If You Want More Success, Use This Simple Technique

It’s free and easy, but often ignored

Success isn’t measured by wealth, or status ranking amongst the people you know, or a perfect lifestyle of spotless self-improvement. We’re not in it for the money, it’s not a competition and we’re not self-improvement bots.

Success means something different to everyone. Here’s what I’m aiming for:

1. Freedom — the millions aren’t flooding in — yet — and that’s fine, I’m patient. What I’m really after is the freedom to do what I want with my time.

2. Getting Better — at the skills, relationships, projects I care about.

3. Feeling confident — that sense of knowing your values (what yo care about) getting better and having some control gives you self-confidence from within.

4. Health — physically, mentally, spiritually — living a life of purpose(s) helps with all of these.

5. The ability to think for yourself — not being conned by the common wisdoms of your workplace, or your media outlet, or your family — being able to look at your life and decide how to lead it the way you want it.

The Secret to Success

You’ll notice that the criteria for success are all personal and not comparative. they are matters of the self, how it grows, how it feels, how it thinks and how it acts.

All of the common self-help practices are going to help you with working out and then working towards your own idea of success, which will be a feeling and not a bunch of trophies. These things:

· Reading books

· Exercising

· Finding creative hobbies

· Working on side projects

· Limiting alcohol, drug, sugar, and T.V. consumption

And there’s another too, that underpins the possibility of all the others and allows the possibility of continued self-improvement. Let me run the Ad:

Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers your food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risks of heart attacks and strokes, not to mention diabetes. you’ll feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested? Mathew Walker

If it were a pill, people would spend fortunes large and small to buy it, yet it is free and readily available and still ‘chronically’ ignored.

This universal health provider is sleep.

That may sound a little cliché/banal but the science behind it is anything but. Mathew Walker discusses these processes in his book Why We Sleep: the New Science of Sleep and Dreams. There’s one really simple technique for getting all the sleep you need which I’ll share in a minute, but first —

How Much Sleep Do You Need?

Insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic.

In our modern, 24/7, technologically flood-lit lifestyles millions of us — around 70% of Adult Americans — are regularly sleep-deprived.

If you sleep less than 8 hours a night you are chronically sleep-deprived.

What Happens When You Sleep?

The brain moves back and forth between different stares of sleep during the night.

Non-REM sleep

This is deep sleep when your brain waves are much slower and deeper than they are during the day. In no REM sleep your brain is processing all the information received in your waking hours. Information is transferred from the hippocampus to the cortex, akin to emptying a USB onto a large hard drive. We transfer useful information from the day into a deeper memory bank, freeing up space for new information the next day. We also dump a lot of the information we don’t need. This process is vital in managing and organizing our emotional and intellectual lives. We could almost say that this processing is the real ‘us’ — an unconscious process whereby we decide what, from daily life, is important to us.

We store the useful, ditch the useless, and free up space to learn more the next day.

REM sleep

Is dream sleep. In this state, our brain waves are as shallow and rapid as they are during the waking state. This is because our sensory receptors are open as they are during the day but are watching images projected from memory now rather than seen in the external world. In this state of sleep, we review, watch again and experiment with the forms of our life, emotional and intellectual — our brain puts together possibilities and makes new connections between new information and older, stored information. We connect what we experience with what we have experienced in the past, emotionally and intellectually. We’re not just storing information now but using it, shaping it, being creative with it, and making new connections.

In dreams, we hallucinate, feel swings in our moods, confront hopes and fears and connect unconnected things. Our brain is making connections, learning, growing in a more focused way than it does during the day. This is because it doesn’t have to deal with the sensory stimuli of new information. It can process and synthesize. We move through a series of epiphanies, dream experiences that enhance our knowledge and define our inner self.

The Cycles of Sleep

If we receive information during the day, we reflect on it during deep non-REM sleep and we integrate it in REM sleep. It’s not an exaggeration to say that our mind is constructed during the night more than during the day.

Non-REM and REM sleep states alternate through the night but there is a dominance of Non-REM in the first part of a night’s sleep and a dominance of REM in the latter half. This means that if you go to bed too late into your natural circadian rhythm you will lose a good chunk of your Non REM sleep — you’ll wake up with a memory card full, processing incomplete… If you get up too early and break the circadian rhythm that way, you’ll cut out a lot of your REM and so you won’t have that time integrating that information.

So a whole night’s sleep is super important to us. Assuming we get food and water, sleep is the fuel for the body, the mind, spirit.

We will all have experienced the feeling of struggling to learn something at night — say a piano piece or a speech or a sports technique — and then sleeping and finding that magically the next day we can just do it. Sleep is doing the deep work of storing and integrating.

‘A problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.’ John Steinbeck

A Chronically Sleep Deprived Culture

It’s too easy, especially if we are ambitious and want to prove ourselves and get results fast, to cut into our sleeping time and make a habit of being sleep deprived. It is endemic, apparently, so even if you don’t think it particularly applies to you, it probably does. Unless you’re careful to make sure it doesn’t.

We won’t necessarily notice that all of our faculties get depleted. Returning to our idea of success as something we choose for ourselves, that relates only to our own choices and expectations, it’s clear to see that there is nothing in the world so important to the optimal running of ourselves and so to any prospect of ‘success’ as sleeping well and sleeping regularly.

Success is an internal feedback loop, a virtuous cycle — the energy running through that loop and the strength of its cord, comes from long, regular sleep.

So, How Do We Get More Sleep?

Number one tip.

If you don’t already, set a to-bed alarm.

Use the alarm app on your phone and set it to remind you to go to bed at least 8 hours before you need to get up (I go for 9). It will remind you an hour before it’s bedtime and you can start to wind down.

Regularity is king. The to-bed alarm will not only help you get enough sleep but will help you to be regular. Your body will establish regular circadian rhythms which will make sleep easier.

In that hour between being reminded of bedtime and going to sleep, wind yourself down in a darkening, cool, gadget-free bedroom/house. Dim lights in your house to let the mind know you’re getting towards sleep time. Read rather than look at screens, reduce activity, light, stimulation towards bedtime.

Mathew Walker gives other tips on how to sleep well in this video. I only want I want to emphasize the to-bed alarm here as it's been so simple and effective for me.

Final Thought

You decide what success is and whether or not you’re achieving it — it’s not out there, in the opinions of others, behind glittering showroom windows, in bank vaults, or in the stock exchange — it’s within your mind. A mind that is largely constructed whilst you sleep, when you reflect, store, connect, integrate. Yes, we want great habits and discipline during the day to help us steer our course through the sea of information, but it’s when we sleep that we build and repair the ship itself, draw up the maps and feed and clothe the crew.