The Importance of Sleep

If you want to be sharp, focused, creative and emotionally strong you need sleep. Not less of it. Not poor quality. Not “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” You need real sleep. Every night. Without an excuse. It needs to be one of your top priorities.

In today’s hustle & bustle world, sleep is often the first thing we sacrifice. We stay up later to do more. We wear tired eyes like a trophy. We confuse being busy with being successful and little by little, we pay the price in productivity, mood and health.

Sleep is not a weakness. It’s a strategy.

Have You Heard the Story: The Fall That Woke Her Up?

She had it all.

Power, influence, prestige. A media empire built from scratch. Best selling books, TV appearances, political commentary. A name that could open any door in the world of business or politics.

Arianna Huffington was the founder of The Huffington Post. One of the most visited news websites in the world. If you measured success by productivity, she was the gold standard.

Four hours of sleep? That was plenty.

Coffee by the gallon, emails by the hundreds, interviews, panels, deadlines, meetings and then more deadlines.

She wore exhaustion like a badge of honor. Like so many do.

One morning in 2007, her body finally said: “Enough.”

She doesn’t remember falling.

But she remembers waking up in a pool of her own blood.

She had collapsed in her office. Face first. Smashing her cheekbone on the edge of her desk. A broken bone, a cut above her eye and a trip to the hospital. MRIs, CT scans and the fear of what might come next.

But what came next was clarity.

It wasn’t a stroke. It wasn’t a heart attack. It wasn’t even a tumor.

It was burnout. Exhaustion.

Her body had been sending signals for years. Fatigue, brain fog, short temper, memory lapses. But like so many of us chasing success, she ignored them.

Until she couldn’t.

That’s when she started asking the questions most of us avoid.

• What’s the point of success if I’m too tired to enjoy it?

• What’s the value of success if it costs me my health?

• Why am I starving myself of sleep?

She stepped way back.

She read the science. She studied sleep. She learned that peak performance didn’t come from doing more, it came from recovering.

In true Arianna fashion, she didn’t just fix her own life.

She wrote The Sleep Revolution, which became a New York Times Best Seller.

She launched Thrive Global, a company dedicated to helping people avoid the very burnout that almost cost her everything.

Today, she’s on a mission, not to tell you how to hustle harder but to show you how to rest smarter.

Do You Know Why Sleep Isn’t Optional?

A good night’s sleep does more than just help you feel rested. It repairs muscles, consolidates memory, regulates hormones, boosts your immune system, helps cognitive function and revitalizes your whole system. Skipping sleep isn’t just a bad habit. It is the ultimate body and mind building time. Did you know that a person can actually die from lack of sleep? Sleep deprivation can increase the risk of heart disease, cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes, depression and impair cognitive function.

Early to Bed, Early to Rise

We’ve heard the saying, Early to Bed, Early to Rise, but few live it.

Getting to bed early gives you a head start on tomorrow. You wake up sharper, before the world rushes in. You start the day with intention, not reaction. You get time to think, plan and breathe. That quiet hour before everyone else is up? That’s gold.

I try to get up at 5 o’clock every morning. Sometimes it is 4 a.m. and other times it is 3 a.m. When I wake up at 3:00 I blame it on what I ate the day before. I am one of those people that is a firm believer of the statement, “You are what you eat.” If I had eaten processed food or too many carbs, which leads to inflammation, this will then cause my breathing to interrupt my sleep pattern.

But you can’t enjoy that early morning edge if you’re dragging yourself out of bed after just a few hours of sleep.

Sleep needs to be scheduled and protected. It needs to be non-negotiable.

Why Does Total Darkness Matter?

Here’s one most people overlook, sleeping in total darkness.

Your body produces melatonin which is the sleep hormone, in response to darkness. Even a small amount of light, a nightlight, the glow of your phone screen, a digital alarm clock, can disrupt melatonin production. That means your sleep isn’t as deep, your brain doesn’t recover as fully and you wake up feeling groggy.

Pitch black is the goal. Here’s how to get there:

• Remove or cover electronics with lights.

• Use blackout curtains

• Get rid of nightlights.

• Turn your phone face-down, better yet, leave it outside the bedroom.

• Use a simple battery-powered alarm clock without bright LEDs.

Professional athletes that are trying to train, recover, and perform use total darkness to get their bodies and minds to function to their full potential. Even those of us that are not professional athletes need to treat ourselves like we are. What I mean by that is an athlete wants to be able to perform at their highest. They eat the super foods, train right and you guessed it…get the best night sleep possible. We should be looking to achieve the same thing. There is no reason why we don’t deserve to treat our bodies and our mind in the same manner.

No matter what you are trying to do; start your own business, going to school, finding a cure for the common cold, doing the 9-5 grind or being a stay at home parent, you need to make sleep one of your top 3 priorities in your life. The thing is, a good, quality night sleep will help to give you that extra boost so you won't need to drink those crappy energy drinks that are not good for you and we will be able to rely on just sleep to get what we need.

One Last Thing

If you’ve been pushing too hard, sleeping too little, thinking you’ll rest when the work is done, STOP.

The work will never be done.

But you can be.

Burnout doesn’t show up with a warning label. It sneaks in while you’re trying to impress, trying to win, trying to prove.

Sleep isn’t for the weak. It’s for the strong who want to stay strong and even get stronger.

So tonight, shut it down. Get to bed early. Turn off the lights and give your mind and body the deep reset they’ve been asking for.

Success isn’t just about how hard you work.

It’s about how well you recover.

If this post gave you value, please share it with a friend who needs to hear it.

Thank you for your support. It is greatly appreciated.

-Rob

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