How Lack of Sleep Makes It Hard to Be Empathetic

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When you don’t meet your sleep need and this connection between these two regions of the brain is hampered, we become more impulsive and less thoughtful in our emotional responses.

Current theories of empathy hold that there are two main components:

Cognitive empathy refers to the ability simply to understand another person’s feelings and state of mind.

This underpins a seller’s capacity to predict a client’s behavior and intuit when they’re withholding information.

Emotional empathy, on the other hand, occurs when you go beyond mere understanding of another person’s feelings to vicariously sharing in them.

This could look like feeling distressed by another person’s anguish (what’s called ‘indirect’) or experiencing physiological arousal like an elevated heart rate at their anguish (what’s called ‘direct’).

This sort of empathy can forge solidarity and tight france telegram data bonds between teammates as well as managers and their direct reports.

A deep body of research shows that sleep debt can affect both components of empathy, with significant consequences for sellers and their managers.

Sleep debt can impair one’s ability to read facial emotions, particularly angry and happy.
Being able to pick up on these cues is vital for any salesperson who wants to better understand and serve their customer’s needs—imagine trying to read the room at a new business pitch without it.

Likewise imagine a sales manager trying to identify struggling team members in order to offer them support without it.

Sleep debt has also been shown to hinder empathic accuracy, provoking conflicts in relationships. In a work setting, this spells trouble for collaboration and morale.