5 Ways Lack of Quality Sleep Affects Your Career Progression

Sleeping well at night has many benefits from healthy body weight, emotional stability to increased intellectual capacity as well as daytime productivity. All of these will impact your ability to build a great career.

But more often than not, the conversations I have with people quickly turn to sleep issues and in particular insomnia and how it affects our everyday lives including our working hours.

When you look at what it takes to function to your best during the day, of course, quality hours of sleep is on the top of that list for sure. But yet, so many of us struggle to achieve and maintain this kind of sleep at night, compromising on our ability to complete all the things we want to during the day.

So if you are serious about being good at your job, and progress in your career, daytime productivity is absolutely vital. For most of the clients that I work with, one of the reasons daytime productivity is so important is that it helps with their career progression.

When you don’t sleep so well at night and wake up tired in the mornings, almost dragging yourself out of bed to get going, your chances of excelling at your job or career will be impacted for sure.

Let’s look at the 5 ways your sleep affects your career progression:

1. Decreased confidence

Waking up tired in the morning after a not so great night’s sleep affects your self-confidence. I am sure you can remember the last time this happened to you. When we are tired, we are less likely to be able to handle all the challenges that arise during the day and approach them with confidence.

Of course, this is no surprise because when you don’t sleep well, your energy levels will deplete much faster. Any additional challenges, perhaps even unexpected ones, that are thrown into the mix can cause more issues than if you had lots of energy and your mind was clear, resulting in feeling inadequate as the day progresses.

2. Decision making

Lack of quality sleep at night impacts our ability to make decisions fast and accurately. Tiredness and sleepiness are one of the main causes of mistakes that happen during the day linking back to incorrect decision making at the time.

If you remember the last time you had to make a decision at work on a day you were tired, I am sure you will also remember how much longer it took to come to a conclusion and finally decide on the best way forward.

3. Intellectual capacity

A tired mind is not able to take in as much information as a rested one, that is a well-known fact. No matter how much you are trying to boost up your brainpower by quick fixes such as coffee, your intellectual capacity will be on a roller coaster ride for sure.

This is one of the most significant effects on your career progression. The more tired you are, the less you are able to handle which then jeopardises any promotions in your career. I have seen examples of this and the great thing is that you are able to turn this around fairly fast by learning the skills that you require to sleep well at night.

4. Teamwork

Excessive tiredness almost always leads to misunderstandings and lack of effective communication within a team. Tiredness raises emotions, mostly negative ones, which will mean that you can misunderstand situations and react to things more emotionally.

This is not rocket science of course but often causes teams to be in conflict. When you and your team is in conflict and tired or sleepy, the way you are able to support each other decreases significantly. Which in turn impacts everyone’s career progression at the end of the day.

5. Lack of focus

I touched on this a little under the third point above but lack of focus is definitely something that will have an impact on your career. We live in a world where the number of distractions is increasing. So even your fully rested colleagues will struggle to keep the focus on one task at a time.

When you are tired, your mind is more likely to want to keep looking for distractions because focus requires a level of stillness that can bring on tiredness. I am sure you can remember a time when you had to read a report just after lunch and you were literally falling asleep reading because your mind was just not able to fully engage with the task at hand.

But the good news is that all these effects can be remedied by learning to sleep well at night again. You see, providing you don’t have an actual sleep disorder or a medical condition that directly stops you to sleep well, learning to master the different skills to sleep well is indeed very possible.

If you want to find out how I help professionals to overcome insomnia or other sleep issues, connect with me via LinkedIn or send me a message via my website directly.

Remember, sleeping well at night is a skill that you can develop too.

To learn more about sleep see: The 10 Day Sleep Challenge