Protecting sleep
Sleep supports the attention, judgement and language skills that medical writing and editing demand. Protecting it involves both a consistent routine and recognising the habits or interruptions that shorten it.
Sleep needs and working performance
A 2020 lifestyle-medicine webinar put nightly sleep needs at seven to eight and a half hours and estimated that people slept around ninety minutes less than a century earlier. It described chronic insufficient sleep as contributing to hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression and accidents through changes in genes and cellular processes, inflammation and sympathetic nervous-system stimulation.
The webinar also linked being a night owl with impaired attention and working memory, higher language functions, divergent thinking and creativity, and difficulty using new information in complex tasks requiring innovative decision-making, concluding that medical writers’ performance could suffer.
Sleep needs vary between people. In a 2010 personal account, an editor considered eight hours necessary for her best performance in spotting punctuation errors and flaws in clinical logic but rarely obtained it. Late reading, early waking, household noise and continued alertness to sounds after raising children interrupted her sleep. Her account associated sleep deprivation with weight gain, illness, stress, traffic accidents and a persistently bad mood that made even ordinary tasks feel burdensome.
A consistent sleep routine
The 2020 webinar recommended a consistent sleep-hygiene routine with these elements.
- Keep the bedroom quiet, dark and cool, without screens.
- Use a calming pre-sleep routine, such as a shower, reading or relaxation techniques.
- Go to bed when sleepy, when melatonin supports falling asleep naturally.
- Get natural daylight to help reset the body clock.