Friday, October 28, 2016

MLM and Sleep Deprivation

Today's blog post is about MLMers using sleep deprivation as a manipulation technique. Sleep deprivation has a variety of effects ranging from impaired brain activity to death. Healthline.com describes what will happen to your central nervous system when you are sleep deprived:

 Sleep deprivation leaves the brain exhausted, so it can’t perform its duties well. The most obvious  effect is sleepiness. You may find yourself yawning a lot and feeling sluggish. Lack of sleep  interferes with your ability to concentrate and learn new things. It can negatively impact both short-  term and long-term memory. It gets in the way of your decision-making process and stifles  creativity. Your emotions are also affected, making you more likely to have a short temper and mood  swings. Overall cognitive function is impaired.

Needless to say this is a tremendous issue when it comes to learning the ins and outs of the business. With all of these negative effects it makes one wonder, why would MLMers want to make their prospects sleep deprived? It seems like backwards logic since they are supposed to be teaching prospects valuable information and trying to help them succeed, yet they are pumping information into people with reduced cognitive faculties.

MLMers utilize long and strenuous days to their advantage, because prospects are more easily manipulated when they cannot think clearly. MLMers don't want you to critically think about their pitch, where the money comes from, or how to be successful. They just want you to join and continue to spend money. The major seminars reinforce these points by making the days extremely long, 9 am to 12 am (sometimes later if you are in a "nuts and bolts" or "night owl" meeting), and then repeat the process the next day. No other company encourages anyone to go through training for that long in a day, because they realize it will not be beneficial to your success as an employee.

I have two examples of sleep deprivation from the FED I attended, and they are a constant reminder of how ridiculous it all was.

1. When I got done with the second day of the FED, I told Fred that I needed to get some extra sleep if I wanted to be able to retain the information from the final day. Instead of understanding that an 18 hour day (including travel time) requires extra R&R he guilted me into coming in at the beginning of the following day for a religious ceremony that I didn't believe in. If I didn't have sleep deprivation, I probably could have confronted his ludicrous objective, but instead I just caved in because I didn't have the energy or cognitive ability to think clearly.

2. When Fred was attending the FED, I remember him falling asleep and thinking, "How could he fall asleep? 
He is so passionate about this business, and is probably missing out on something important". I asked his wife what was going on, because she was staying awake, and she said, "He had a rough night on a blow up mattress, and we car pooled with Tom (the sponsor/eagle), and he had to stay for the 'night owl'".  Looking back, I realized that he was just as much a victim of the sleep deprivation as I was, and he too could not be "fired up" enough to stay awake throughout the conference.

I'm not the biggest fan of Ted Talks at the moment, because they haven't been doing a great job in selecting certain people to conduct them (Robert Kiyosaki), but they did do a nice job with this sleep deprivation video. It is a little more dramatic than it needs to be, but it gets the point across that anyone interested in making you successful will let you get some much needed shut eye.

If you have a story involving abuses from your upline and would like me to share it on this blog as a guest post, then please e-mail me and I will be more than happy to post it! Your stories are not as unique as you may think, and your stories are some of the most impactful resources we have to fight MLMs. I will keep your anonymity upon request.

2 comments:

  1. The only purpose of a deliberately induced sleep deprivation is to weaken someone's rational function, and make him intellectually disabled. This was done routinely in communist POW camps during the Korean and Vietnam wars, to compel American soldiers to "confess" to atrocities and to make propaganda statements against their own country.

    Continuous sleep deprivation lowers one's IQ level. But of course that's obvious when you try to talk to anyone involved in Amway. They all seem to have a room-temperature IQ.

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  2. I enjoyed reading your article :) PLease continue publishing helpful topics like this. Regards, from beddingstock.

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