Asleep at the Shift-Work Wheel

The recent incidents involving air-traffic controllers caught sleeping on the job begs the question: What can HR do to ensure its late-shift employees are both awake and alert? Setting up fixed, rather than rotating, work shifts is a step in the right direction, experts say. By Michael O'Brien For many late-shift workers, the desire to fall asleep on the job may feel as irresistible the force as gravity itself. That deep desire has been with us since time immemorial, says Dr. Douglas Moul, a staff physician and sleep psychiatrist at the world-famous Cleveland Clinic. But, while it may not surprise us, it still creates workforce problems -- and possibly safety issues as well. Just look at the potential dangers created by the four recent incidents of air-traffic control tower workers falling asleep on the job. Those reports have prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to give air traffic controllers an extra hour off between shifts as well as placing a second employee on the overnight shift to prevent any more dozing off at work -- but some experts don't believe that will be enough of a solution. This goes back through mammals, insects, anything that is exposed to a 24-hour cycle, Moul says. It's very ancient, and there's simply no getting around it. This refers to the circadian rhythms, or the internal clock we all possess, designed to regulate the quotidian aspects of running a human body. And between the hours of 3 a.m. and just after dawn, Moul says, that internal clock is (or should be) at its busiest. The clock is preparing the body for daytime activity at this time, he says. It's a robust, hard-to-change system to help regulate the body. But that time period is also an important one for work reasons, he says. Where HR is concerned ... that's when your biological clock is going to push you to sleep on its own, even if you have enough sleep already, he says. The risks for falling asleep at the wheel, etc., go up around this time. In fact, it doesn't take much lost sleep to create lapses in attention, according to How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With? , which appeared recently in the New York Times. The study found that individuals with eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the

14 days of the study, but that individuals who had only four or six hours of sleep showed steady declines in their abilities with almost each passing day, according to the article. By the sixth day,

25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day [of shorter sleep]. In the workplace, sleep issues faced by individuals who work non-traditional hours, usually between the hours of

10 p.m. and 6 a.m., are so common The Cleveland Clinic even has a name for it: Shift Work Sleep Disorder. Symptoms can include: insomnia, excessive sleepiness, difficulty concentrating, headaches and a lack of energy. In order to decrease the effects of SWSD, employers should work to decrease the number of night shifts an employee has worked in a row, according to the Clinic. Shift workers working the night shift sleep less than day workers and become progressively more sleep-deprived over several days, it states on the Clinic website. You are more likely to recover from sleep deprivation if you can limit your number of third shifts to five or less, with nights off in between. Dr. Michael J. Decker, an associate professor in the Byrdine F. Lewis School of Nursing at Georgia State University in Atlanta, says he is not surprised air-traffic controllers are falling asleep despite inhabiting high-pressure positions. As a society, we're sleeping two hours less per night than we did a decade ago. For those working night shifts and rotating shifts, those are the mainly the ones who are experiencing these problems, says Decker, who is also a Diplomat for the American Board of Sleep Medicine, located in Darien, Ill. When you think about why someone falls asleep when they're doing something critical like this, it's something we call 'Sleep Drive,' he says. If people are awake for a prolonged period of time, [the body] creates a build up of chemicals that are difficult to control or mitigate, short of simply sleeping them off. Our brain is programmed to be awake and asleep at certain times, he says. If we suddenly shift our 'awake' and 'asleep' periods, it takes a few days to readjust. And nurses, who work rotating shifts, are often forced to stay awake or asleep and their brains haven't caught up to the new pattern. It's constant flux for them. Becker says that wake-promoting compounds are currently on the market, including medications such as Provigil -- as well as short-term energy drinks -- which are designed to keep people focused on the task at hand. Some of these, like Provigil, work specifically on certain neuro pathways that focus on wakefulness, he says, but adds that they do not fully address the problem of sleep deprivation. If we think about some of these over-the-counter formulas, they have high levels of caffeine and sugar, so they create a sudden surge of energy and that's it. It's sort of an OTC amphetamine, he says. Becker says the best treatment for sleep issues is to make sleep a priority. A pharmaceutical compound only promotes wakefulness, but if [the user doesn't] get the right sleep amount that night, they will be twice as sleepy the next day. The best treatment for workers is something he calls sleep hygiene, which means little more than a regular shift of sleep. Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time and sleep for seven to eight hours a night, Becker says. Making sleep a priority is the best advice I can give. Dr. Joe Golish, a professor of sleep medicine in a combined program with Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland-area MetroHealth Center system, says SWSD affects approximately one in five shift workers. He says employers can help shift workers minimize the effects of the disorder by mimicking daytime conditions at night, and vice versa. Very bright lights in the area will suppress melatonin, and get the person in sync with their waking hours, he says. And protect them from bright light when they go home in the morning; advise them to wear sunglasses and avoid sunlight before bed. Becker, who also helped develop sleep research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says that HR has a vital role to play in minimizing SWSD. If HR can promote schedules to avoid rotating schedules, that's the best, he says. If you're on night shift, then stay on it. Regardless of the approach HR takes to address the issue, Becker says a sea change needs to take place in terms of how we view sleep. We're trained to consider sleep as a disposable commodity, he says, but it's really one of the cornerstones of health, so placing a priority on obtaining the necessary amount of sleep per night is the key. 管理新知 您可能感兴趣的文章 三点式管理 2017-03-17 腾讯简单温情，阿里杀一儆百！企业文化到底该怎么玩？

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