When people are asked what the most important things are in their lives, sleeping rarely comes up. Usually, you will get answers like love, good food, happiness, traveling, family, health, career and so on. And those things are unmistakably important.
But for literally everyone there is nothing as important than sleep and this for a very specific reason.
We spend on third of our lives with sleeping!
That is a lot and we have to do it daily! That makes sleeping an absolute paramount aspect for you and for me and for everyone else between Reykyavik and Melbourne no matter who or how old they are. The only thing which is even more important than sleeping is breathing. That's how important sleep is for us.
And although there's a big average, everyone sleeps differently of course when it comes to the duration, the sleeping times, the lying position and other environmental factors.
As fact remains that no-one can live without it - even for a short period of time. It is in the same league with breathing! If you stop sleeping, you will go insane and then you will die.
Just because we are unconscious while sleeping, it doesn't mean it's not important, therefore check your sleeping patterns
Sleep has the purpose to give our brain time to recreate and give the body time to relax. I won't go into the details its evolutionary advantages and necessities, it is enough to assume that the human (and other mammal) bodies are such complex constructions that they need regular downtimes with low impulses.
A non-relaxing sleep can therefore be very harmful for your life. If you are not relaxed in the morning but stressed out, you will quite likely have a bad day and do you daily tasks in a nervous and erratic way, which is usually accompanied by making mistakes with being unfriendly to others. As soon as the trigger for the bad sleep is gone, the bad mood and the induced stress are all gone again.
Of course, a persons problems - or just the fact that you aren't capable of improving yourself - can have a multitude of root causes. But sleeping is not just of a paramount importance and takes up a lot of time, it also directly and fundamentally affects our daily life without that we realize it.
The problems in your life (and the lives of those around you!) begin, when the trigger for a bad sleep does not go away again. That is why it should always be checked that your sleep is ok. Something that you spend one quarter to one third of your life with is definitively worth checking.
When improving your life, don't forget improving the things you do when you don't know what you are doing
Usually, when finding ways to improve your life, you quickly get to a point where it is about changing details. The day only has 24 hours and when you concentrate on the 16 hours that you are awake, there is a limited amount of time to organize or reorganize.
Just think of your daily morning routine with brushing your teeth, showering, eating breakfast and checking some news. That takes about 30-60 minutes or some 5% of your day but the optimizing potentials are fairly limited. It's not different with other things like buying groceries, washing your clothes or driving to work.
But then there is this huge goldmine of time in the form of the time that is spent with sleeping which takes up by far more time than anything else.
Improving your sleep has many aspects
A good and refreshing sleep may not lead to a huge improvement of your daily life - at least not in the short term - but it can definitively remove a lot of negative aspects that you carry with you during the day. Less stress, more focus, a fresher (and more honest) smile and maybe a better mood on average. Usually, it doesn't even cost you much or anything at all.
How you can accomplish a better sleeping pattern is fully up to you. There are simply too many factors to account for biologically, mentally and environmentally as that there could be a one fits all solution. Here are some areas, where you might test and change something:
- Snoring: Very bad and very common, but can be fixed and it definitively pays off!
- The sensual setting of your bedroom: Light, noise, temperature, smell, TV/radio/computer
- The mattress firmness (and quality): I always thought I needed a soft one, but then by coincidence I found out that I sleep much better on a board, seriously.
- Fresh air: It's like trying to learn in a room with bad air, doesn't work
- Mosquitoes: There's a trick: take a bowl of water, put a tea light on the water and a drop of dish liquid in the water -> the light will attract mosquitoes and the dish liquid reduces the water tension -> the mosquitoes try to land and drown
- Sleeping alone in the room: Partners in the room can be very distracting
- Sleeping times: Maybe you need half an hour more or even less and maybe going to bed at 9pm is better than 11pm (or the other way around)?
- Naps during the day: I highly recommend Autogenic training, it's sort of a self-hypnosis and you literally have to do nothing at all for it (and which is why I like it). AT is a great relaxer, but there are a lot of other "napping techniques" out there, or if you are religious: Try praying, it actually helps.
