Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Money and power are all well and good but if you really want to live a successful life, get more sleep and turn the phone off, writes Nigel Stephenson.
That was the message from Arianna Huffington, founder of the online Huffington Post and one of the world’s most prominent businesswomen, to an audience at the Hay Festival of literature and arts, which ended this week.
Political and business leaders across the world, and the people who work for them, are often living lives of sleep deprivation and burnout in pursuit of the two traditional measures of success – money and power, Mrs Huffington said.
But those who chase these two goals alone are likely to come crashing down. “This is like trying to sit on a two-legged stool. Sooner or later you fall off,” she said.
Huffington should know. Seven years ago, she collapsed from overwork and exhaustion, banging her head as she fell.
The first result of what she calls her ‘wake-up call’ was to get more sleep. “It’s like a miracle drug,” she said.
The Huffington Post newsroom includes two ‘nap rooms’ where journalists can grab 40 winks.
Many in today’s hectic working world wear their ‘busy-ness’ like a badge of honour, Huffington said. This is usually when weary workers make mistakes and their creativity is blunted.
According to a recent article, published by the BBC, even intense training could not make up for lost sleep.
A team of scientists in China and the US used advanced microscopy to witness new connections between brain cells – synapses – forming during sleep.
Experts said it was an elegant and significant study, which uncovered the mechanisms of memory.
Researchers at New York University School of Medicine and Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School trained mice in a new skill – walking on top of a rotating rod.
They then looked inside the living brain with a microscope to see what happened when the animals were either sleeping or sleep deprived.
Their study showed that sleeping mice formed significantly more new connections between neurons - they were learning more.
And by disrupting specific phases of sleep, the research group showed deep or slow-wave sleep was necessary for memory formation.
During this stage, the brain was replaying the activity from earlier in the day.
