Smarter machines, tired brains, and what to do about it
AI can produce the work in seconds. Deciding whether it’s right, and whether it’s good enough to send, is the part that’s still yours.
As machines take over the producing, our value shifts to what they can’t do: judging the output and reading the people. Questioning weak reasoning, separating real insight from convincing noise, sensing what a client actually needs, noticing that a colleague is struggling. We are walking into that era chronically short on sleep, and sleep loss erodes exactly these abilities. Tired brains miss emotion in other people’s faces, including the smile you were hoping for. Tired people are also more willing to go along with something that merely looks right.
In this online session, sleep neuroscientist Dr. Els van der Helm shows what happens in a tired brain when it has to judge and to read people, and how to protect the hours when you need both at their best, for you or your whole team.
You’ll leave knowing how to time your hardest thinking to your own body clock, what to do on the day after a bad night, why your own sense of how sharp you are is the least reliable signal you have, and what your own tiredness is doing to the people around you.
This free 60-minute online session takes place on Tuesday 13 October. The session is scheduled at 5 pm Amsterdam/Zurich time, which is 11 am Eastern.
About the speaker: Els van der Helm, PhD, is a sleep neuroscientist who works with global organizations to improve performance through sleep. She studied the impact of sleep on the brain and performance while pursuing her PhD in psychology at UC Berkeley, before becoming a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. She is a frequent keynote speaker for organizations such as Meta, Novartis, Booking.com, L’Oréal, and PwC.
Her first book, Sleep Intelligence: The High-Performance Blueprint for Sharper Thinking is coming out January 12th. When you preorder the book now and send us an email at preorders@elsvanderhelm.com you immediately get a 20+ page preview of the book with several of the exercises and tips that you can implement right away.