Is your congested cold affecting your performance at work?
Feeling groggy and congested when you have a cold puts you in a bad mood, but is it also affecting the decisions you make?
A survey reveals that congestion with a cold could be costing the British economy an estimated amount of £1.3 billion a year in underperformance.
The new research, which looks into the impact of congestion with a cold on our functionality and sleep, has found that the average person gets a cold with congestion once a year and that a typical cold could last nearly five and a half days.
Our sleep also suffers. An extrapolated 16 million adult Brits who have suffered from congestion with a cold in the last 12 months have said that they lose out on two hours of sleep or more on a typical night due to mucus build up. This could add up to an estimated 32,000,000 hours of sleep being missed across the UK each year.
And it seems that we aren’t our normal selves when suffering from congestion with a cold and the subsequent loss of sleep.
GP, Pixie McKenna explains how congestion with a cold can also have an impact on our sleep: “When suffering from congestion with a cold, our sleep can be affected. A lack of sleep, along with a woolly head, can affect our functionality during the day and that’s when we could start to make careless mistakes and become short tempered. To ensure that we function to the best of our ability, it’s important to take steps to treat congestion during the day and at night.”
Embarrassingly, the survey suggests around 600,000 British workers who have suffered with congestion with a cold in the last 12 months may have accidentally 'replied all' to an email when they only wanted to reply to a specific person/group of people. Furthermore, approximately 300,000 British workers who have suffered with congestion with a cold in the last 12 months may have accidentally sent a personal email to their boss or a client when it was meant for a friend and another 300,000 may have made a mistake which cost them a client or a customer, all as a result of congestion with a cold.
And these slip-ups could have financial implications. According to the survey, 1% of British workers who have suffered from congestion with a cold in the past 12 months estimate that their bouts of congestion with a cold costs their current employer over £1,000 due to underperformance (e.g. not getting as much work done, silly mistakes etc.). Looking at Great Britain as a whole, it is estimated that careless mistakes, due to congestion with a cold, could amount to as much as £43.76 per person lost to our bosses a year, amounting to an estimated amount of around 1.3 billion pounds a year in underperformance across the UK.
Nia Vester, spokesperson for SUDAFED® Mucus Relief Day & Night Capsules, who conducted the resesarch, says: “It’s astonishing to see that something as common as congestion with a cold can have such an effect on our work and functionality. The fact that we could be losing up to 1.3 billion pounds shows that the nation needs a solution that allows them to keep calm and carry on during the day and one that aids sleep at night. We’ve found that treating the day and night symptoms separately can really help people to get mucus relief, whatever the hour”.
Tagged in Health cold and flu