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Unpaid interns at the centre of an epidemic

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Fatigue is an epidemic in our society. In a study conducted by the CDC, over 40% of 18 to 25 year-olds have reported unintentionally falling asleep during the day at least once in the last month, and 7% of 25 to 35 year-olds have nodded off while driving in the same period of time.

In 2011, Andy Ferguson, a 22 year-old student at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), died in a head-on collision after working back-to-back shifts as an unpaid intern.  In a recent article by CBC’s Kathy Tomlinson, a renewed sense of sadness and outrage surfaces.

Andy had worked 16 of the last 24 hours of his life.

Moritz Erardt, a 21-year-old exchange student from Germany, collapsed in his shower and died last month.  He worked through the night 8 times over two weeks leading up to his death.  He did this in an effort to secure a position at Merrill Lynch, which was just about to be offered to him.  He was known as the ‘superstar’ of the internship program.

In Kathy’s article, Claire Seaborn of the Canadian Intern Association, mentions high youth unemployment as a potential cause for interns feeling the pressure to work long hours.  This is one of many pressures students face in their day-to-day reality.   Students and unpaid interns are hit hard by managing a full-time school schedule, perhaps a part-time job or two, and an internship to gain experience.  Top off this breakneck schedule with the added pressure of exams and you have a formula for increased risk of accident and health complications.

This is not just a student issue. How many times have you put off sleep to get something done?

While you might get away with being tired and clinging to a caffeine crutch to get you through the day, you are playing a dangerous game that goes well beyond having bags under your eyes.   Fatigue is attributed to an increased risk of accident not to mention health problems that range from diabetes to depression and obesity.

The problem doesn’t stop there. The more chronically fatigued you become, the harder it is for your body to get back on track. You can trick your body to thinking it is rested if you “catch up” by sleeping 8 hours in a night, but all that means is that you are less exhausted than the day before.

It is time to take health and wellness off the backburner. Addressing the issue of fatigue-related accidents goes beyond the Bank of America’s inquiry into their employee policies. This is a good start, but we all need to take a long hard look at our expectations of ourselves and those around us.

Forbes: Didn’t get enough sleep? You might as well be drunk

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Our Readiband, used by the Vancouver Canucks and the US Military, has been featured in Forbes Magazine.

Kelly Clay, a contributor to Forbes, spoke with our founder Pat Byrne about the history behind Fatigue Science, the technology, and how Readiband is helping individuals understand their effectiveness scores in real-time.

In the article titled, Didn’t Get Enough Sleep? You Might As Well Be Drunk, Clay says that “Readiband serves to drive actionable, behaviour changing insights around sleep patterns and human performance in a practical and scientifically valid way.”

Why athletes should make sleep a priority in their daily training

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In 2008, Usain Bolt broke records at the Beijing Olympics by being the first person in history to hold both the 100m and 200m world records. By the 2012 Olympics, Bolt became the first man in history to win 6 Olympic gold medals in sprinting.

So what does Bolt consider to be the most important part of his daily training regime? None other than sleep.

“Sleep is extremely important to me – I need to rest and recover in order for the training I do to be absorbed by my body” – Usain Bolt.

At Fatigue Science we know how important sleep is to an athletes performance, reaction time and recovery time. Our fatigue measurement technology is used by professional sports teams such as the Vancouver Canucks to ensure enough sleep is incorporated into athletes training regimes.

So how much sleep do the professionals get? And how can sleep reduction effect your performance.

Key Infographic Takeaways

  • By incorporating adequate sleep into their routine, tennis players get a 42% boost in hitting accuracy
  • Sleep improves split-second decision making ability by 4.3%
  • After 4 days of restricted sleep, athletes maximum bench press drops 20lbs
  • Roger Federer gets 11 to 12 hours sleep per night
  • Lebron James gets 12 hours of sleep per night

 

infographic_sleep-to-be-an-allstar

New Swedish research on the relationship between sleep and fatigue is misleading and may be harmful

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On Friday August 2, new Swedish research conducted by the Stress Research Institute of Stockholm University, found that there may be little-to-no relation between how much sleep people get at night and how fatigued they feel.

The research to be released in late 2013, suggests that the number of hours slept is of much less importance in determining how a person functions throughout the day. It is actually genetically conditioned and dependent on age and health.

However, the findings from the study are not only misleading but in fact could be very harmful to the way the pubic perceives fatigue and how much sleep people actually need to be at peak alertness and effectiveness.

Swedish researchers asked 6000 people how long they slept and how fatigued they felt, but they could not find a relationship between how long people slept and how fatigued they felt.

Personally I don’t find this surprising, as it has been known for decades that self-reported sleep and self-reported fatigue are not very accurate.

In 2004, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania published a comprehensive study where they measured subjects’ actual sleep and actual fatigue levels using clinical level objective tests.  Their conclusion was that there was a large difference between what people report and how they actually perform on clinical testing.

Further, in September 2012, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) published the largest study of its kind where they measured the actual sleep of 178 flight attendants using highly accurate, clinical level Readiband’s.  The flight attendants also took over 10,000 reaction tests.  The FAA was then able to correlate how sleep affects reaction time or fatigue.   The results showed that people do not normally feel fatigued until they lose 30% of their reaction time due to sleep loss. That is equivalent to the reaction time of people who are legally drunk at 0.08% blood alcohol.

This is why fatigue is such an insidious hazard. People can be mentally fatigued and be at a greatly increased accident risk, yet not even feel fatigued.  The Swedish research is simply misleading and reinforces the out dated notion that sleep does not affect our fatigue levels.

The National Sleep Foundation says it best:

“People underestimate how tired they are and think that they can stay awake by sheer force of will.” “This is a risky misconception,” says Thomas Balkin, Ph.D., Chairman of the National Sleep Foundation.

Would there be 1.9 million fatigue-related crashes or near misses if people were good at assessing their own ability to drive when fatigued?

Sleep is critical to human health, safety and performance.

In March the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that “insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic.” Which is why the public needs to better understand the critical link between sleep and fatigue, instead of listening to highly published inaccurate research.

Are baby Prince George’s royal parents getting the sleep they need?

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Royal Parents and Prince George

Newborns typically sleep 16 to 17 hours a day. That sounds wonderful to the rest of us, except they wake every three hours or so to be fed, changed, and cuddled. This means the parents’ sleep is short and highly disturbed during the baby’s first few months of life.

To make matters worse, parents are often anxious with the birth of their first child, and wake up every time they hear the baby make a noise, wondering “is that baby sound normal?” “is the baby in trouble?”

When parents are constantly woken up to attend to the baby, they miss out on valuable sleep and never get the recommended 8 hours each night. This causes a great deal of fatigue and new parents are usually exhausted and express other symptoms of sleep deprivation such as irritability, blurry vision and the inability to concentrate for very long.

Here are some basic tips for Prince George’s parents to get the sleep they need.

The importance of sleep for professional athletes

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We often mistake sleep and fatigue to only effect those working shift work , but recent articles in the news have bought to light the importance of sleep in sports for professional athletes.

In the last week we have seen the spotlight being put on Wimbledon, where we learnt that the key to both Andy Murray and Marion Batoli’s recent victories was managing sleep and adding additional z’s into their daily routines. More recently, the press has highlighted the Indian cricket team’s demanding touring and playing schedule and the importance of sleep and recovery for Tour de France riders.

Fatigue can have serious effects on professional athletes performance and can reduce injury and recovery periods. However, measuring, managing and mitigating athlete fatigue can be hard.

In the news: