![]() Innovation and creativity, after all, is a byproduct of associational thinking - connecting dots between disparate bodies of knowledge, and as Steve Jobs noted in his Stanford commencement speech, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward”. REM sleep connects those facts and skills with each other, helping us to develop a more accurate model of how the world works and become more innovative and creative. NREM supports the storage and strengthening of new facts and skills. Two Types of SleepĢ - REM (rapid eye movement) aka ‘dream sleep’ ![]() If so, you’re probably not getting enough sleep. How Do I Know If I’m Not Getting Enough Sleep?ġ - Can you fall back asleep at 10 am or 11 am after waking up earlier that day?Ģ - Can you function without caffeine before noon?ģ - Would you sleep right on through your alarm clock if it failed to turn on? If you get 7 hours of sleep for an entire week, the effect on your body and brain is the equivalent of pulling an all nighter. If you’re an entrepreneur or executive trying to battle the afternoon crash by reaching for a cup of coffee, Walker warns us that caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours which means if you have a cup of coffee at 3 pm, you’ll still have 50% of that caffeine in your system circa 8 pm to 10 pm, so that difficulty getting a good night’s rest might have a lot to do with your mid-afternoon coffee. ![]() The same goes for the old maxim, ‘live each day like it’s your last’ - well, I don’t know about you but if I lived each day like it was my last, it would very quickly be my actual last day. “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system and more than doubles your risk of cancer.” The shorter your sleep the shorter your life-span.įor many years, I pointed to the Bon Jovi song, “Sleep When I Am Dead” as an anthem of sorts, but if you adopt this mindset, Walker warns, you will be dead sooner and the quality of that shorter life will be poorer. I couldn’t fathom how my fellow revelers would sleep right on through to the mid-afternoon.īut the science suggests that routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system and more than doubles your risk of cancer.Īnd the thing about thinking six hours is enough is you don’t know you’re sleep deprived when you’re sleep deprived. During my twenties and early thirties, when I was more inclined to head out for a big night (I’m now 35 and such nights are now a rarity), I’d think nothing of waking up at 9am on a Saturday morning after having gone to bed at 5am, and venture out for a 10km run, thinking I was invincible and that it was the best way to recover and enjoy the day. I’d judge people who slept until 7 am and write them off as lazy and undisciplined. Utterances like “I can perform well on six hours a night”, and “eight hours is a pipe-dream” are common.Īnd I get it, I said the same thing for almost ten years, willing myself out of bed at 5 am for an early-morning workout, after having slept somewhere between six and seven hours. Sadly, two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep (which means that there is a 67% chance that you are one of them). So basically, all the important stuff your brain does. Sleeping enriches a diversity of functions related to learning, memory, creativity, decision making, and emotional regulation. Why We SleepĪccording to Matt Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California and author of Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams, there are numerous reasons why people need to be getting eight hours of sleep a night, and several that stand out as being of utmost importance to entrepreneurs and leaders of teams. Far from the rhetoric of Jocko Willink, a wealth of sleep research provides damning evidence and an overwhelming body of knowledge to suggest that “if you don’t snooze, you lose.” “If you don’t snooze, you lose”. In fact, it can do us a massive disservice insofar as the quality of all of our waking hours is concerned. It’s a case of being ‘up before the enemy’ we’re told.īut being up earlier and having more waking hours in the day does not mean that we have more quality hours. Listen to the likes of leadership coach and retired Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink, and you will be up at the crack of 4:34am, you’ll proceed to splash some cold water on your face and “get after it”, despite every fiber in your body, more likely than not, willing you to go back to sleep.
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