334. Overthinking, holiday hoarding and Gail's menopause plan. PLUS! Can you bank sleep?

27:34At least that's what it says here. And if you do want to hear a really personal story, go to episode 136. This is Troy's honest account of fatherhood, killing hustle culture, and what really matters when you stop performing and start living with intention. Listen to I Digress wherever you get your podcasts. That concludes the break. Let's return to the scheduled programming. Back to the studio.

28:00Okay, welcome back. It is truth or lie time. It's that time of the week where we take a popular workplace idea and ask if the research actually bakes it up. God, it has been a while. Baks it up. Thinking about pastries again. Link, we are talking about a workplace idea, but this isn't actually, this isn't fitting to the workplace directly, is it? What are we talking about today? Sleep banking. Got to be careful I say that. Yeah, you do, don't you? Yeah, you do. He's a proper sleep banker, him. Oh, yeah.

28:29William's a proper sleep banker. Is he sleep banking again?

28:36William, cut it out. We've got clients in the office. I feel like I've ruined this. It's not even started. Okay, Lee, talk us through it. So, yeah, the term sleep banking is about 15 years old, 2009. and it was coined by a team of researchers working with the US Army led by somebody very famous in this world called Tracy Rupp. They were trying to solve a pretty practical problem. So soldiers often go into missions already short on sleep. So the researchers wanted to know if you give someone extra sleep beforehand, does it protect them later? This is all about, because we know how important sleep is for mental health, for physical health, for all the health, right?

29:19so this isn't necessarily workplace based but if we're not getting sleep we ain't gonna be we ain't gonna be working very well are we um so yeah so one study kicked all of this off and since then researchers have tested this idea on shift workers athletes and people doing simulated um all-nighters in a lab and all asking the same basic question so the theory claims that sleep banking um you can sleep extra hours before a stretch when you know you'll be short of sleep so say you've got a long flight or you're on you're on longer shifts if you for the week before that spend 10 hours in bed rather than eight the idea is can you bank the sleep to help you when you're oh sorry when you're then deprived in the future yes makes sense cool so let's start with the original study for the four side of the argument in support so in 2009 u.s army funded a trial of 24 people half slept 10 hours a night for a week the other slept their normal seven then everyone was cut down to just three hours a night for a full week so the group who had banked extra sleep beforehand kept their attention and reaction speeds sharper throughout the week where they're only getting three hours a night and they also recovered faster once normal sleep came back.

30:41I see so that's a very convincing four. Yes yes and this was a study that everything else builds on. So 2015 a French team tested it with 14 men sleeping either eight hours or 10 hours a night for six nights then everyone stayed awake for 38 hours straight no sleep at all brutal. the group with extra sleep beforehand made about half as many attention mistakes on a reaction test they also had far fewer micro sleeps we call them micro snoozes don't we love the time in like few seconds when you kind of brain switches off um go on no no i was just thinking that maybe maybe i did that a bit earlier when you were when i was googling ruminate how rude um so yeah and they We found that the benefit was still there the next day.

31:32So even after a full night of recovery sleep, the people who had banked sleep were still performing better. The team ran a follow-up in 2016, this time on physical endurance. So 12 men did six nights of extra sleep, then a full night with zero sleep, then a leg muscle endurance test. And they lasted about 8 % longer than after a normal week of sleep and said it felt easier. So the important thing about this one is their muscles weren't any stronger. It was the extra sleep was helping them push through the fatigue. This is all sounding good. Yeah, all sounding good. Then there was a basketball study.

32:09So 11 college players extend their sleep to 10 hours a night for five to seven weeks. Their sprint times improved from 16.2 seconds to 15.5. So that's quite a difference, isn't it? Nearly a full second. Their shooting accuracy went up about 9%. but the only flaw in this study was that nobody deprived them of sleep afterwards to test if it kind of held. So it was kind of the banking sleep without then the deprivation. Oh, okay. So I guess it's really showing that if you're well rested, you perform better. Yeah, well, that's probably more like the real life because in real life, you probably wouldn't go 38 hours straight.

32:46You might be a health professional. True, true, true, true. And one more piece, the study of 14 men had a week of extra sleep and researchers found it raised a hormone called IGF-1, which helps repair tissue and helps with brain functions. That might give an eye hint at a possible reason as to why sleep banking might work. It's hormonal change in the body. Got it. So that's all the evidence for. It's pretty highly stacked, I can see. So is there any evidence against? Yeah. So not everybody agrees that sleep banking is real. So this is very recent. 2025, a sleep researcher named Elizabeth Klerman led a team that published a pretty formal challenge to the whole idea.

