Australia's senators have spent an entire night debating a single piece of legislation - changes to senate voting.
While their dedication to filibustering has been well publicised, Professor Dorothy Bruck, an Emeritus Professor of psychology and a sleep psychologist at the Sleep Health Foundation, told SBS News it may not have been the best idea.
Senators have been debating voting reform for more than 24 hours. Are they really going to be working effectively?
It’s likely that, at least for quite a lot of them, their working effectiveness would be significantly reduced. We know that your ability to process information is a lot reduced during times when you would normally be very much asleep. We have what we call a dead zone between 3 and 5 am and we know that during that time all people really want to do is sleep. They react much more slowly to things that are happening around them, they process information, that is either written information or verbal information, less efficiently, so they’re not quite on the ball as they would normally be with what’s going on. Their attention is less, their concentration is less and they have a poorer memory as well. I think generally we could be quite concerned with the way people do function, especially between that 3 to 5am timeslot.
Related reading
Senate passes electoral law changes
Do the brain and body get tired once you’ve worked a certain number of hours?
It certainly does and it depends on the type of work. And the other thing about the senators is this cumulative – they’ve had days of fairly high-pressured negotiations and discussions. While they may not have had over-nighters, this over-nighter is coming on top of possibly already a significant degree of weariness with everything that’s been happening and I imagine quite high stress factors as well - there’s a lot at stake here.
Why do we need sleep?
There’s been a lot of research coming out in the last decade about how important a certain part sleep is. It’s called REM sleep, when we have our dreams. That part of sleep is important for us to process all of the information of the day and getting rid of the information that we don’t need. It’s like an office clean up going on during the night, during this dream sleep. You’re getting rid of bits of information that aren’t important and you’re filing other ones away so that you can retrieve it. If you’re not getting good sleep in order to do that then it’s like waking up to a very messy office in the morning.
How much sleep do we need?
The general consensus for adults is somewhere between seven and eight hours a night. We know that people are different. Some people will say ‘I regularly need nine hours a night’ and some people will say ‘I’m fine if I regularly have six or six and a half’, so there’s some variability, but for most people it’s about maybe seven and a half hours, somewhere in that region.
How important are short naps for our concentration?
They’re a very good idea to have just a 20 minute power nap. We know that for shift workers, if they’re allowed to have a power nap at say midnight or 1am that really improves their concentration for subsequent hours when they’re on the shift, so I imagine it would be the same for the senators.
The problem is when they have longer naps, like if they go on for an hour or longer that we have what we call sleep inertia. If they have an hour nap they’ve probably gone into a deep sleep and they’ve probably set an alarm and then they have to go back into the chamber and they’ve got this grogginess that is a legacy of having just been asleep and that can take an hour to shake off or even longer. So the key is to keep the naps to 15, 20 minutes.
Short naps can help improve concentration. Source: AAP
What do we really need to change in our approach to sleep?
We often don’t realise how much lost productivity there is because of poor alertness in the workplace especially, and the cost of that. That’s been reliably estimated for Australia at $5 billion a year in lost productivity and health care costs due to poor alertness. We see that displayed in workplace injuries as well and also road accidents – 25,000 a year serious injuries from road accidents related to poor alertness. That’s a bit of a wake-up call.
Do weekend sleep-ins make up for inadequate sleep during the week?
The problem with that is if you’re building up a sleep debt during the week then you’re not functioning very well during the week. Then when you sleep in on the weekend you’re playing havoc with your body clock because your body clock thrives on routine hours. If you’re overcoming your sleep debt on the weekend by sleeping in until say the middle of the day your body clock is going to become completely disorientated, especially again on Monday morning when you have to get up at 7am it will want to sleep in again.
What is the focus of World Sleep Day?
Our emphasis on World Sleep Day this year is about how inadequate sleep does affect about 20 per cent of the population. Our focus is on overcoming inadequate sleep wherever possible.
