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The Science Behind Sleep and High Performance
Marc Effron, president of the Talent Strategy Group, looked at the scientific literature behind high performance at work and identified eight steps we can all take to get an edge....
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Marc Effron, president of the Talent Strategy Group, looked at the scientific literature behind high performance at work and identified eight steps we can all take to get an edge. Among those steps is taking care of your body — sleep, exercise, and nutrition. But the most important is sleep. He offers some practical advice on getting more and better rest, and making time to exercise. Effron is the author of the new book, 8 Steps to High Performance: Focus On What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest).
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.
All of us want to perform to our utmost level at work – whether we’re a new employee or the CEO.
But a lot of the self-help books and articles out there don’t start with science, says our guest today, Marc Effron.
MARC EFFRON: To me, high performance is someone who delivers both results and behaviors at the 75 percentile, compared to their peers, over time. So it’s not that you had a good month or good year but year in year out you are delivering results and behaviors better than most of the other people that you work with.
In his new book, Effron actually looks at eight different ways that you can become a high performer at work – with the studies to back up those claims.
Those include things like setting big goals, relying on yourself to develop new skills instead of expecting your company to help you, and growing your network.
But the step I found most interesting and surprising – and that Effron says is entirely within our control – is taking care of your physical body.
Marc Effron is president at The Talent Strategy Group, and the author of the book “8 Steps to High Performance: Focus on What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest).”
Marc, thanks so much for being here.
MARC EFFRON: My pleasure. Happy to be here, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You know, I must have read hundreds of leadership books while I’ve been hosting this show and not a whole lot of them talk about the importance of physical well-being. Why was that something that you felt was really important to talk about?
MARC EFFRON: Well, I didn’t go into writing the book with a preconceived notion that I should write about the body and how the body contributes to high performance. I sorted through thousands of academic articles that said that they had some nugget of proof in them that connected something with something else. And it just so happened that there was a lot that popped up around sleep; a little bit around exercise. And so it caused me to include this one of the eight steps because it really emerged as a very powerful force in our performance.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah, it’s interesting that you say there’s a lot about sleep and not as much about some of the other things, because I too have looked for research on say, nutrition or exercise, and there really isn’t as much research on that. Do you know why that’s the case? Is it just harder to measure that other stuff or is sleep really that much more important?
MARC EFFRON: Well, there have been plenty of experiments done on exercise and performance, so it’s not for lack of looking. In fact, that was probably the area where I was most surprised, being a bit of a gym rat myself. I was looking for some great proof that that would make me even more successful if I just spent one more day in the gym. And unfortunately, if you go through all of the academic literature, there just really isn’t anything there. Obviously if you eat right and exercise you will be in great shape and probably a happier individual, but scientists could find no link between those two things and your performance at work.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You know, I – as someone who doesn’t always eat very well and definitely doesn’t exercise enough, I find that oddly reassuring. So, you kind of break sleep into two different parts: quantity and quality. So let’s start with quantity. We all know we’re supposed to get six to eight hours of sleep, but is there a number that’s the absolute minimum? Like, if six to eight just feels impossible. Is there a number that you should aim for as the absolute least you can get and still be effective?
MARC EFFRON: Yeah. That’s part of the big challenge, Sarah, is that the advice on sleep is really all over the place. In fact, the National Sleep Foundation says it’s somewhere between six and 10 hours. That’s a four hour gap where you could do a lot of other things.
And if you look across the collection of research on sleep, it really narrows in on about six to seven hours being the ideal. That ideal is going to vary for everyone. The science also says we each likely have a set sleep point; that minimum number of hours that we need, and we can try as hard as we want to get less than that and train ourselves, it’s not going to work.
So the challenge with quantity is that there’s not a great set of research into what’s the exact right number. We at least have a range, but we can likely narrow it down to that six to seven hour
Point.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I remember a few years ago there was a fascinating Wall Street Journal article about what they called the “sleepless elite,” this tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of people who really can function, on not very much sleep at all. I think the problem is that a lot of us think we’re in this group and we’re not. We really do need more sleep. But why is it so tempting to think that we can sort of cut corners there?