33:29Their argument was that sleep isn't like a piggy bank where you can kind of put extra in now and take it out later. It's more like a credit card so you can borrow against sleep, but you're going to owe it back afterwards. I tell you what, Elizabeth, what a lovely analogy. Yeah. That is brilliant. I like that. It's nice that, isn't it? Well done, Lizzie. So yeah, so she said you can't bank, you can't kind of have this build up the surplus in advance right um the kind of idea that they had to test this was that if sleep banking is a really a thing can you actually fall asleep when you're not tired because it's almost like well you should be able to because you're banking asleep you don't need it now but you're banking it for the future so to test it researchers gave people way more time in bed than they needed 12 to 14 hours a night for weeks um and as i said with that logic that if people can sleep on demand, they'll use all of that time.

34:24And if they can't, they'll run out of tiredness and just kind of lie there awake. And that is exactly what happened. For the first few nights, people slept through most of the extended time because they were catching up on existing tiredness. But once they caught up, they started lying awake for long stretches, night after night, even with all that time available, their body simply stopped wanting more sleep. so the conclusion from them was that nobody could sleep past the point their body actually didn't need anymore so there's no evidence that anyone can sleep um kind of before it's owed which means there's no way to build a surplus in advance and that's exactly what sleep banking would require um there is another study worth mentioning so 70 people went through two rough weeks in a row of sleep so just um five nights of just four hours sleep then five more nights of the same and in between those two weeks they got one night's sleep um as much one night's sleep as much they wanted um and if banking worked that one good night should have made the second rough week earlier so that makes sense they had five nights of four hours and one night of normal sleep and another five nights of four hours so so it would be that uh if you can sleep bank then like you said that one night is going to make the second week better than the first week because you didn't bank on the first week.

35:47Yes, got it. Yeah, but it didn't. People's performance kept getting worse either way. So what mattered was their sleep pattern over time, not that one night in the middle. And then the other problem as well is that extra sleep didn't make people feel less tired. So actually, if you look at the original studies, both the 2009 and 2015 studies, people who banked extra sleep performed better on tests, but still reported feeling very, very sleepy just as sleepy and tired as as everybody else um so yeah the banking is is pretty hard to pull off in real life and the other thing i think i need to point out as part of the again is if we look back at the original samples one only on men didn't include any any women in there um and very small sample sizes 24 people or is it 14 people 24 athletes very very small sample sizes so the verdict is see i was convinced you could up until you gave me all the against and so now i feel like i want to go back to elizabeth's analogy of credit card not savings account yeah yeah is that what you think that's what i'm thinking that's what i'm getting from it yeah i agree i agree so yeah sleep banking truth or lie i think the official answer needs to be that more research is needed we don't really know yet um extending sleep before kind of a tough stretch does seem to improve in those smaller samples things like attention and reaction time and endurance but as you rightly said Al we don't know whether it's actually banked or whether it's actually more that we're paying it back afterwards so yeah the improvements could be because of a genuine kind of reserve or more than likely could be because people are catching up on debt that they didn't realize that they had um so yeah i guess sleep banking do you know but probably the better idea is just try and sleep more and more consistently um and you'll likely perform better so sleep banking truth or lie if i had to decide i'd probably say a lie okay fantastic thank you leanne i'm guessing all of the links will be in the show notes like a proper scientist uh if you have your own idea for truth or lie then get in touch just check the show notes um look at our brand new website truthliesandwork.com you'll see there's lots on there there's lots on there that's one of the things that hermes has been helping me with it's been uh yes you can go on there you can find all of the previous questions i think there's about 300 of them i know sorry previous i've talked about workplace the previous truth and lie which is probably about 40 50 of them i think i'm doing doing for almost a year um and if you have your own idea then there's ways to get in touch in the show notes we'd love to hear from you even if it's just a study or something that's been bothering you yeah you're like hmm i wonder if that's true or not yeah we'll find out okay so it is now time for my favorite time of the week it's the time for the world famous weekly workplace surgery where i put your questions to leanne leanne i've got three questions are you ready yeah on my first whistle okay so there's so this person writes if says they say i feel like i've lost visibility of my remote team now this is really really we've i'm not going to name who it is but i've spoke to someone quite recently who's saying the same thing that i do oh remote team.

38:51Oh really? Yeah, lost visibility. So there could be a tool around that. You're a tool. So hi Al and Leanne. I manage a fully remote team. I'm struggling with something I've something I never really had in the office. I can see when work gets delivered but I can't easily tell who's overloading, who's coasting and who might be struggling. I absolutely do not want to start monitoring people or constantly checking up on them but equally I feel like I'm managing these people with only half the information I used to have. Lee, is there any way to get proper visibility of a remote team without using one of these nasty little trackers or being a nasty little micromanager.

39:26Yeah, it can feel a bit tricky, Con. I mean, I've managed teams remotely or remote teams for like, God, 15 years? Some of those people you've never met, haven't you? Yeah, yeah, many of them never met. So I understand that it can feel like a shift, particularly when you're used to managing people in person. The truth is there's no difference to it. there's no different techniques to managing a remark team it's just a bit more intention and probably a lot more frequency in terms of communication i understand what you're saying about tracking i have worked in teams in both scenarios one that we didn't track but we had very very clear um targeted outcomes and one where we did track where we still had an end product but the route to get there could vary massively we did use a tracking in in the latter just to see where people more to to identify training and development where if a task was taking people a bit too long then there's something there that either something in the process wasn't working they were really unlucky and just getting kind of all the difficult clients or there is a training need there um and would obviously then from a time perspective see people who were just massively um overextending themselves in in general over a week so i think it depends on the culture of the organization how the team is set up so i wouldn't rule out time monitoring but be very very clear about what its purpose is and what you're going to get out of it as a manager more than likely all you need to do is just start having more conversations with people you're not going to bump into people in the kitchen over a cup of tea so you're going to have to pick up the slack or the phone or the the facetime and actually have more regular check-ins with people and that could be a quick quick five minutes every morning just to kind of debrief on what's been happening it could be a more time-based one-to-one once a week half an hour with people and you can see you know if they don't want to switch on their camera ever or they're just starting to look a bit tired you can still see these cues through video and actually having these conversations and asking people directly because we know from the research that one of the main risks of working from home or working remotely is that people do tend to blur their boundaries between work and life more and do tend to work more hours and it's quite significant it's something like 15 to 20 percent more hours people work as they're working from home so you can just assume from kind of typical data these people are probably stretching themselves more than they should be so it's having that honest conversation you know I know this is a common trap that people can fall in how do you find you know you're balancing your time at the minute do you feel that you're working more hours in than you should be is there anything else that that you need in terms of support And on the flip side, do you have enough to do?

42:10You know, is how long is the things taking you? Are you challenged? Are you interested? Some job crafting type things. Are we using your strengths? What other tasks or responsibilities could you have that are going to feel more fulfilling? It's having these very open, direct manager conversations, coaching conversations, as you would with an in-office team. You just have to be a bit more intentional, probably a bit more, do them a bit more regularly. and in terms of people slacking off this really frustrates me with remeric teams if you're managing by kind of outcomes and you've you've kind of saying your question you've got you know that things are being delivered doesn't really matter does it really matter because I think it's more of a question that these people it matters from an engagement perspective that they're probably going to get bored and might leave so it's the same questions again in terms of are you being challenged enough what is it you could be doing that you'd find more enjoyable or more purposeful or bringing more meaning in the meantime as long as they're delivering then cool it's these conversations are going to help you figure out and i don't want to see people slacking off but maybe people that are just more efficient than than you realize or aren't being as challenged as much they should be okay great all right we've got another a similar question here i grouped this one because this one's quite similar so this is about uh it's about whether the employees burnout is actually my responsibility as the manager i run a growing business and i've started noticing signs that some people are stretched my instinct is to offer more support encourage time off maybe bring in some well-being stuff go back and listen to the beginning of this episode but part of me wonders whether that's just dodging the real question leanne will have some opinions on that how do you work out whether burnout is an individual problem or a business design problem it's both okay it's both it's it's an individual thing and it's a business or more accurately work design problem.

