Sleep, Sid, & Job Hunting
We hope you’re all as excited for this new year as we are. Mostly just because “2020” sounds cool and the 2000 film Mission to Mars was scripted to unfold this year. Must mean that Elon will make it happen before the end of summer. Enjoy this month’s challenge by going back to bed, check out what we built for Vibio, and meet our project manager Sid Prakhash. We hope everyone’s shiny new decade is off to a great start!
Sleep Like It’s Your Job
We put a lot of thought into this month’s challenge. We figured that the world of default new year resolutions would be filled with new gym memberships and dreams of perpetual ketosis. Last year we read a book and heard a series of interviews with the author that blew our minds. It made us realize that the above types of health goals and even the more cerebrally focused ones are often being attempted over a foundation that is cracked or about to implode altogether. The book is called “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker. The crux of the issue around sleep is that we live in a society that gives zero shits about it. In the world of tech startups it’s even worse. Sleep deprivation is heralded as a badge of honor. One-hundred hour work weeks are bookended with nonsense like “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”, which in truth, might be a lot sooner than we’d like. The average American is getting 25% less sleep than needed, and therefor subject to increased susceptibility of the following bummers:
Cancer
Alzheimer's
Diabetes & Weight Gain
Heart Disease (Getting more sleep is the best blood pressure medication you can get)
Fertility Issues
DNA Damage
Weakened Immune System (if you average less than 6 hours of sleep, you’re 4x more likely to fall to the flu after exposure!)
It hasn’t always been like this. For a number of reasons that you might be able to guess, our slumber has been steadily eroding over the last twenty years. In 1942, the average American was sleeping 7.5 hours but is now down to 6.5; a record low for the recorded history of our species. Very few folks (it’s statistically very unlikely you're one of them) can function optimally on less than 8 hours, but the rest of us should be setting this as a non-negotiable number of hours to hit. Although he had our attention with “cancer”, here are a few more things that you can expect with sleep deprivation:
More Susceptible to Depression
Stifled Creativity
Less Likely to Take on New Challenges
Decreased Memory
Hindered Learning (an all nighter decreases learning capacity by 40%!)
Death Behind the Wheel - this one is downright frightening. “Microsleeps" refer to little lapses of consciousness where the eyelids partially close. The less you have slept, the more likely these are, and they are alarmingly common. At freeway speed speeds, the difference of one second of your attention can mean life or death. Driving while drowsy causes more accidents than drugs and alcohol combined. When drunk, your reactions are impaired. When you have microsleep occurrence, it’s 100% lights-out.
The Challenge
For the month of January or what we are calling the nod-off new year, we challenge you to sleep like it’s your job. This means giving it the same level of priority that you might offer to an important project, a new workout program, or other habit modification like quitting smoking. Every bit of evidence shows that the less you sleep, the shorter you’ll live. Let’s get the minimum eight hours that gives us the foundation to achieve all our other health and productivity goals. Here are some tips to help you make it happen:
Knowing the Cycles: All sleep is not created equally. In Non-REM (N-REM), you have 4 stages. 1 and 2 are lighter with 3 and 4 being deepest and most restorative. Then there is REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep is weird because your nervous system is firing and it doesn’t appear very “restful”. However, it’s still very important which is why it’s sometimes referred to as the paradoxical sleep state. These stages happen in cycles throughout the night that average about 90 minutes. In the first half of the night, most of these cycles have very little REM which is why those who sleep 5-6 hours miss out on almost all of it!
RCQQ: Regularity, meaning a consistent sleep schedule. Continuity is duration between wakeful states. Quantity is your total sleep (and sleep in each stage). Quality is that exposure to stage 3 and 4 sleep.
Sleep Windows: Try and keep it regular. If you can do somewhere in the neighborhood of 10PM to 6AM, you will have the best chance more restorative sleep.
Bedtime Food & Booze: Alcohol can reduce REM sleep and big meals too close to bed are bad for digestion. Drinking too many fluids before bed will also cause interruptions.
Winding Down: Allowing time in your schedule to disconnect from the world before turning in will greatly improve your sleep quality. A hot bath is great because it also drops your body temperature and may help you feel sleepy.
Temperature Control: Cooler temps will help deepen sleep. Drop that thermostat in the 60-67F range. If you share a bed with a cold sleeper or otherwise finicky partner, check out the Chilipad.
Caffeine Intake: Yeah, that won’t help you sleep. File that one under “duh". But we’re not doing a coffee detox challenge right now, so try to have your last cup by 2PM.
Dark & Gadget-Free: Yeah, we saved the best for last. Television, computers and the now ubiquitous smartphone have likely been the biggest detriment to our sleep as a culture. Nothing gets the brain working in the wrong direction for sleep like doing work in bed on your laptop, or scrolling through your coworkers’ seemingly perfect vacation posts on your phone. But here’s the real doozy: the blue light emitted by these screens (and most electric lights) actually suppresses the production of melatonin, the hormone responsible for your sleeping cycles. The longer you can go without a screen in your face leading up to bedtime, the better. At the least, use a dark-mode equivalent on your phone and computer. If you want take it to the next level, replace your usual indoor nighttime lighting with only candlelight. You’ll feel like you got hit by an elephant tranquilizer by 8PM. If you don’t feel like going total caveman, you can also try some blue-blocking glasses from sundown to bedtime.
Next-Level Geeky
Eric and Eli are having a sleep competition using the data from fitness trackers. The WHOOP wristband helps users find optimal performance windows by giving them a recovery score based on their sleep and heart rate variability. Using a variety of sensors, the strap will inform the user of their total time in bed, disturbances, light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. It even gives an efficiency score to the percentage of time in bed spent asleep vs awake. If you have a WHOOP and would like to be added to the January leaderboard, just drop us a line.
