Sleep: The Core of a Healthy Life, and More Companies are Promoting it for their Employees

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The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

As Shakespeare wrote, sleep is “sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.” It is the time our body and mind take each night to mend the injuries of the day, to reset and recharge. Its importance to our physical, emotional, and mental well-being cannot be understated.

Despite this, our society devalues sleep and glorifies its dismissal. The leaders and celebrities we revere often boast of their lack of sleep. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc. TSLA, has said he has worked 120-hour weeks, not leaving “the factory for 3 or 4 days.” Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo Inc. PEP, reportedly allowed herself 4 hours of sleep a night. The idea that productivity and sleep are mutually exclusive, or at least opposing forces, is baked into the fabric of our society.

And yet, overwhelming clinical evidence points to the opposite. When we are deprived of sleep, our ability to perform mentally and physically is greatly reduced. We cannot focus as well or as long on a task. Our mental recall and the ready access we normally have to our knowledge base are hampered. In short, we are slower. Like a slow computer requiring a ‘disk cleanup’ for more working memory, we humans need sleep to declutter and recharge. Without sleep our mental performance notably deteriorates.

And these are perhaps the least of our worries. The long-term effects of consistent lack of sleep are very serious. According to the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard University, lack of sleep has “profound consequences for our long-term health.” Insufficient sleep leads to a host of serious illnesses like diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease, and “these conditions may lead to a shortened life expectancy.” It has also been linked with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia. Brain health and mental health are directly impacted by how much sleep you have.

Interestingly, relatively little about the actual mechanism of sleep is understood, as with most processes of the brain. Healthy sleep is made up of cycling through various brain states characterized by differing brain wave activity, and these are correlated to differing restorative processes. Observing what a lack of sleep does to an individual helps with understanding more about what it does.

Healthy sleep leads to a healthy life. New technologies are helping to improve good sleep. Wellteq Digital Health Inc. WTEQWTEQF has created a suite of tools to help people get better sleep. Working with employers to maintain healthy workforces, the company is currently extending the proposition towards the clinical end of the ‘continuum of care’, and is based on strong clinical evidence and behavioral health best practices. 

Of Wellteq’s expansion from corporate wellness into a deeper clinical proposition, Dr. George Gellert MD MPH MPH FABPM, Wellteq’s Chief Medical Officer stated, “Wellteq has already impacted the wellness side of the sleep market, and our technology releases for 2022 will enable us to help sleep medicine specialists diagnose and manage the most prevalent, dangerous, and under-diagnosed clinical sleep disorder within a comprehensive, user-centric offering cutting across the spectrum of sleep health concerns. Wellteq plans to positively disrupt and radically advance the detection and care of sleep disorders worldwide by augmenting the current understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of obstructive sleep apnea into dynamic and continuous knowledge, rather than based on a single, discrete sleep lab snapshot as it is today. Our approach is unprecedented.”

Hopefully, as more awareness comes to the importance of habitual quality sleep, sleep will begin to get the respect, and support it deserves. After all, what is life without health, and what is health without a sound mind?

The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.