By ALYSHA MILLER
Believe it or not, there is a Top 10 list of sleep-deprived careers. Those professionals would be especially hard hit last week due to the time change.
According to a Feb. 27 article in Business News Daily, home health aides and lawyers topped the list of the tired, followed by police officers, physicians, economists, social workers, computer programmers, financial analysts, plant operators and secretaries.
A study led by Dr. Lance Ferris, assistant professor of management and organization in Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, suggests that the Monday following a daylight time change, people lose an average of 40 minutes of sleep. This makes the Monday that follows an especially unproductive day at work. The study found that employees spend more time than usual surfing the web for entertainment on Mondays following the change to daylight time.
The research in the study was based on information from Google searches over six years.
One experiment gave sleep-deprived subjects a task to perform on a computer, during which they spent an average of 8.4 more minutes searching for unrelated entertainment subjects per hour of sleep lost the night before.
So how did Conestoga students handle the change?
“I’m tired,” said Sayanna Lopez, a graduate of Conestoga’s marketing program, who was on campus visiting a friend. “I’m definitely more tired than usual.”
“One hour of sleep is a big loss to me,” said Diego Brito, a first-year software engineering student, laughing through a yawn.
And it is, according to the study. Researchers wrote, “In the push for high productivity, managers and organizations may cut into the sleep of employees by requiring longer work hours. This may promote vicious cycles of lost sleep, resulting in less time spent working, which could result in more frantic pushes for extended work time.”
Overall, though, it’s important to be present for work or school-related shifts; it’s also important to sleep enough so that time is well spent.
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