44:01So you know how they talk about people have their own windows of tolerance and people have very different experiences in life and different genetics and their kind of tolerance for pressure and workload is going to differ from individual to individual. So addressing well-being at an individual level as a business owner or leader is really hard and you can't really do that. You're signposting people either through an EAP or GP services or counselling services or whatever else like you you as an individual manager or business owner it's difficult to have a direct impact on individual well-being by just focusing on the individual because you're not really qualified to do that and it's not really your kind of in your area of control and expertise or indeed at times responsibility but what you're creating in terms of the work environment the impact that has on the individual experience and their well-being that is absolutely your responsibility and as i alluded to before with the the um holiday allowance it's often things like that around work design and policy that have much more to do with well-being than an app or mindfulness or free meals or whatever else um so it's always going to be things of course around workload but the interesting thing about workload i was reading some more recent research in this recently i'm such a nerd this is how i spent my holiday there's a new meta analysis out that looked at like 60 years of research into role stresses right and they basically found through and it was a massive sample in the end i think it was like more than half a million huge huge sample and they basically found that in terms of job stresses that's things like um role overload which would be kind of too much work um role ambiguity so that's not really understanding what it is your responsibility are and role conflict and kind of how these three interact with the individual experience in terms of performance in terms of mental health in terms of kind of other outputs so they found that role ambiguity so not kind of understanding responsibility to role had a negative impact mainly on things around attitudes and performance so it meant lower job satisfaction, lower work engagement, lower organizational commitment, lower task performance.

46:25That was kind of the role ambiguity. Role overload, which is where we talked about kind of the workload. Yes, it did have an impact more on things like negative mood and symptoms. But in terms of burnout, role conflict was the most important predictor. So that's when we have like competing demands on our time whether that be from a manager or a customer or a peer or there's arguments in terms of whose job is it to do that that was the biggest predictor of burnout of psychological distress of counterproductive behaviors in the workplace and of intention to leave wow yeah so we can often think that workload is the problem and often it's a bit more nuanced it's more about why is that workload feeling that heavy and it's probably more than likely because we also know that these three things are correlated that they're also experiencing work overload and role sorry role ambiguity and role conflict so all that to say work design is so important it's often in very operational transactional elements that you wouldn't think were associated with mental health and burnout so checking things around role clarity, role conflict, looking at things like relationships within the workplace, is there any infighting, is there any incivility?

47:46Meaning is a big one. Do people understand what the organization is trying to do? Do they understand their role in delivering that? Meaningful work is one of the biggest predictors of work engagement, which from a psychological perspective is basically the opposite of burnout. So there's lots of things that we can do in terms of work design to improve well-being um before we try and dip into the individual side that let's be honest it's a whole other freaking industry in terms of mental health and wellness practitioners that that are there to do just that um so yeah look at your work design and the three things i would always start with reason why is your organization there what is it trying to achieve and how do people how can people relate to that role are people clear on what they they have to do in their role are workloads evenly distributed and are we making sure there's no role conflict and recognition are people being fairly paid are they being recognized in terms of their performance and also in terms of their career development they're three really nice places to start me excellent excellent and if you want to know more about burnout then we've got three episodes with the wonderful kate donovan who's arguably the world expert on burnout episode 329 302 and 185.

49:00Don't worry, I'll put the links in the show notes. Or you can just go on to truthliesandwork.com, click on guests, find Kate, and it'll show you all of them, and you can just click play and listen to them at you, and they've got the segments, they've got all of the transcript. Yeah, it's beautiful. Go check out truthliesandwork.com. Yeah, lovely. Okay, so last question here. I kind of like this one. My direct report has been faking meetings to get work done. So he said, a guy on my team has been blocking out a couple of hours every afternoon with fake meetings he told me he started doing it because whenever he puts focus time in his calendar people just book over it so now he uses boring meeting titles and everyone leaves him alone i love this the problem is my manager has now asked me which client he keeps meeting with because he she wants to join one of the calls i don't want to lie for him but i also understand why he's doing it so do i grass on him do i snitches get stitches do i tell my manager what's going on or keep Snitches get stitches.

