Don’t Lose the Snooze

You’re not a college student pulling all-nighters any more, so you’re getting enough sleep — right? You don’t have apnea, insomnia or narcolepsy, so there’s nothing to worry about as far as your sleep habits — right? Being a little short on sleep doesn’t hurt anything anyway — right?

Wrong. If you short your sleep cycle to 7 hours per day or less, you may be among the one-third of U.S. citizens who are chronically sleep deprived, and it’s affecting your performance. Whether you’re a sleepy airline pilot, a sleepy emergency room physician or a sleepy freeway driver hurtling across two lanes of traffic and the median thanks to a half-second of inattention, it matters.

Gregory Belenky, M.D., director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University Spokane and a leading scholar in the field of sleep research, examines the critical questions of sleep and performance in people going about their everyday lives. The work of Dr. Belenky and his colleagues could change the way we view–and manage–our sleep: as the critical performance resource it really is.

Belenky has shown that normal sleepers — those with no sleep disorder — don’t need to lose an entire night’s sleep to be impaired. He is heading studies investigating how sleep restriction affects the performance of professionals in high-stress jobs with long hours and irregular schedules, including police officers and first-year doctors. These studies will break new ground in the study of sleep and performance, aiming to determine the true impact of sleep restriction on performance and subsequent recovery.

Belenky’s research has shown that even modest sleep deprivation over a period of days — dropping from eight hours to seven hours of sleep per night — significantly hinders mental performance, reaction time and judgment. Much of Belenky’s pioneering research was conducted during his years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, where he served as the director of the Division of Neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Because of that research, the United States Army has changed the way it trains and deploys soldiers in the field today.

Every Sleeper Is Different

You have a late night and the next day you pound out a deskload of work. Your co-worker has a late night, and the next day can’t get one project completed. Why is degradation of performance due to sleep loss so different from one individual to the next?

That’s what WSU Spokane sleep researcher Hans Van Dongen seeks to understand: why the cognitive response to sleep loss can be so different among people and how this response can be predicted for a given individual. His work has important implications for everyone who occasionally or routinely loses sleep, whether it’s due to occupational demands, medical condition or life style.

Van Dongen is assistant director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at WSU Spokane. The Center’s research lab is one of only a handful in the world that can accommodate carefully controlled experiments to study the effects of sleep and sleep loss on human cognitive functioning. Van Dongen manages these experiments, which address important, unresolved questions, such as why sleep is so important for daytime alertness and productivity.

Sleep Loss and Fatigue—A Recipe for Disaster

When people in critical positions—such as intelligence or law enforcement—lose sleep, disasters may be more likely to happen or worsen, says Bryan Vila, professor of criminal justice at Washington State University Spokane and a senior researcher associated with the university’s Sleep and Performance Research Center.

Documentation describing events such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina has provided him with arguments to support his view that the long work hours common in intelligence, law enforcement, disaster response and similar fields cause sleep restriction, which in turn degrades the very skills professionals need most in times of a disaster or an impending catastrophe.

Vila — a 17-year veteran of law enforcement and one of the nation’s foremost experts on human performance issues related to crime control — recently gave an invited lecture on this topic at the sixth international conference on occupational stress and health. Vila’s audience included first-responders, public health officials, members of the intelligence community and police officials, among others.

He discussed the impact fatigue can have on performance and demonstrated the lack of attention for this problem; prior to the conference, he scoured dozens of government documents on 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and found they contained almost no mention of long work hours, fatigue or sleep loss and how these factors might have affected the course of events, even though they could have influenced many of the human performance issues described. Concluding his lecture, he stressed the need to plan for and take into account human factors such as sleep loss and fatigue in preventing and responding to disasters.

Media Advisory: To make arrangements to interview Belenky, Van Dongen or Vila about their research, contact WSU Spokane Communications Director Barb Chamberlain, chamberlain@wsu.edu, (509) 358-7527 (desk), (509) 869-2949 (cell).

2006 Washington State Magazine article on sleep research at WSU:
https://washington-state-magazine.wsu.edu/stories/2006/February/sleepmain-2.html

News release on Greg Belenky appointment at WSU Spokane (2004):
https://wsunews.wsu.edu/detail.asp?StoryID=4674

News release on Hans Van Dongen appointment at WSU Spokane (2005):
https://wsunews.wsu.edu/detail.asp?StoryID=5502

News release on Bryan Vila appointment at WSU Spokane (2005):
https://wsunews.wsu.edu/detail.asp?StoryID=5414

2006 WSU Spokane Campus Bulletin story on Brian Vila’s research:
https://www.spokane.wsu.edu/News&Events/bulletins/
bulletin06/Mar29.asp#Brian_Vila