MARC EFFRON: Well, I think any high performer wants to do whatever he or she can do to continue being a high performer. And so we’re always looking for a shortcut and while we’ve got those wasted seven hours, we’re just lying in bed – we’re not working at all during that time.
Therefore, why don’t I just take one of those hours and apply it to work? It’s a very tempting thought, until you dig into the research and you find out it just doesn’t work that way. In fact, I remember reading that article and thinking, “I bet they have a couple of hints at the end about how I can become one of those sleepless elites.”
They did not and there are certainly no hints in the academic literature to help people do that. We are unfortunately somewhat hardwired into our sleep patterns; both the number of hours we need, but also the time that we wake up. So those advocating for, you know, a 4:00 AM wake up and get a great start to the day – it’s likely that their brains are hardwired to that and it would be very difficult for somebody else to shift and engage in that exact same pattern.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHEL: So what happens to our brains when we don’t get enough sleep?
MARC EFFRON: Well, this is what’s interesting is you would naturally think, “Well, if I don’t get enough sleep, I’m not going to show up as smart, as clever as I would if I got a full night’s sleep.” But what the science says is, actually, that’s not what deteriorates. It’s our more fundamental skills that deteriorate.
We’ll forget people’s names. We won’t remember where the car keys are. We might not be alert on the way to work and swerve or get into an accident. So it’s actually not the higher motor functions, the higher cognitive functions that suffer, it’s the much more fundamental ones. So you’ll still be just as bright in that meeting, you’ll just be really crabby or irritable.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Which can be a really bad thing if you’re supposed to be running the meeting.
MARC EFFRON: It does not contribute to success in some cases.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So it’s not just the quantity of sleep you get – the number of hours. You also make the case that it’s the quality of sleep that really can affect your mood and your performance at work. So I’m wondering to hear a little bit more about maybe some things you do to make sure that the high quality of sleep is there?
MARC EFFRON: And that was one of the most interesting findings when I was sorting through all those academic papers, was the fact that it is quality, not quantity that matters most. And the challenge for anyone who lives a real life is that the recommendations around getting high quality sleep sounds something like: you should go to bed in a completely dark room with no device reading beforehand, no animals in the room, the room set to about 65 degrees and no other disturbances.
And if you’re a hermit, that’s probably a lovely way to get a full night’s sleep. But for those of us who probably have all of those things going on, it makes it a bit challenging. If nothing else, it at least lays out: here’s what’s required to get higher quality sleep. And the two big ones are a dark room and a cold room. Those are actually pretty controllable, and those can certainly help to improve the quality. You can get five hours of quality sleep, which will allow you to be a higher performer than 10 hours of poor quality sleep.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I don’t know if this is a study you ran across, but I do remember reading once that people, when you make your bed, you get higher quality sleep. And that is a study that, regardless of how scientific it is, I always cite as a chronic bed maker.
MARC EFFRON: Well Sarah, there is what we call a replication crisis in this field. And I’m just going to guess that mountain might not stand up twice. But it doesn’t hurt, I’m sure.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It was probably done by someone who was nagging their spouse to make the bed.
MARC EFFRON: Exactly, or who was in the sheet business – one of the two.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Exactly. So if you, for whatever reason, have not managed to get enough sleep or you have not managed to be in that dark, cool room, are there some ways that you can make up for it after the fact?
MARC EFFRON: Yeah, I think there are a few different strategies. One is: recognize that if you do not get either the quality or the quantity of sleep that you want, you are not going to be your best. Let someone in the office that you interact with regularly, and who you trust, know that. Not as an excuse, not: “Hey Sarah, I had a bad night’s sleep, so please put up with me being a jerk today.” But: “Hey Sarah, I had a bad night sleep. We’ve got that big meeting today. Can you make sure that I’m well-paced, I’m not rushing my words? Give me a little hand signal if I’m being too crabby?”