- Cleanliness before bedtime: This is not (necessarily) just showering, but watching TV, Internet, eating, cigarettes, alcohol and other stimulants. Maybe you should restrain from using them before bedtime.
- Sleep/dream diary: Write down what you dream about, when you went to bed and when you woke up. Over time, it may show you pattern in your life you haven't seen before.
This list is surely not complete, but more meant as suggestions where to look at. If you know other areas to improve, let me know in the comments.
Also, the list reads like a how-to if you can't sleep or already do have a bad sleep and you think, 'oh well, I can't complain about my sleeping routine', but even if things are ok - and I cannot stress this often enough - sleep takes up a significant amount of our time that it is foolish to think you can ignore it.
It's just like with teeth. When you think you have good ones you still have to brush them and see the dentist regularly. Otherwise you will be very surprised in 10 years.
All very successful individuals only sleep a few hours per day
I don't know if there are studies out there that prove or disprove my theory, but I have the strong impression that (financial) success in life is tightly connected to the sleep and downtimes you need during the day. The more sleep and the more mental and physical breaks you need, the less success you will have. It is just the other way around with little sleep and few breaks.
This follows a very logic assumption: When you don't sleep much and don't need many breaks, there is more time to learn and work. Hence, you can earn more money than an others with comparable skills and physical and mental abilities. Of course this is not a straight line, but it would be very strange, if there was no strong correlation between these factors.
In fact, sometimes people in positions of political or economic power talk about their sleep and it's usually not more than 6 hours. At least I haven't heard of anyone among the functional elites who sleeps 10 hours straight and needs 4 extra half hour breaks during the day. Such people usually get sorted out somewhere in the lower to middle ranks of the career ladder depending on their other talents and how they've learned to cope.
Unfortunately, you can't manipulate the naturally given amount of sleep, but you can always optimize what you have been given.
Even if very talented, if you need too much sleep, you can't get anywhere. Is that's the reaspn why there are drugs out there?
Modafinil is something, that you should probably know about. It's a drug developed to treat narcolepsy, a disease that causes uncontrolled sleeping attacks. One nickname for Modafinil is "manager drug", because when you are healthy and take it when for example tired from jet-lag, you can concentrate another 8 hours without a break.
In difference to other substances (usually illegal ones like cocaine) it doesn't get you addicted and doesn't affect you mentally or physically. Given the drastic impact of the drug it is surprisingly harmless. This is not meant as an advice to start using this drug to improve your success. Personally, I am very skeptical about using drugs generally and I try to avoid them as often as I can. But it would be disingenuous not to mention them or insist on their exclusively evil nature. Everything has two sides and this also counts for drugs - and drugs, yes, they can speed up the process, it's just that the price you usually pay is very high.
People who are willing to take that step and start doing drugs for anything else than getting healthy again will surely not refrain from doing so just because someone on Steeemit said so in some article. And everyone else knows the rules.
Look at those who already successful and you will find many with a burn out
You often read about very successful people who turn out as drug addicts. Some of them use drugs to become more creative (think of Brian Wilson who's genius exploded with the help of LSD) and a lot of them - usually it is sensitive but somehow broken singers - become addicted to heroine, but many artists, top managers, politicians and other public figures end up on cocaine or amphetamines, because they tried to increase their productivity.
In German politics, just alone in the past four years there were three cases of that and there are many more rumored. They don't necessarily do those drugs because they are fun, but because their workload (and also responsibility) can be so extreme that they cannot keep up if they just stick to what they are naturally capable of doing.
It can be extremely frustrating when you realize that you are much more talented than others in something. You think you should be at the top, but somehow the others get done two or three times as much as you. That is the moment, when too many start thinking about tweaking their body and mental status.
When you reach this point, better think twice about the costs and benefits of what you have in mind and if you are still willing to go for it, try Modafinil before you try cocaine. I think that is a fair advice.
Just never forget, improving your sleep is not about chasing potentials, but about removing unnecessary risks from your life Overall, you should try to become happy and not the best. If the latter happens, it's worth nothing unless you are also happy with yourself. Too many who are very successful can confirm you this.
I wish you all a Good Night!