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Does A Lack Of Sleep Hurt Your Writing?
You might do better if you wrote drunk, some research suggests
A trove of good research has shown how sleep deprivation affects groups from soccer players to long-haul truck drivers. If there’s a comparable study of writers, I don’t know of it.
But if you’re a would-be bestselling author, you might draw a few conclusions from Rachel Clarke’s memoir Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor’s Story (Metro Books, 2017).
Clarke is a palliative care physician in Britain, and her book is an unsparing critique of the punishing workloads that led in 2016 to the first nationwide strike by Britain’s doctors in four decades. As she tells it, junior doctors — generally those with less than a decade of experience — often had to work 12-to-14 hours a day for up to 12 days straight.
Such working conditions, Clarke suggests, could compromise the care and safety of patients of her country’s National Health Service. Her evidence includes this comment:
“Studies show that the fatigue levels experienced by doctors at the end of busy night shifts can impair their mental acuity more effectively than exceeding the alcohol limit for driving. So if you become unwell in hospital at the wrong moment, you might find your life rests in the hands of someone who is…
