result in symptoms on par with conditions like ADHD, including increased distractibility and diminished attention to detail.

This is uniquely relevant in the context of physical risk. Consider the following statistics that researchers have found:

• Decreasing your sleep by just 1.3 to 1.5 hours for one night results in a 32% decrease in alertness during waking hours.
• Sleep-deprived workers are 70% more likely to be involved in workplace accidents.
• Some evidence also indicates that roughly 13% of all workplace accidents are due to poor sleep.

Sleep deprivation also affects our ability to retain information. Research from the National Institute of Health shows that sleep-deprived employees retain about 40% less information than their well-rested counterparts.

The combination of poor focus and information retention has serious ramifications. Your accuracy, pace of work, and response times all suffer. By how much? One study determined that even moderate sleep deprivation had the same effect on cognition as alcohol intoxication.

Interpersonal Relationships

Getting along with others is an important part of most jobs. Positive work relationships enable you to be part of a collaborative effort and contribute meaningfully to meetings and projects. These relationships play a critical role in advancing your career, as well.

Research suggests that sleep deprivation hurts your ability to build and sustain productive workplace relationships. Poorer relationships can also worsen sleep, thus creating a vicious cycle. Increased irritability and stymied decision-making skills may cause you to lose your temper easily or interfere with your judgment in communicating with others.

Likeability bias has been found to positively affect your work performance reviews, so your lack of sleep could directly impact your career trajectory.

Sleep Deprivation and Your Wallet

The impacts of sleep deprivation on our health, well-being, and job performance are severe and many.

They can also be quantified in terms of personal finance.

Sleep deprivation may hurt your work to the point where you miss out on promotions or raises. In the long term, that hurts your overall financial health. In fact, American workers with sleep disorders earn an average of $2,400 less every year than those who don’t have sleep disorders. In comparison, sleeping just one extra hour on average per week can increase wages by 4.9% in the long run.

Severe sleep issues can eat through your savings, as well. One study calculated that individuals with insomnia faced healthcare costs that were 80% higher than those without. When you live in the only high-income country in the world without guaranteed healthcare coverage with costs twice as high as the next closest developed nation, that’s a huge expense.

Poor Sleep as a Drag on Businesses and the Economy

When extrapolating all the data on the personal cost of sleep deprivation, we realize just how costly a tired workforce can be for our economy.

The Cost of Absenteeism

As health issues mount, lack of sleep leads to more missed work. A survey from Gallup found that workers reporting poor sleep had missed an average of 2.81 days of work in the prior month, compared to 0.91 days for those who felt they were sleeping well.

The result? American businesses lose over $44 billion a year on unplanned absenteeism alone.

Lost Productivity

The cost of absenteeism is alarming, and it doesn’t account for reduced productivity when sleepy workers do show up. There is a staggering 29% loss in productivity among workers who sleep less than five hours a night.

Reduced Economic Output

According to a RAND sleep study, the overall annual economic cost of poor sleep in the US is up to $411 billion. Globally, sleep deprivation is responsible for a 3% loss in GDP. We’re talking trillions of dollars in economic output.

If the price of poor sleep is this high, it might be time to chase the returns on a good night’s rest.

Tips for Improving Sleep

If you’re one of the many who struggle to get the right amount of high-quality sleep at night, don’t be dismayed. By taking steps big and small, you can improve your sojourns through the land of nod.

Practice Good Sleep Hygiene

Sleep hygiene refers to the practices and habits used to encourage healthy rest. Think of it as tricking your mind.

This could include going to bed at the same time every night and building a routine of things you do before lying down. These actions can program your body and brain to follow a rhythm in delivering consistent quality sleep.

Optimize Your Sleep Setting

Pay attention to where you sleep, too. Our surroundings are often a reflection of our psychological state. When your bedroom turns into a mess, it usually correlates with heightened stress. That pile of clothes in the corner, open drawers, and a disorganized dresser top will all remind you of the work left undone in the day, keeping your mind busy with to-do lists instead of rest. Just as clutter in the office hurts productivity, clutter in the bedroom hurts productive sleep.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Everything from lighting to scent can influence how much sleep you get.

Maintain a sleep environment that’s conducive to slowing your body and brain down. Beyond making your bed and putting dirty laundry in the hamper, there are also other steps you can take:

• Install room-darkening curtains and change to a lower setting on the thermostat to provide physical sleep cues.
• Keep background noise neutral to limit audio interruptions to sleep, opting for things like white noise machines over the TV.
• Limit exposure to blue light from mobile devices 2-3 hours before you lay down and turn your phone to ‘do not disturb.’
• Consider decorating your bedroom with plants proven to encourage rest (like lavender or jasmine) or set up an aromatherapy machine with similar scents.

