Sleeping Your Way to Success

I made an article about the morning habits of successful people and what I noticed was, generally, it seemed that successful people had less sleep compared to their less successful counterparts. But as I’ve said, there are only a handful of people, 1 – 3% of the total population, who are lucky enough to operate with only 4 hours of sleep. The rest of us just need to squeeze in 6-8 hours every night.

I’ve read a quote before that said “Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.” And Thomas Dekker is correct. When we sleep, our bodies recuperate from all of the stresses of the day. In the lying position, our blood can circulate better to all parts of our bodies, especially the brain which needs most of it since it was drained throughout the day. Sleep is the time where our muscles recover, it also consolidates what we’ve learned when we were awake. It helps with memory, metabolism, immunity, and a lot of different things, and yet, most of us still say “you snooze, you lose.”

No. “You snooze, you win.”

We all have this belief that less sleep correlates to more success, but it’s not entirely true. Sure, people who wake up earlier than usual get more things done when the sun is still up, but its 2013 and we’re not farmers, we don’t need the sunlight to work.

And for those people who really need to wake up early, there are two ways to make up for lost sleep, naps and sleeping earlier. People also think that you’re lazy when you nap, on the contrary, people who nap at work for 25-30 minutes (any longer and it will disrupt your sleep cycle) do better at work because they get relaxed and get more things done.

If you sleep the right amount of hours every day, you will reap a lot of benefits and avoid all of nasty things that you can acquire from lack of sleep. Just look at the mirror, eyes are sunken with eye bags, face is puffy, skin is dull, and that’s only the outside. Your internal organs also suffer when you have lack of sleep especially your brain which never stops working. When you have lack of sleep you get moody and irritable, which nobody likes. Chemicals in the brain that regulate emotions don’t also function well so our emotions go flat and it ruins our relationships whether it’s for family or business. We can’t concentrate with what we’re doing so we jump from task to task aimlessly wandering for things that we could actually do.  We forget things and we are more likely to be addicted to illegal substances when we don’t have enough sleep.

So bottom line is, sleep. You really need it. If you can’t go for the straight 8 hours then take naps or a power nap, or a power charge, or a beauty rest, whatever you want to call it, do it. It will improve every aspect of your life even your business.