The Companies That Teach Their Employees How To Sleep. - Central Jersey Dental Sleep Medicine

JUL 31, 2016 @ 11:43 PM

Question: What do camera-maker Olympus, accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers , Shire Pharmaceuticals, Unilever and Cambridge University have in common. Answer: They are all sending employees on courses to teach them how to sleep.

Before you reach for your copy of Brave New World or do a Google search on neural reprogramming, rest assured. Guy Meadows doesn’t mind what employees dream about or hear while they are sleeping.

However, the sleep physiologist has become increasingly concerned that employees are not getting the sleep they need to perform their duties to the levels that their employees need.

Judging from the number of organisations that have signed up to send staff on the courses of Meadows’ London-based Sleep School, they agree too.

Dr Meadows hit upon the idea when he was researching treatments for chronic insomnia and pioneering a new approach called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), a form of cognitive behavioral therapy that seeks to change the way people relate to discomfort they are suffering.

His clinic has been training doctors in this approach since 2005 but in recent years noticed an increase in demand from organisations.

“They do staff surveys and discover that their employees are struggling to sleep,” he says.

The Sleep School therefore began to provide what Dr Meadows calls “sleep education” workshops under the mantra “sleep to perform.”

“The aim is to enable employees to perform at their very best during the day by knowing how to sleep really well at night,” he says.

“There seems to be an intimate relationship between how people sleep at night and how they perform the next day: how resilient they are to stress.”

The Sleep School has defined three key areas in which it wants to teach employees to excel: how well they are at night, how resilient they are to stress during the day and their ability to transition from work to home and connect with their personal lives.

“The goal is that when people are performing in all three areas, this will have a knock-on effect,” says Dr Meadows.