Quality Sleep: The Ultimate Performance Enhancer

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”_Benjamin Franklin 

‘Sleep is for suckers!’ This is a slang of the industrious class in some quarters.

However, with time, I believe it will soon be replaced by ‘sleep is for winners.’

Now, many active people consistently deprive themselves of sleep, assuming that, it is an optimal way to live a more productive life. And for a long time, I engaged in that line of thinking. 

Until recently, I used to think that to achieve more you need to sleep very little on a daily basis. This misguided pattern of thought caused me to go through my days with a high degree of cumulative stress. 

Having learned better, it is now clear to me that quality sleep is necessary for our mental, emotional and physical vitality. 

We can’t cheat nature. Our Creator has made sleep essential for us to live and function; God alone is the only One who is always at His best without sleep, without slumber. 

This article is a call for us to make sleep a priority again in our lives as did our ancestors. In modern culture, the basic human need to rest has been dismissed for far too long, making missing sleep an erroneous sign of superiority. 

Hundreds of ambitious people now use their precious nocturnal hours for ‘superior activities,’ throwing their wellbeing in the rear. This, however, has not been without a huge cost, both in financial and non-financial terms.

For example, in America alone, research from the Rand Corporation reveals that inadequate sleep is costing the States more than four hundred billion dollars a year.  

Imagine the cost on the entire world economy!

You see, sleep deprivation will backfire in the long run.  No matter how strong you think you are; you need quality sleep to stay healthy and function at your highest level.

In this direction, Matthew Walker, the author of ‘Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams’ discovers that:

“Routinely sleeping less than six hours a night demolishes your immune system.” 

In case you don’t know Walker, here is a brief introduction. He is currently a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. And he was previously a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. His sole focus is to help improve our overall health through quality sleep. 

As evidenced by his research, sleep deprivation will eventually tell on our physical, social and economic health. We really can’t afford not to sleep well.

If you are among those who brag about working or studying late into the night, I hope this piece will cause an instant change in your thinking.

As it turns out, nothing is more critical to our wellness, vitality and effectiveness than good, quality sleep. 

To be clear, I am not arguing that sleeping excessively will make us perform better. But my argument centers on the fact that the right amount of quality sleep is a sure driver of peak performance, and it is essential for good health.

Note that while we sleep, our system flushes away the toxins that were accumulated all through the day. Deep sleep enables us to wash away the scraps of stress that can slow us down the next day. 

Undoubtedly, quality sleep is necessary to boost our immune system, replenish depleted energy and enhance our brain power. Studies have shown that sleep deprivation does the exact opposite, making us more susceptible to fatigue, sloth and illness.

Now let’s dive into what we can start doing today to make changes on how we can get better sleep.

Six Tips to Get Quality Sleep

To improve the quality of your sleep, adhere to the following tips on a daily basis:

Maintain a good balance between nutrition and exercise during the day. 

Establish a pre-sleep routine

Maintain a comfortable sleeping environment 

Don’t eat too much or too soon before bedtime (or leave a two-hour window between your bedtime and supper)

Maintain a regular sleep-wake schedule

Reduce or eliminate bright light when you are ready to snooze.

Please note that these tips have been carefully extracted from the wisdom of foremost experts and sleep psychologists around the world; so don’t ignore them.    

     

Further peep into the book, ‘Why We Sleep’ reveals the paradox of overworking.

Walker writes: “The irony that employees miss is that when you are not getting enough sleep, you work less productively, thus need to work longer to accomplish a goal.”

And he continues with an allegorical question: “Why try to boil a pot of water on medium heat when you could do so in half the time on high (heat)?”

In other words, sleep deprivation is not really a smart way to maximize your time.

The key lesson here is this: whatever your workloads, try not to make a habit of prioritizing them at the expense of your sleep. 

Yes, to make the most of time, you need to cut-off distractions and eliminate non-essential things in your day. But try to make sleep a priority, because it is.

Indeed, quality sleep is a good investment for our long-term health and effectiveness.

Finally, I hope these lessons will prod us to start making better choices with regard to how we sleep per night.