Poor sleep is widely known to have many benefits to our lives.  For instance, a study from Michigan State University showed how good quality sleep helps us to buffer the stresses of our daily lives.

“We found that employees who have a stressful workday tend to bring their negative feelings from the workplace to the dinner table, as manifested in eating more than usual and opting for more junk food instead of healthy food,” the authors say.

This link with our willpower was further demonstrated by a second study, from Trinity Business School, which highlights how poor sleep can diminish our willpower, as well as our motivational and emotional resources.

Conservation of resources

The study draws on the conservation of resources theory to examine how our mental resources are affected by the quality and quantity of sleep we get, which in turn influences our motivation and our effectiveness at work.

Understandably, the study shows that sleep does indeed affect our willpower and therefore our effectiveness at work, but the researchers believe that this can be managed by people by adopting the right state of mind.

For instance, when people understand the non-limited resource theory, the spillover of sleep into their effectiveness at work was stronger than for those who were not familiar with this theory. In other words, the authors believe that we can mitigate any lack of sleep we may experience by holding a non-limited resource theory on those days.

“Our data points to sleep being directly linked to employee effectiveness,” the researchers say. “The study implies that sleep duration affects employee effectiveness through employees’ ability to control impulses, emotions, and desires- as well as their emotional resources such as a positive outlook towards daily task completion and motivational resources such as feelings of aliveness and energy during the day.”