Ultimate Day Step 2: Set Your Sleep
“Sleep needs to be respected for its power to improve your learning, creativity, productivity, problem solving, mental agility, mental health and quality of your personal and professional relationships. ”
Crafting your ultimate day includes setting yourself up for success well before dawn breaks. That means slotting sleep into your timeline in an intentional and thoughtful way. And for the record, what I call sleep isn’t crashing on the sofa at 1 am in front of the TV, stumbling into bed at 5 am, and then fighting for clarity and coherence when the morning alarm rings – and for the rest of the day as well. That is not going to move you toward the vision you crafted in step one.
If you’re going to create an ultimate day timeline that runs from, say, 6 am until 10 pm, that means you are getting to bed around 10 pm and getting somewhere between seven and eight hours of sleep. Or maybe you tend to rise later and sleep later. Whatever the case, sleep needs to be respected for its power to improve your learning, creativity, productivity, problem solving, mental agility, mental health and quality of your personal and professional relationships.
You can’t live optimally on sub-optimal sleep. Let me give you a glimpse into the science of sleep.
1. Overnight is when learning happens, because that’s the time when we lay down memory. There is no learning without memory of the day’s lessons. Students who sleep more perform better on tests and exams than students who stay up later cramming in more content – even when they legitimately cover more material. The sleepers retain their knowledge; the crammers lose it.
2. If you don’t sleep well, you don’t eat well. You may have noticed that you eat more, and make poorer decisions, when you’re tired. Not only do you crave “comfort foods” because you feel lousy and want to self-soothe, but the foods you gravitate toward tend to be nutrient poor. There are a lot of reasons for this, and one is that sleep controls leptin and ghrelin, the hormones in control of appetite and satiety. Leptin decreases your appetite and ghrelin increases it. When we’re sleep-deprived, ghrelin goes up.
3. I’ll leave you with this final fact on sleep: it washes your brain. It cleans it for the next day. It gets out the grime and freshens up the whole cerebral system. Scientists have discovered that when we sleep, the billions of cells inside of our brains shrink by about 60%. They do this to open space for cerebral spinal fluid to wash through the brain. This process clears out viruses, bacteria, broken down cells and waste products, driving them towards blood vessels so they drain away from the brain. Only when you enter a deep sleep and delta waves prevail, does this work occur. We are also learning that this cleaning process helps prevent disease and disorders, like Alzheimer's disease. It also reduces inflammation, which helps to prevent cardiovascular disease, cancer, and depression.
Bottom line: we need to sleep well for optimal recovery and regeneration – to create the ultimate day and the best possible life.
The ideal night’s sleep is five complete 90-minute sleep cycles. That's between seven and eight hours. Evidence shows this is the formula for achieving the lowest risk of all-cause mortality. For the longest and most productive life, train your brain to go through five sleep cycles every night.
It may take time to set up good sleep patterns. Irregular sleep is like smoking – it’s a habit that is difficult to break and has detrimental effects. The damage accumulates. However, the second that you stop smoking, your body starts healing. It’s the same with sleep. As soon as you start sleeping well, your brain starts healing.
Today’s Exercise: Set your Sleep
Fill in the Step 2: Set Your Sleep exercise on pages 4-5 in the Ultimate Day Workbook.
Today’s Bonus Podcast
Check out this podcast Here with renowned inspirational speaker, writer, and film maker Philip McKernan titled "Are you Destined for More?".
The information and advice provided in this program is intended to assist you with improving your performance, as well as your general health. It is not intended and should not be used in place of advice from your own physician or for treatment or diagnosis of any specific health issue. By participating in this program you acknowledge that undertaking any new health, diet and/or exercise regime involves certain inherent risks, that you assume such risks, and that you release Wells Performance Inc. from any responsibility or claim relating to such participation.