Entrepreneurs: Why Should You Sleep?
by Miki Saxon
Startup people are notorious for their long work hours.
They’re also known to play hard and not just in bars; most are into some form of working out or athletics and many are into extreme sports.
And most are knowledgeable enough to eat right and allow their bodies to recuperate.
But what about brains?
Brains work just as hard as bodies, if not harder and longer per 24 hour period.
It turns out that brains have their own janitorial system comparable to the body’s lymphatic system that cleans up metabolic toxins.
Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school calls She called it the glymphatic system, a nod to its dependence on glial cells (the supportive cells in the brain that work largely to maintain homeostasis and protect neurons) and its function as a sort of parallel lymphatic system.
The bad news, from the viewpoint of most startup folks, is that it only works while sleeping.
“In a series of new studies on mice, her team discovered exactly that: When the mouse brain is sleeping or under anesthesia, it’s busy cleaning out the waste that accumulated while it was awake.”
But the truly bad news, the news that should make you think twice about ignoring these findings and charging ahead, is the long-term damage.
“The Journal of Neuroscience, the Veasey lab found that while our brains can recover quite readily from short-term sleep loss, chronic prolonged wakefulness and sleep disruption stresses the brain’s metabolism. The result is the degeneration of key neurons involved in alertness and proper cortical function and a buildup of proteins associated with aging and neural degeneration.”
It’s been proven over and over that a tired brain is neither productive nor innovative and now there’s early proof of potentially serious long-range damage from lack of sleep.
After all, what good does it do to improve physical health if your mind is rotting?
“Nationwide, entrepreneurs tend to eat more healthful foods and exercise more than other workers. But they also have more stress and are less likely to have health insurance.”
Worse, there is a chicken-and-egg connection between less sleep and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Not absolutely proven, but neither was the football connection between concussions and brain problems that is playing out in the courts today.
Editor’s note: Since the subject came up, what makes more sense to solve the problem of how a startup can offer health insurance than a startup with a founder who really understands?
Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, which provides startup mentorship and resources and conducts research on entrepreneurs’ needs. To address this problem, his organization is introducing StartupInsurance, an online platform of health insurance plans offered by major health insurers, which will be compliant with the Affordable Care Act by 2014 and are tailored for entrepreneurs.
Flickr image credit: Adam Goode
March 16th, 2015 at 1:16 am
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