Improve Your Sleep Tonight to Wake Up Full of Positive Energy Tomorrow
A lack of sleep negatively affects you, your relationships, the clarity of your thoughts, and your ability to achieve success.
For years I have been draining hours from my time in bed. My mind is always racing and for me personally, sleeping has always seemed to be a waste of time.
If I could, I would stay up all night writing, reading, thinking, training, and living. But the reality is that our internal processor, just like muscles, tendons, and ligaments, needs rest.
Brain cells need to regenerate for another day of stain, stress, and noise, plaguing us, often without us even realizing it.
I always woke up full of energy, but after lunch, I was already yawning. After 5 pm, my energy completely dropped. I had to take my third coffee to keep my eyes open.
Until one day, my head almost exploded- I suddenly went blind for a moment and felt dizzy. I knew exactly why it was happening. And for several days following, I went to bed early. My body and mind were so tired that I stayed in bed for hours and hours.
This episode was one year ago and since then, I haven’t stolen one more minute from my sleep. We cannot play around when it comes to our health, much less with our brains.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 35 percent of people are sleep deprived, which means that 1 in 3 people aren’t getting enough sleep on a regular basis.
I have been playing sports since I was a kid and my body was always in good shape. But last year when I was sleep-deprived, I started to feel changes in my metabolism. My belly started to bulge like never before.
According to a study done by the University of Chicago Medicine, sleep is a crucial component in energy metabolism. In this research, scientists found that if you are sleep-deprived, your fat cells may not function properly.
When we’re young, we think we have endless energy. And that belief lingers until middle age. The problem is that as time goes by, your body begins to show signs of wear and your brain needs to recover all the thousands of hours you have deprived yourself of deep rest.
It’s a complete delusion to think that by enjoying the day to the point of not resting, that your days are more productive.
It is precisely the opposite. By resting properly and allowing your brain to recover all its functions, you start to be more effective in everything you do in your day-to-day routines.
If you sleep correctly, sleep can be your secret weapon.
1. Sleep is the best meditation.
Before I went into my sleep recovery, I didn’t know about quality sleep or restorative sleep phases.
Usually, when you’re ignorant about something, you either keep repeating the wrong patterns, or you try to learn how things work and do them the right way.
Each sleep stage plays a hugely important part in allowing your mind and body to wake up refreshed.
Sleep is not a uniform activity. Rather, over the course of the night, your sleep is made up of several sleep cycles, which are composed of four to six individual stages.
On a typical night, a person goes through four to six sleep cycles, but not all sleep cycles are the same length. On average they last 90 minutes each.
It’s typically for sleep cycles to change as you progress through the night sleep.
The first sleep cycle (Stage1) is often the shortest, ranging from 70 to 100 minutes, while later cycles tend to fall between 90 and 120 minutes.
“During NREM (non-rapid eye movement)1 sleep, the body hasn’t fully relaxed, though body and brain activities start to slow with periods of brief movements (twitches). There are light changes in brain activity associated with falling asleep in this stage.” — Dr. Nilong Vyas
The second sleep cycle (Stage2) can last for 10–25 minutes during the first sleep cycle, and each NREN2 stage can become longer during the night. A person usually spends about half their sleep time in NREN2 sleep.
During the second sleep cycle, the body enters into a more subdued state. The body temperature drops, muscles relax, and breathing and heart rate slow down. At the same time, brain waves manifest a new pattern and eye movement stops.
The third sleep cycle (Stage3) is also known as deep sleep. In this phase, it’s harder to wake someone up. The body relaxes, breathing rate decreases, and muscle tone decreases too.
During this period, brain activity has an identifiable pattern of what are known as delta waves. Usually, NREN3 is called delta sleep or short-wave sleep.
“Experts believe that this stage is critical to restorative sleep, allowing for bodily recovery and growth. It may also bolster the immune system and other key bodily processes. Even though brain activity is reduced, there is evidence that deep sleep contributes to insightful thinking6, creativity7, and memory.” — Dr. Nilong Vyas
In the fourth sleep cycle (REM i.e. rapid eye movement) the brain activity picks up, nearing levels experienced when you’re awake. Scientists believe REM sleep is also essential to cognitive functions like memory, learning, and creativity.
The fourth sleep cycle, REM is known for being when the most vivid dreaming occurs, which explains the significant uptick in brain activity.
Typically, you don’t enter a REM sleep stage until you’ve been asleep for about 90 minutes.
“Failure to obtain enough of both deep sleep and REM sleep may explain some of the profound consequences of insufficient sleep on thinking, emotions, and physical health.” — Dr. Nilong Vyas
2. Create a consistent schedule.
Netflix and Disney Plus are the main culprits for me getting to bed so late.
Today I managed to get up from the couch and go to bed at 11 pm, but before committing myself to healthier sleep habits, I never went to bed before 1 am.
It was impossible not to walk around with my head completely scattered. Creativity was intermittent, I had great difficulty maintaining concentration on my writing for a long time, and after mid-afternoon, it was a burden to work; preparing dinner for my daughters was a difficult task and my demeanor was awful.
Exhaustion defeated me every day. And I (stupidly) never had the courage to commit myself to solve this problem. I kept putting it off until one day my body almost collapsed.
Making a non-negotiable agreement with ourselves is essential for restorative sleep, and for the brain to wake up completely restored from the wear and tear of the previous day.
3. My bedroom is mine, and I am his.
After I committed to being highly disciplined with my sleep schedule, I started to read before falling asleep. As a reading addict, I found out that I can read another book per month just by being in bed at 11 pm.