Ask others for help with recovering from that. But also, the science is really clear that two things help a lot. One is naps. Now, not everybody has the luxury of taking a nap, but the science is super clear that a 10 minute nap – not five, not 15, not an hour – a 10 minute nap can make up for as much as one hour of lost sleep.
So if you can find some place to put your head down for 10 minutes, it has amazingly restorative benefits. And then our old favorite caffeine. Caffeine is proven to increase alertness – not a surprise to any of us.
And so if you don’t get that good quality or quantity of sleep, come into the office. Let your trusted friend know, “Hey, keep an eye on me today. I want to make sure I am a high performer even though I haven’t had a great night’s sleep.” If you can find time to take a 10 minute nap to get that boost and a couple of cups of coffee or tea, that’s a magical recipe for faking that you actually have had a great night’s sleep.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Is there a danger with caffeine that it actually makes your sleep problem worse? Like if you have caffeine because you didn’t sleep, but then caffeine keeps you awake so then you get another night’s bad sleep – are you kind of in a vicious cycle.?
MARC EFFRON: Yeah, there’s definitely a challenge there. And most of us underestimate the half life of caffeine. So. people often will say, “I can have a double espresso and fall right asleep.” Well, that’s great, but quality of sleep is a very likely going to suffer, with caffeine speeding up your brain and your body. And so what the science would suggest is that caffeine within about six hours of bedtime is probably going to have a negative effect on both quality and quantity of sleep.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What if you are someone who is chronically sleep-deprived? Maybe you have a new baby at home and they keep waking up no matter what you do, but for whatever reason, you are not in a position where you can really improve your sleep quality and it it’s not just like, oh, today’s a bad day. It’s like every day is a bad day. What would your advice be to someone in that situation?
MARC EFFRON: I think I would go with one of the first things that I mentioned, which is you simply need to let other folks know, try as I might, I am not going to be at my sharpest over the next week, month, year – whatever that period is and ask for people to – if it’s a long time understand, hey, I’ve got a new baby at home, you know, try as I might, I can’t control their crying, therefore… But also let them know: here’s what it’s going to end. So no one wants to have an employee come to them and say for the next 12 years I’m probably not going to show up to well. So it’s probably helpful to say here’s the period during which I think I probably won’t be as sharp as I’d like to be, but then also recognize things like ating – well while it might not be a high performance strategy – is certainly going to give you the fuel to perform well during the hours that you are at work.
And we’ve already talked about caffeine, a well-proven strategy around that. And that’s part of the challenge with any of these elements of being a high performer is sometimes we simply can’t get that particular step done. That’s why there are eight steps in total. If you say, “Guess what, I’m, I’m just not going to get the sleep that I need.” There are still seven other things you can do that can help you be a higher performer.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I want to talk a little bit more about some of these things that are beyond sleep. But staying in the physical realm, you mentioned that you’re kind of a gym rat and you were really hoping to find strong evidence that working out would improve your performance at work. What did you find? You said you didn’t quite find that, but you must’ve found a couple things. I’m curious to know what you found.
MARC EFFRON: There is a lot of research and about the best that I could find that talked about exercise and its impact on performance was: One, more vigorous – meaning weights, not aerobic exercise – tended to yield slightly higher performance benefits on the same day only. And exercising in the morning tended to yield higher performance benefits then exercising at night. That was about it. So if you combine those two little factoids, what you get is some really hard exercise early in the morning can give you a very small performance boost during the rest of the day.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I do think there is some really good research that shows that there is a connection between even moderate amounts of exercise and mental health. So could you then make a transitive leap that moderate amounts of exercise improve mental health and having better mental health surely helps you at work or is that too much of a stretch?
MARC EFFRON: Yeah, I think you get to what we call a three way interaction: If A causes B, does B cause C? It’s a lot easier to measure both of those things separately. So if you show up to work without good mental health, then it’s probably going to impact your performance. But it’s a bit of a stretch to be able to connect all of those things together.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And sort of the third leg of this whole stool is diet, right? The stuff that we eat. It seems like there’s really not a lot of evidence out there though, that what you eat really affects your performance at work. Did that surprise you?