Commit to a Healthier Diet

We all know that poor nutrition can interfere with proper bodily functions and compromise our health. It increases a person’s risk factors in many of the same health categories as poor sleep does. When you mix the two together, those risks surge ever higher.

An unhealthy diet and poor sleep habits feed on one another, too. For instance, people who consume excess sodium tend to enjoy less quality sleep. This applies to 90% of Americans who all consume more than the recommended sodium intake.

In the meantime, those who sleep less tend to eat more, even if it’s just due to being awake for longer, and this increases the likelihood of obesity.

Healthier eating might be the easiest variable in that equation to control. From balanced meals to taking vitamins, making smarter choices regarding what you put in your body can make a huge difference.

Get Moving

People today are more sedentary than ever. According to the CDC, over a quarter of Americans are considered ‘physically inactive.’ This has a ripple effect in terms of weight, risk factors for disease, mental health stability, and more. It also directly affects the duration and depth of sleep.

This presents yet another situation where two problems compound upon one another. If you’re not sleeping well, you might not have the energy to be more physically active throughout the day. When physical activity levels are lower than they should be, your sleep suffers.

You don’t need to attend daily CrossFit classes to improve your health and sleep. Medical experts say that just 30 minutes of moderate aerobic activity (even just walking) can speed up sleep onset times and improve your quality of rest. It can improve your energy and cognitive processing, too!

Set Thoughtful Limits on Stimulant and Alcohol Intake

In the rise and grind of our hustle culture, we constantly seek ways to ‘up our game’ – even when it costs us precious hours of sleep.

It should come as no surprise that the coffee market segment in the US alone generates close to $90 billion annually, and the energy and sports drinks segment brings in over $214 billion in annual revenue.

Beyond midday crashes, withdrawal headaches, and diminished oral health, excessive caffeine consumption can completely undermine our attempts at getting rest. One study found that consuming caffeine even six hours before bed decreases your total sleep duration by an hour.

Things we usually refer to as ‘relaxing’ can be similarly detrimental. For example, despite colloquial references to ‘stress smoking,’ the nicotine in cigarettes is a stimulant. Smokers are more likely to experience sleepiness during the day, with nicotine used four hours before bedtime resulting in major sleep interference.

There is a similar disconnect between our assumptions about alcohol and sleep. As a depressant, the sedative qualities of alcohol can quicken sleep onset. The duration of your sleep, however, will be shorter with more interruptions.

The bottom line? Limiting when and how much you consume stimulants and alcohol can significantly change your sleep experience.

Consider Sleep Aids

Sometimes, poor sleep is a result of chemical imbalances in the body. On other occasions, outside circumstances beyond our control can render small solutions ineffective. In such cases, you might need additional support to achieve better sleep.

For some people, steps like drinking teas with sedative properties or over-the-counter supplements like melatonin will do the trick. Others may require help from a medical professional. Given the health and financial consequences associated with sleep deprivation, those interventions are more than worth exploring.

Stop Hitting Snooze on Sleep Improvement

While you may have decided long ago that a few extra wrinkles are the price you’re willing to pay for the additional hours spent making money at work, you are likely paying more than you bargained for on all fronts. From real dollar signs to career progression, we’re unknowingly writing unnecessary checks we cannot afford.

Sleep isn’t a luxury. Pulling an all-nighter is no badge of honor.  Real, meaningful rest is a necessity if you want to excel. People like Tim Cook, Jack Dorsey, Floyd Mayweather, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sheryl Sandberg, Malcolm Gladwell, Ariana Huffington, and Lebron James all know that firsthand.

If you hope to emulate their success, then follow their lead. Get that beauty rest. You’ll enjoy a better, more productive life in the morning.

We think you’ll also like:

1. Waistlines and Wallets: How Your Health Affects Your Financial Wellness
2. Sleep Your Way to the Top
3. Green Investing and Green Living: Good for Your Lifespan and Your Wallet

[Editors’ Note: To learn more about this and related topics, you may want to attend the following on-demand webinars (which you can view at your leisure, and each includes a comprehensive customer PowerPoint about the topic):

1. The Start Up/Small Business Advisor
2. MBA Boot Camp
3. Business Borrowing Basics

This article was originally published on March 17, 2023. This article was most recently updated by the Financial Poise Editors.]

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