When’s the last time you took an office coffee break?  American work life and social life now shortchanges a critical part of human design – the need to rest. 
        
         Americans have cut off an hour and a half of sleep in the last forty years.  The resulting shifts in insulin and other hormones may have a lot to do with our increased obesity and diabetes rates.  But as Professor Dirk van Dijk pointed out to me recently, the loss of rest may be a greater societal loss than that of sleep.

         We live in a machine age.  The telephone-television era has morphed to the Internet-Blackberry period. Businessmen who formerly waited for an international telephone operator now speak instantaneously on global widescreens. Children walking from the bus stop to the schoolroom pull out their iPods to text message friends fifty feet away. 

         The age of the machine has also become an age of the Machine Lifestyle.  When you manipulate sophisticated machines all day long, may often start thinking of yourself as a machine.

         Computers don’t care if it’s 4 A.M. or 4 P.M. You do. Your body needs to sleep at 4 A.M.  Computers don’t worry if they’ve been left on for two or twenty hours.  You do.  The longer you’re up, the less effective you become.

         Yet a biological lifestyle that recognizes how human beings are designed is becoming harder to live. If multitasking means there’s no time for lunch, you eat at your desk.  And since there’s little time for buying food or “idle” lunchtime socializing, why not a fast food meal?  The concentrated calories from a milk shake and hamburger require few wasted moments.  You can pour two thousand calories down your gut in minutes and still keep working!

         If you’re totally dedicated, you may think to never stop working. Sleep, you recognize, is a waste of time.  Cut it down; you’ll get used to it.   While you’re watching TV with the kids you can still be emailing colleagues on your blackberry.

         And remember, you’re tough, resilient. Why rest when there’s so much left to accomplish?  Staying up at night means more work done, more calories used. In no time you should be thin as a rail.  And if you need downtime, play a game.  Visit Second Life as your avatar, a superhero vixen that flies helicopters, sings opera, and gets all the cute guys, while still taking calls from your boss.

         What’s wrong with this picture? It violates human design almost everywhere. Sleep less and you’ll weigh more.  Fast food, an increased waist line and a shorter lifespan are deeply interconnected.  Deny rest and you and your effectiveness at work may fall apart.

         Dr. Gregory Belenky spent nearly thirty years doing research on alertness for the military.  To him there are three large determinants of effective performance  - time of day, previous time asleep, and time on task.  If you keep doing something for a long time, your brain and body tire. You begin to make major mistakes.

         What reverses those mistakes?  “Rest,” Dr. Belenky told me.  “Nothing works as well to reverse performance declines.”

         Rest is when your body literally restores.  Whether it’s brain or bone, muscle or tendon, what gets used is replaced, and modified, by use. Your muscles get stronger.  Your brain remembers and learns.   Computers remember, but don’t learn.  If they fall apart, we buy new ones.

You can’t buy yourself a new body.

         Not that many people don’t want to.  Part of a machine lifestyle is belief in the ultimate technological fix.  If my hip wears out, I’ll get a new hip.  If cataracts destroy my vision, I’ll get new lenses.  Once stem cell research gets going, I’ll be able to get new heart valves, new lungs, you name it.

         But you won’t get a new brain.  Or new heart arteries.  Or replace long lived immune cells.  There are parts of you that won’t see science fiction replacements for a long time.

         Giving up rest is often done in the name of greater effectiveness yet it produces biological chaos.  Rest restores tissues all over the body, and improves efficiency.  We literally learn as we sleep.  Overuse muscles and they tear and break.

         Sleep and rest are not “wastes of time,” but necessities of life like food and air.  Without them we get sick, go crazy, and die from preventable diseases.  Alternating physical with mental activity is a particularly useful way of restoring brain and body.

         It’s all part of human design.  Human design makes it possible to live longer and live well, but it also makes you more effective and efficient.

         So hurry up work and take a rest.  Then you can join the only part of the workforce that still takes work breaks  – smokers.  We know they need all the help they can get.

Dr. Matthew Edlund, M.D., M.O.H., director of The Center for Circadian Medicine, is an expert on applied public health, sleep medicine and psychiatry. A former professor at Brown and University of Texas medical schools, he can be reached via email to DocME@DoctorEdlund.com. And CLICK HERE to subscribe to our new Fitcast, via the iTunes Store.