Its effects are experienced over days, but its impacts are realized over a lifetime.
We need sleep. (7-9 hours)
- Decision making
- Attention
- Memory
- Response speed
- Physical Health
- Mental Health
- Emotional Health
- Brain Health
Sleep affects health, quality of life, career and everything in between.
Sleep is productive.
Don’t think of not working as unproductive. Not all work is effective work. Sleep and rest is where is where the processing and development happens— the body recovering from all the activities; our brains digesting the lessons of the day and compressing memories.
A lack of sleep can lead to steps backwards.
There is a lot of terrible advice and shaming out there about how little sleep we need. However, we won’t know if we are one of the 15% sleepless elite until we develop dementia or not.
Make sleep a priority.
Don’t skim on sleep to makeup for the lack of efficiency in workflow.
It’s not easy.
Don’t over-estimate our ability to just put life aside and turn-off— to just stop on a dime and get to bed. The process to effective sleep starts hours before bed time.
I originally thought all babies do is eat and sleep. But it turns out proper sleep isn’t an natural impulse. We need to be trained to develop healthy sleep habits.
Develop better sleep habits / rituals.
- Maintain consistent sleep schedules – make our body more efficient towards sleep
- De-Stress — Stress / Anxiety is the leading cause of insomnia.
- No screens — light not only interrupts our ability to sleep; but also our quality and duration
- No coffee or energy drinks after 2-3pm – it stays in our system
The motivation for sleep isn’t always obvious. Take an objective approach to making better, quality sleep a rituals, rather than a chore for half-ass, unproductive, in-efficient sleep.
Start now.
Lost sleep is lost opportunity. Although you can “catch up” on sleep debt, it takes around 7 days. You can never fully get back the forfeited benefits.
Also see: Rest