The most valuable thing in life is time.
You can have more money, but unfortunately, it won’t buy you more time. Time is something scarce. As time goes by, you have less of it. Using time in more productive ways than entertainment drastically changed my life.
In December 2020 I decided I wanted to be a full-time writer. So I committed to myself to work tail off to be the best freelance writer I could.
I bought two whiteboards and filled them with notes on my short-term, medium, and long-term goals.
Even today, I have written my financial objective for December 2022 at the top of one of the charts:
$6,000 per month.
One of the first things I knew I had to do when I committed myself to higher goals was to be physically and psychologically at my top capacity.
The first thing I thought was I have to manage my sleeping time. I’m always tired.
One of the most important things I realized was that there are no free lunches. You have to grab onto life’s hardest challenges and start flying.
That was what I started to do. And it happened in my bedroom. A place where I hated to be suddenly become the most peaceful, mindful, and cozy place I could enjoy.
I changed the curtains, placed another bookshelf right next to my bed, and made sure that the room was in total darkness at night. Fortunately, I live on the top floor of the building, so silence is guaranteed.
I can’t entirely explain the difference I felt to you, but I can tell you that with deep sleep, my brain could work for hours on end, I was highly linked to a flow of ideas, and my capacity for concentration was fantastic.
As a result, I had surpassed all I had proposed to myself in only four months. My talents are being solicited for other’s projects and my followers read my writing attentively as I put out new pieces.
I’m finishing my new website, I was invited to write on a globally recognized platform, and I transformed from a tired, irritable, and unmotivated man into one who feels capable of conquering the universe.
This is all because I started to see my room as my refuge- a space where peace resides, where I end my days in happiness.
4. As you begin to heal the inner you, you alter your immune system.
According to the restorative sleep specialists over at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, proper sleep can make vaccines more effective. In these pandemic times, this is something that can make us consider the subject deeply.
How many people couldn’t fight the Covid-19 because of lack of sleep and its consequences?
“When your body gets the sleep it needs, your immune cells and proteins get the rest they need to fight off whatever comes their way — like colds or the flu.” (www.sclhealth.org)
Preventing Weight Gain
Have you ever heard of ghrelin? Ghrelin is a hormone that boosts your appetite if you don’t get enough sleep.
Have you ever heard of leptin? Leptin is the hormone that tells you you’re full. With a lack of sleep, your body decreases the production of leptin.
So, remember that late-night snack you go for? Try to avoid it and go to bed early instead.
5. Lack of sleep can be dangerous. Literally.
A recent study from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety concluded that you’re twice as likely to get in a car accident when you’re cruising with six to seven hours of sleep compared to if you get a full eight hours rest a night.
“Even though great days start the night before, the majority of today’s population is chronically sleep deprived and suffering from low-quality sleep.” — Sinem Günel
Sleep fewer than five hours and your chances of a crash are multiplied by four. Your reaction time slows way down when your brain isn’t fully rested.
Now, as an exercise, think of the number of small things you do per day that can be affected by your lack of sleep. You’ll quickly find out why some things don’t work out even after years of effort.
Relentless: Unceasingly intense, harsh or inflexible.
Do you know who Alexandra Zatarain is?
I didn’t know anything about Zatarain before I listen to Pomp’s podcast a few weeks ago. I was astonished by this woman and her wild spirit of entrepreneurship.
Alexandra Zatarain is a young Mexican entrepreneur that was working at a financial technology start-up in New York before she and her husband started a completely different project called Eight Sleep.
Eight Sleep is a company that makes products that improve your sleep through personalized temperature data, smarter health data, and patented technology.
If you visit their website, you’ll go nuts. Great images popping in front of your eyes and Tim Ferriss, the marketing guru, recommending the mattress he uses daily — The Pod Pro Cover.
Zatarain’s husband had sleep problems, so it was a natural byproduct to start thinking about creating a company that could help him with his issues.
Zatarain and her husband, Matteo Franceschetti, realized that most of their friends had sleep issues too. So they immediately start asking all kinds of questions about sleep to their friends.
They created a sleeping space where they did tests with their friends. As they started to prepare the pitch for their product, they would test it on friends and receive as much feedback as they could get.
They did their customer-discovery process with Matteo and their friends because it was an issue so common in their general population.
In their pitch to raise the first seed money, they brought a smart mattress to the space and had the brilliant slogan “Achieve your sleep fitness.”
They launched their crowdfunding and managed to raise $1 million.
Eight Sleep struggled at the beginning because people thought they were just selling smart mattresses, which was not the case. The company was born because they believed they could help people sleep better overall, but the message was not being communicated the best way.
They wanted to use deep technology to help people sleep better, so they built technology for sleep fitness. The moment they started to shift their message and their brand from mattresses to the overall picture, the company exploded.
Technology and artificial intelligence are in such a state of development that any company that starts with a good motto and vision paired with technologically advanced techniques, has a high probability of success.
Final Thoughts
After I got my sleeping fitness in shape, although not with the Eight Sleep mattress (yet), but with my own willpower and discipline, my life changed for the better and the good.
And if you doubt what I’m talking about, try it. Try sleeping eight hours a night for a full month, and then we’ll talk.
Technology is helping us in so many ways. I strongly believe we are facing an extraordinary technology disruption era in which information, knowledge, and technology are guiding us into another state as human beings.
As technology evolves, it tends to be deflationary, meaning, more people will get access to high-tech products like The Pod Pro Cover that, in a very personalized way, will help us to improve our quality of life.
It all starts with your brain, your cells, your breathing — your sleep.
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