Project Highlight : VIBIO
Vibio is a multimedia resume platform that brings the job application process to the 21st Century. The team at Vibio recognized the fact that we are all unique and that traditional resumes don't tell the full story of the applicant. They set out to create a platform that enables applicants to highlight their uniqueness and aspects of their personality so that companies can get a better sense of the person behind the resume. In three simple steps, applicants can: 1) Create a profile; 2) Create a video resume and; 3) Share it with prospective companies/recruiters
Vibio came to SPARK6 with a phenomenal idea and a solid foundational understanding of how the platform would need to function. It was SPARK6’s task to bring it to life.
Beginning with User Experience (UX) Design, SPARK6 created a clean and intuitive onboarding flow so that new users were able to get going right away. Job hunting is daunting enough on it’s own—the Vibio platform needed to be user-friendly and not create a bunch of unnecessary work and stress for the user. After settling in on a streamlined and effective UX flow, SPARK6’s visual design team jumped on board to make sure the platform was on brand and visually pleasing. After a few tweaks, the design phase was a wrap and it was time to bring in the engineers. Although future plans will have the Vibio platform available for all mobile devices, it was decided to kick things off as a web application for this initial build. A couple of months later, Vibio launched to rave reviews and have been busy onboarding users ever since.
Team Member Spotlight
Sid Prakhash : Project Manager
S6: Hey Sid! What do you do at SPARK6?
Sid: I’m a project manager. I basically keep all the trains running on time, ensure clients’ expectations are being met, and verify that best practices are being followed.
S6: What’s one of the biggest challenges of that role?
Sid: Engineers, creatives, and the client all tend to be very different personalities. I need to be able to connect and empathize with all three in order to make a project successful.
S6: You also have the challenge of time zones when doing web meetings with our team in New Delhi. How is that for you?
Sid: It’s actually not that big of a deal since I’ve been keeping some of those hours to stay in touch with people back home since I moved here.
S6: Where did you grow up?
Sid: I grew up in Southern India in a city called Channai. I went to school there and didn’t move until I came here. We were about two miles from the beach, so I spent a lot of time there. It was a small community, but a pretty big city. I lived at home while at my undergrad, which was about an hour and a half away.
S6: How were your home town beaches in comparison to those in LA?
Sid: Beaches back home were super quiet. There were food vendors, so lot of people would just chill out and eat. But the biggest difference is the heat in the summer. Nobody is on those beaches in the summer. You can only really go during the winter and the fall.
S6: What were the winter temps like there?
Sid: About 80ºF.
S6: Wow - that’s a pretty toasty winter. Did you grow up speaking English?
Sid: I grew up speaking English. It was taught in my school from the beginning.
S6: Is that a pretty common practice there in early education?
Sid: Yes, almost all the schools in the bigger cities do that. In some of the smaller villages they’ll still focus on the local language.
S6: Speaking of local languages, I heard that there are a staggering number of different ones in India.
Sid: Yes, about a 120 completely different languages spoken and written languages. It’s nuts. It would be like going from California to Nevada and not being able to understand a thing once you got there.
S6: So does English serve as the common language for a lot of these different regions?
Sid: Yes, after Hindi, English is by far the most common language. In bigger cities, you can easily get away with just speaking English.
S6: So when you are having your one on one calls with the New Delhi office, do you just speak English?
Sid: Absolutely. If they speak their local dialect, I can barely understand them. Most of the people in the office are from the same area so while they can speak their native language, so I can only pick up on words and phrases here and there, but they speak very quickly and it’s hard to keep up - so English it is!
S6: When did you come to the US?
Sid: Seven years ago. I came right to Los Angeles and have been here ever since.
S6: Why LA?
Sid: I write, direct and produce. My education and work experience also makes me the perfect project manager, but like just about everyone at SPARK6, I have side hustles and I love writing.
S6: That’s so cool. When you got to LA, what was the biggest culture shock you experienced?
Sid: How nice people are! [laughing]
S6: Really?? In LA? [laughing] People must be super mean in India!
Sid: It’s basically like New York. Nobody has time for you. You can’t have a conversation with a barista or bartender like you can here. You can even pick up random conversations with people here whereas in India, people tend to stick in very tight cliques and only talk to people they already know. I also really appreciate the variety of LA as a city. There are so many micro-cultures in LA. Even the difference between Santa Monica and Venice or the difference between the financial district and the arts district. I also didn’t expect the US to be such a mini version of the whole world. You can get exposure to so many different cultures in just one city, and India definitely doesn’t feel like that.
S6: How about LA traffic? Were you ready for that?
Sid: In India, it’s more about the density of foot traffic. You can’t walk anywhere without bumping into a thousand people. But yeah, the LA traffic was a bit shocking. We just don’t have that number of people in cars where I grew up. But everything here just feels more spacious. In India there are just tons of people in the streets and everything in Southern CA just feels so spread out and spacious.
S6: Any new goals for 2020?
Sid: I’m almost done with my first feature shot, so I’m getting that pushed out this coming year. I’m also getting back into MMA. I start back in Muay Thai in January and will then pick up Jujitsu again later in the year.
S6: Any big NYE plans?
Sid: I’m doing a 24 hour writing challenge. I’ve done this before. We basically lock ourselves in a room and write nonstop. I’m hoping to knock out the rest of this screenplay in that time. I just wanted to start this new year doing something productive as opposed to just partying.
S6: Wow - that is nuts. Good for you! What’s your favorite thing about being on the S6 team?
Sid: I really like that almost all our projects are helping people. Software for good. Whether it’s teaching people to meditate or helping them get jobs. I’m hoping we get to do even more in education this coming year.
