So you are seated at your desk trying get some work done then without noticing it, you start dozing off – happens to the best of us, right? Or you are seated in someone’s office, waiting to start a meeting, and out of the blues, you start dozing off. Or you are in a matatu on your way to work, and it is 7 am for crying out loud, and still, you start dozing off!
These are all tell-tales signs that you have not been getting enough sleep and that you need to rest your body. Research has shown that sleeping for less than five hours daily increases the chances of one being involved in a car accident while driving on the road.
And you need to banish the notion that coffee will sort out your need for sleep. Once you are sleep-deprived, no amount of coffee will wade off sleepiness. The remedy to sleep deprivation is in actual sense, sleep itself. So take a nap.
But before you do and while we are doing this, what other signs other than the obvious persistent drowsiness, are the serious indicators that your body uses to signal to you that it is in serious need of a shut-eye?
1. Moodiness: If you are cranky and annoyed and not pleasant at all, and for no particular reason, it might have something to do with your lack of enough sleep.
2. Forgetfulness: “I cannot find my phone!” You exclaim to that friend you are talking to over the phone. You can’t remember where you kept your car keys. Or even basic things like whether you locked the door or not. When these starts happening a lot, pencil in some serious nap time in your diary if you have to.
3. Lack of concentration: Are you trying to read but keep reading the same sentence over and over again? Are you struggling to listen to what your colleague or boss is saying? Are you missing the exit signs as you drive on the road? Sleep deprivation could be doing that to you.
4. Unproductivity: For your brain to perform at its optimum you need enough sleep so as to boost your ability to reason and focus. Failure to which, you will be very unproductive. What with all the dozing off you will be doing between tasks.
5. Weight Gain: What you might not know is that lack of enough sleep suppresses the production of leptin, which is an appetite-suppressing hormone and so you tend to get hungry pretty fast. If you don’t think this is serious enough, doctors are encouraged to motivate their obese and diabetic patients to get sufficient sleep.
If you have not been getting enough sleep, you now have more than enough reasons to remedy that. Go ahead. Take a nap.