Sleep Your Way to Success

A good night’s sleep is priceless.

I think most people would agree with that statement.  However, do you believe it enough to apply that statement to your life and the lives of those you lead?

If you do, your health, your outlook on life and your ability to lead will improve dramatically.

Police officers work long hours, extra duty jobs and work schedules that may not be conducive to a good night’s sleep.

Shift work and a lack of sleep can take a toll on the health of officers and contribute to poor performance.

Many police officers in my area, including the Dunwoody Police Department, work 12-hour shifts.  12-hour shifts can be significant for time off but challenging for those officers trying to get a good night’s sleep.

Some specialized assignments have demanding schedules, which cause poor sleep patterns for those officers assigned to the positions.

As a Detective with the Marietta Police Department, I worked many long hours and operated long periods of time with little sleep.  I worked 66 hours overtime in one week working a homicide case where a child was killed.  Although that case was a bit unusual, it is a representative sample of the type of hours and sacrifices many police officers across the country have to make every week while performing their jobs.

Research

Chronic sleep loss can lead to a variety of issues that negatively affect us as police officers and our departments.

Here are a few of the recent findings from some of these studies.

Sleepiness Causes Accidents

A lack of sleep and/or sleep deprivation was a contributing factor in many of the world’s worse disasters and accidents.  The investigations surrounding Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, the Challenger Explosion, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill and American Airlines Flight 1420 Crash all referred to fatigue or lack of sleep being a factor in these accidents.

According to a 1988 study, there is a connection between a lack of sleep and manmade catastrophes.

On a smaller but much more impactful scale, drowsy driving is a serious risk.  The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety suggests that One in 10 highway crashes is the result of drowsy driving.

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Police officers spend most of their time driving an automobile while performing their duties.  Driving drowsy can be a risky proposition considering there are 6,000 fatal crashes caused by drowsy driving each year.

A few years ago, one of my officers was driving along on the night shift, and the cars in front of him stopped because of some construction.  The officer had fallen asleep and plowed into a line of cars stopped for the construction without even hitting his breaks.

A sleepy driver is an accident waiting to happen.

Sleep Deprivation Can Lead to Serious Health Problems

Many studies clearly make a connection between chronic sleep loss and health issues.  Some of the common health concerns include obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hypertension, anxiety and depression.

The extent of the effect depends on the underlying health of the individual combined with the severity of sleep deprivation.

For police officers, many risk factors contribute to potential health issues including our poor diet and the stress of the work.  Adding sleep deprivation to the mix makes things worse.

Sleepiness Makes You Forgetful

A study conducted in the UK of 1,000 adults revealed that 25% of those who slept less than five hours a night were more forgetful.

Forgetfulness can be problematic for police officers.  Our jobs require attention to detail and to be able to recall facts as accurately as possible.

Sleep Loss Impairs Judgement

Police officers must make split-second judgments and take the appropriate actions based on those judgments.

These life and death decisions leave little room for error.

Washington State University researchers designed an experiment with 26 healthy adults.  13 of the subjects were deprived of sleep.  Researchers had all participants conduct an exercise where they saw two cards with numbers, one of which was a “go” number.  They had one second to select the correct number.

After a certain period, the researchers switched the requirements, and the test subjects had to select the “no go” numbers.  The subjects who slept regularly adapted to the change quickly.  The subjects who were sleep deprived could not catch on and were unable to complete the task successfully.

Good judgment separates mediocre officers from great officers.  A good night’s sleep is an essential ingredient for good judgment.

There are many other adverse outcomes from chronic sleep loss.  When I don’t get enough sleep for even one day, but especially for several days, I am more irritable, have emotional swings, eat more and am generally a less happy person.

In my experience and based on my observations, these negative outcomes are typical for most people.

Here is a graphic from Johns Hopkins Medicine showing the effects of sleep deprivation.

Now that we have identified the problems when we don’t get enough sleep, we need to ask ourselves a question.  How much sleep should we get?

According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average adult should get 7-9 hours of uninterrupted sleep a night.

So what can be done to protect our people and our departments from this problem?

I’m glad you asked!

Get Enough Sleep Yourself

As a law enforcement leader, you must first make sure that you are getting enough sleep.

Think of it like the instructions you receive on an airplane.  The flight attendants provide all of the safety instructions at the beginning of every flight.  One of those instructions is about what you should do if there is a loss of oxygen and the oxygen masks are deployed.  They tell us to put the mask on ourselves before we try to help others.

Those instructions apply to our sleep discussion as well.

It is difficult to discuss questions related to sleep with others if you don’t have your own house in order.

If getting 7-9 hours of sleep a night is vital for your people, it is crucial for you as their leader.

Make Sure Your Staff Gets Enough Sleep

Ok.  I know what you are thinking.

How can I make sure the people who work for me are getting enough sleep?  After all, they are adults, and I have no control over their private lives.

Instead, do everything you can to make sure the conditions exist that encourages and facilitates adequate sleep for your officers.

How do you do this?

The first thing to do is to have conversations about how important it is for officers to get adequate sleep.  If you talk about it periodically, the message may sink in.

The second thing to do is to make sure your department has an excellent part-time job policy.  A good policy restricts the number of hours a week officers can work as well as sets limits on the number of hours an officer can work in a 24 hour day.

Of course, the third thing you must do is monitor the actions of officers as they relate to compliance with the part-time job policy.

Lou Gerstner said, “People don’t do what you expect but what you inspect.”

The fourth thing you need to do is observe the actions and interactions of your officers on a daily basis.  If you see signs that an officer might be suffering from sleep deprivation, it is probably a good time to chat with the officer.  A sign might be a careless crash.

Family problems, health issues, working too many part-time jobs or a myriad of other stressors can contribute to a lack of sleep.

Conclusion

You cannot address a problem if you don’t recognize that it is a problem.  Chronic sleep loss can be damaging to you, those you work with, the department and the community you serve.

This damage can manifest itself in a variety of ways including poor judgment, health issues, forgetfulness, accidents and in many other ways.  Chronic sleep loss can lead to monetary loss and even loss of life.

Guard against this problem by first making sure you get enough sleep yourself and then by making sure you conditions exist that encourage those you work with to get enough sleep also.

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