The Free Encyclopedia (aka, Wikipedia) defines ‘risk appetite’ as the “amount and type of risk that an organization is prepared to pursue, retain or take”.

Whilst this concept is embedded in Economics and Finance, the same concept could be applied to an organization you know well.

Your body.

If you had to build a human body, it would incredibly complex. It is an organization of different organs - some of them crucial to living.

Put together, the Organization known as your body, will die if it is starved of air, water, food …. or sleep.

Yes - sleep.

Well, at least if you were a rat ….

In this study, rats were totally and continuously sleep deprived - somewhere between 11 to 32 days - before they died. Keep in mind that they has access to all the other essentials …

Air. Water. Food.

In fact, they ate more food whilst sleep deprived, which makes sense, because they kept needing to burn energy to keep their Organization (their body) going and going and going.

Now whilst the chances of a human dying due to continuous sleep deprivation in today’s society would be near impossible, you can still reap the consequences of what’s called ‘Chronic Sleep Restriction’.

In other words, you can eat into your sleep, not get enough sleep for your Organization’s needs on an ongoing basis, and experience an array of problems.

‘When’ - this sleep loss is most likely to occur, is the transition from day-to-night …

Revenge Procrastination

… seems to have hit the headlines in the past couple of weeks - and in the context of losing sleep in the evening.

I hadn’t heard of ‘Revenge Procrastination’ so I had to look it up in the scientific literature.

And I found it. Twice. From studies done during the era of good music (1990s)…

Yet each study used a period between ‘revenge’ and ‘procrastination’.

For comparison, here’s a Google search …

…1,870 results!

We’ve been 1 of probably 4 research groups in the world who have been investigating individual differences that influence people’s technology use before bed.

And there seems to be some overlap in the characteristics that different people possess.

And that overlap could be named “F#ck it”.

So we’d like to draw your attention to one of these characteristics …

Risk-Taking

8 years ago, one of our studies - led by Dr Chelsea Reynolds - saw us recruit 20 teenagers who completed a bunch of different questionnaires.

One of these questionnaires assessed teenager’s appetite for taking risks.

And this questionnaire had two parts to it.

The rewards of taking risks.

And the consequences of taking risks.

Two weeks later, the teenagers would come into our Sleep Lab after school, settle down into their designated bedroom, eat some pizza for dinner, and get into their PJs.

We then gave them a video console and a brand new video game to play, along with these instructions …

“You can play this game for as long as you want tonight. But just understand that we’re going to get you up at 7 AM tomorrow and take you to school.”

We provided them with water and snacks. Turned off the overhead lights. Turned on their bed lamp. And said goodnight.

We then went to our monitoring room to watch them play their video game (we had an infrared camera in their bedroom). Our pens were ready to write down the time that they chose to turn off the video game, and go to sleep.

What did we find?

Well, here’s some examples of the risk-taking questionnaire they completed …

As you can see, you need to circle a rating for each question - from 1 to 7.

And here’s the thing. The teenagers who scored higher on the consequences of taking risks chose to turn off their video game later.

If you’re thinking SFW? let me just say that the difference between each category circled was 38 minutes...

Let me emphasise that a different way.

Teenager X (who circled a 5) chose to turn the video game 38-min later than Teenager Y (who circled a 4).

Another way of saying it is that Teenager X (who circled 5) chose to turn off the video game 76-min later ( 1 16 min) than Teenager Z (who circled a 3).

This study showed that people’s risk-taking is a really important issue when it comes to using technology before bed. Way more important than the blue light coming from screens.

It means those who inherently take risks - because they don’t care so much about the consequences - lose sleep (and possibly lose sleep on an ongoing basis).

Sleep Loss and Risks

A recent meta-analysis of 500,000+ participants found that insufficient sleep increased the odds of risk-taking by 43% (Short & Weber, 2018).

The types of behaviours included:

• increased substance use (which can then amplify the risks further)

• violent and/or delinquent behaviour

• risky driving

• sexual risk-taking

This suggests a ‘vicious cycle’ - whereby delaying sleep (because you want to get in your time at the end of the day to do what you want) - can increase your risk-taking - and then your risk-taking can again push away sleep.

Conclusions?

We vary in how much risk we are willing to accept.

Personally, I know I my appetite for taking risks is higher than others. Then again, I probably get less sleep than the average person (after all, I know how to fix bad sleep).

The point is to find the balance - or the sweet spot - that is the best way to Biohack your sleep.

How much time at the end of the day can you devote to You - vs - How much sleep you’re willing to lose?

Of the people who come to see me for help with their bad sleep, so many of them seem to describe an unstructured evening.

It makes me realise Time Management is not just about what we do at work during the day, but how we structure our evenings, so we can strike that balance between our ‘down time’ and ‘our recharging’.

If you haven’t done so yet, I highly recommend getting access to a ticket for our WINK Sleep Conference - where you can hear Dr Serena Bauducco discuss her research about instructing time management - as a way to strike that balance.

You can grab an early bird ticket here.

But I guess it’s up to you whether you’d risk the tickets selling out before you grab hold of them …

• Prof Michael Gradisar