49:57Do you know what kind of, in this scenario, I wouldn't grasp on it. Because I think what this person has done has found basically their own coping mechanism to remain productive and effective in an environment that isn't allowing them to be productive and effective. They're a great member of staff to take this initiative, to see that then their time is getting booked out anywhere and they put focus time, so then to change it. Like it shouldn't be that. it should be that focus time is respected but good for them for finding a way to remain productive and efficient in their role so i think it's a case of kind of guarantee manager go oh um maybe maybe just fudge something so oh it's just that client you know that that client that always needs a bit more time or oh actually i think i think that was put a mistake in the diary actually and you know just fluff around it just get make it go away or say oh do you know what if you want to sit on a call this client is really good sitting on that meeting if you want to you want to sit in on something redirect what do you do with the dog training al uh don't do this do this yeah stop doing that do this exactly not this that yes not this that is much better way exactly so just not this that with with your manager to get them in terms of of a call and i think it's then going to your team member and go one bravo two i'm so sorry that you had to do this to be able to have your focus time respected it shouldn't be that way i would ask questions like is there one person in particular was always booking in around focus time was it in general was it ever me and figure out exactly because it might just be one person that you might just need to go to a manager like if they've got focus time in the diary do not book that in or give you permission as an employee that if it's booked in during focus time that you can decline it yes yes that's it that's that's it that's it to quite it yeah so i think it's just giving setting some some clear expectations if somebody has focus working in their diary that that has to be respected and what that person can do to make sure that it is and this goes for everybody in in you know in the team it can be hard for some people to understand that people need this focus time i remember on my team like i had i had a person who who really needed focus time it's really hard because we worked in a community center so they asked me if they could come in an hour earlier and leave an hour like an hour earlier um so they basically have an hour before anyone else came where it'd be quiet and i was like yeah of course um and then i had a member of staff kind of go oh why does this person leave early i said well because they're doing that you're welcome to do the same if you'd rather have you know have that time um but they were like no because then i have to get an extra early bus and i don't want to do that it's like well there you go you know flexibility isn't it so i think i think that's what i'd say protect the focus time and and just distract your manager not this that you don't want to listen to that and also i think leanne said all along that a great manager tends to sort of protect their team from anything external imagine yourself as like the first line of defense um and that's what you're doing this does remind me of um i saw this thing on it was a tweet or something i don't know it was a little while ago and someone saying i only discovered today that my diary was public when my manager emailed me and said we have a meeting this afternoon but you've got in your diary get a chicken any chance you can move that for this meeting he's like oh shit and also made me think are you actually getting like a roast chicken are you going out and getting a live like a rotisserie chicken yeah so the hands have a hungry day today you should have seen her face when i said rotisserie chicken like we don't even eat that much meat i don't even eat chicken no i'm like i could eat chicken get me to Asda and get me a rotisserie chicken oh yeah one of those days where you just want to sit in your car and eat a rotisserie chicken with your hands yeah yeah I agree oh god that's going to make me hungry right okay let's go and find the vegetarian equivalent of a rotisserie chicken there is none there is none boom so this Thursday we're joined by we don't know we've got three people and we haven't quite decided who's going to come on yet or have we?

53:58I don't know we've got some cool people coming up though do you want to tease a couple of them? Yeah, it sounds like we've got cool people coming up. Not this Thursday, they're shit. No, well, in general, we generally can't say we've got three interviews we pre-recorded before the summer break. And we're like, which one do we do first? It's all too exciting. So we've got someone who's going to talk about the history of personality tests and a workshop on how to choose a personality test. Because Leanne's always saying, don't use Myers-Briggs. But then she doesn't often say, well, you probably do actually be in the comments.

54:24In every post, I do. Whenever I slug off Myers-Briggs, I give it an alternative. But does anyone listen to that? No, do they? No. So we got in a crazy mad scientist who knows everything about this, who's going to talk us through that. Psychologists listening will know exactly who that is. Yes, yes, he's very well known. We've also got someone who can talk about the medical factors of work, how it actually physiologically changes stuff in your body. And the third person is a fabulous storyteller who will teach you how to be a, basically how to tell stories at work, not in a bad way, but in a great way.

54:57and he also apparently he ruined star wars he used to work with the muppets he's just such the coolest guy ever oh that's what i'd do today i'm on the first day of my period if you hadn't clocked on but i want a rotisserie chicken and i want to watch the muppets oh that's what we can do right we'll go and do that so we'll see you next week in the meantime oh and also on next tuesday sorry i'll sorry to over talk about no um we also are bringing back our guests our guest hosts on Tuesdays. Yes. So next Tuesday we are joined by the one and only Mr. Danny Wareham. DW! Yay! Yeah, he's great. And then we've also got Bill Yost, I think, coming up as well, I think.

55:39Yeah! We've got Paula Brockwell. We've got Nicole Williams. Oh, he's going to be great. Oh, it's so good. And of course, Jakey Jake will be back sometime soon. We just can't shake him off. We just can't. We can't. Okay, right. So if you're listening, Jake, we love you. We do. Alright, so we will see you on Thursday for this interview see you next Tuesday for some more Tuesday fondness in the meantime it would mean genuinely the world if you'd have to review for us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts we probably get about four or five a week and each time we get one it just makes our flipping day so yeah go and do that brilliant anything else to add Leanne?

56:12Nope bye bye bye bye