Forbes –

According to the Division of Sleep Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, the short-term productivity gains from skipping sleep to work are quickly washed away by the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation on your mood, ability to focus, and access to higher-level brain functions for days to come. The negative effects of sleep deprivation are so great that people who are drunk outperform those lacking sleep.

We’ve always known that sleep is good for your brain, but new research from the University of Rochester provides the first direct evidence for why your brain cells need you to sleep (and sleep the right way-more on that later). The study found that when you sleep your brain removes toxic proteins from its neurons that are by-products of neural activity when you’re awake. Unfortunately, your brain can remove them adequately only while you’re asleep. So when you don’t get enough sleep, the toxic proteins remain in your brain cells, wreaking havoc by impairing your ability to think-something no amount of caffeine can fix.

Jon Bon Jovi may have gotten it a little wrong with the fourth song on his 1992 his hit album Keep the Faith…

We are beginning to see a wave of companies world wide taking steps to curb after-hours work — though, sadly, few of them have much to do with North America where we are busy destroying the unions that managed to get us to even the minimally improved state things currently are at…

Really, the only thing that can be described as positive in this whole mess is that research on sleep deprivation and employment is finally happening — and the government is finally noticing the real-time body count associated with such.

But, it’s still mostly up the individual if anything is to be done about it…