MARC EFFRON: It did. I really thought I’d find some magical connection to at least what we know about, you know, decent balanced diets and higher performance. And again, it wasn’t for lack of studies being out there. But it was more of a stretch to say food leads to higher performance, rather than food leads to good health and good health might be a platform or a foundation for higher performance. We’re back to that three way interaction where it probably contributes, but it probably contributes in such a small way that it’s going to be really difficult to kind of parse that out of everything else that we’re studying.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And maybe, you know, individual results might vary. If you’re someone who has pizza for lunch and then notices that you fall into a food coma, maybe that’s just you and you can learn from that, but that doesn’t mean that it’s like, science.
MARC EFFRON: And I would also guess – I didn’t find anything that proved this – but I would guess there’s far more downside risk on food than there is upside. So if I eat a perfect diet, will I be a higher performer? Probably not according to the science. But if I eat a really horrible diet, will I have health problems that will likely take me away from work or reduce my focus on my performance? Absolutely.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And maybe this is something that should go without saying, we all have our own definitions of high performance, but I’m curious to know how did you define high performance and what do you mean when you use that term?
MARC EFFRON: To me, high performance is someone who delivers both results and behaviors at the 75th percentile, compared to their peers, over time. And a few magical phrase s in there: One is “compared to their peers.” So all performance is relative. You might be great, but how great are your peers? So you’re better than three out of four of your peers – and over time – so it’s not that you had a good month or a good year, but year in, year out, you are delivering results and behaviors better than most of the other people that you work with.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So that kind of reminds me of that old joke about the lawyers where they’re running from the tiger, and it’s like, “I don’t have to outrun the tiger, I just have to outrun you.”
MARC EFFRON: One of my favorite jokes.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It’s a piece of life wisdom, like I keep coming back to.
MARC EFFRON: But it’s true – performance is relative. And I think that’s part of the challenge with a lot of the changes that we’ve seen in performance management systems at companies recently is there was a lot of noise with people saying, “Well, I did a good job and I want a prize.”
Well that might be great, Marc, that you want a prize, but Sarah did a better job, so she’s going to get a better prize. So it’s not simply that you’re doing a good job. Life is relative. It’s always going to be relative.
And that’s what high performers understand, is it’s not just about me being good, it’s about me understanding what is the highest possible standard for the work that I’m doing and how can I meet that highest possible standard because somebody else is trying really hard to get there.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: There’s so much about work performance and being better than your peers that is out of your control. You don’t really control who your peers are. You don’t really sometimes control what your company culture is, although you can try. And one of the things you wrote in the chapter on managing your physical health is how you manage your body is a completely controllable factor. And that is both appealing, but I also have to admit that it doesn’t always feel that way to me as a person with a body. I’m just curious to know sort of how it feels to you.
MARC EFFRON: Sure. Well, I would suggest all of these steps are completely controllable. Now, that still means you’re working in an ecosystem where other things are happening. So you might set big goals, and somebody else sets bigger goals. You might set big goals and your boss doesn’t like those goals.
So it’s not saying that you can completely control the outcome, but you can completely control that step. And part of it – again, let’s go back to the exercise piece. If you say you want to exercise an hour every other day, will something else need to not get done in that hour? Absolutely.
And that could be talking to your friends, it could be reading a book, it could be enjoying your favorite show on TV. All those things would simply get sacrificed, but it’s making choices to say, “In the 24 hours that you have to spend, how would you like to spend them?” High performers say I’m going to spend more of those hours on things that deliver high performance and willingly sacrifice other things that might be very enjoyable, but that I don’t see adding up to that higher performance.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And don’t sacrifice your sleep!
MARC EFFRON: Keep at least six hours.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes. Well, Marc, this has been really fun. Thank you so much for spending some time with us.
MARC EFFRON: My pleasure. I enjoyed it.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Marc Effron. He’s president at The Talent Strategy Group, and author of the new book “8 Steps to High Performance: Focus on What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest).”
This episode was produced by Mary Dooe and Curt Nickisch. We got technical and production help from Alexie Rodriguez. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager.
Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.