There are lots of benefits for getting good sleep. Sleep improves your retention of information
and skills you encountered the previous day.
Sleep helps your concentration the day after you sleep. Good sleep also helps you to regulate your
mood.
All of this data suggests that people should try hard to get
a good night’s sleep as often as possible.
Sometimes, of course, it is not possible to control your own sleep
schedule. People who travel may have to
wake up early to catch a flight and then may suffer jet lag when they arrive at
their destination. Work and school may
present assignments that lead people to work deep into the night. I am a musician, and my band sometimes plays
until the wee hours of the morning.
In the United States, there is also an enforced change in
schedule twice a year as we shift from standard time to daylight savings time
and back. In the Fall, the clocks are
set one hour back early on Sunday morning so that the night has an extra
hour. In the Spring, the clocks are set
one hour ahead so that the night has one fewer hour. While people could try to adjust their sleep
schedules immediately, it is quite difficult to do that, and so people are
usually somewhat sleep deprived after the time change in the Spring.
Does that time change have any practical implications?
This question was addressed in an interesting paper by
Kyoungmin Cho, Chistopher Barnes, and Cristiano Guanara published in the
February, 2017 issue of Psychological Science.
They looked at the sentences handed out by judges in
criminal court in the United States using data available from the US Sentencing
Commission. They explored the prison
sentences handed out between 1992 and 2003.
They compared the sentences given out on the Monday after the Spring time
change to the sentences given out the week before and the week after on
Mondays. The statistical analysis they
did also took into account the crime committed as well as the particular court
handing out the sentence (because some judicial districts tend to give out
harsher sentences than others).
Overall, judges gave out sentences that were 5% more severe
on the Monday after the Spring time change than they did a week before or a
week after the time change. By Tuesday,
though, the effect went away. So, the
effect of sleep deprivation was short-lived.
You might think that this effect has to do with a disruption
of schedule rather than sleep deprivation.
However, the researchers did a similar analysis for the Fall time change
in which the night is an hour longer.
The sentences on the Monday after this time change did not differ
significantly from the sentences a week before or after.
This finding demonstrates how even a fairly small disruption
in sleep can have a big practical impact.
It suggests that the kind of emotional disruption caused by lack of
sleep can affect the quality of people’s lives.
Even though most of us may not be handing out criminal sentences, we may
have a negative influence on our friends and colleagues on the days that we do
not sleep well.
This finding is also one more piece of evidence that we
should get rid of daylight savings time.
It has little practical benefit for most people, and the consequences of
the time change can be severe.
Written by Art Markman,
Art Markman Ph.D., is Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial
Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He
got his Sc.B. in Cognitive Science from Brown and his Ph.D. in Psychology from
the University of Illinois. He has published over 150 scholarly works on topics
in higher-level thinking including the effects of motivation on learning and
performance, analogical reasoning, categorization, decision making, and
creativity. Art serves as the director of the program in the Human Dimensions
of Organizations at the University of Texas.
Art is also co-host of the radio show and podcast Two Guys
on Your Head produced by KUT Radio in Austin.
No comments:
Post a Comment