Sleep Your Way To The Top!

Yes, you read that right.

Those were the words that came out of the mouth of the Forbes 2014 52nd Most Powerful Woman In The World, Arianna Huffington, during her keynote this weekend in front of over 4,000 female bloggers, including myself.

She began by telling us that she used to be an extreme workaholic, working 18 hour days, until the one day she experienced burnout at its worst. In 2007, she was at home talking on the phone and replying to emails. Next thing she knew, she woke up in a pool of blood. She passed out from extreme exhaustion. The result was a broken cheekbone and a huge wake up call.

She urged us by saying that if we want to succeed at anything in life, we must, “Sleep our way to the top!” Since her exhaustion incident, she now sleeps eight hours a night, 90% of the time. Let me remind you. This is Arianna Huffington, possibly one of the busiest women in the world, but she makes sleep a priority.

On average, how many hours of sleep are you getting?

William Dement, a pioneer in sleep research says, “Millions of us are living a less than optimal life and performing at a less than optimal level, impaired by an amount of sleep debt that we’re not even aware we carry. We are not healthy unless our sleep is healthy. After all the research I’ve done on sleep problems over the past four decades, my most significant finding is that ignorance is the worst sleep disorder of them all. People lack the most basic information about how to manage their sleep, leading to a huge amount of unnecessary suffering.”

Unfortunately, we live in a society that praises sleep deprivation. We pride ourselves on being able to “power-through” our day on just a few hours of sleep. It’s almost as if we secretly think the busier we look, the more important we feel. We’ve created a culture of workaholics, where it’s simply normal to tell people how busy we are, how tired we feel, and how we need to “catch up on sleep” this weekend.

Do you feel like you’ve been catching up on sleep for as long as you can remember?

If you want to be more active, productive, energetic, happy, healthy, function at your highest capacity, sustain concentration, and be able to regulate your food intake, you need to get a full night’s sleep.

Today, add up about how many hours of sleep you got this past week (Monday – Sunday). Then give yourself a gift of more sleep this coming week. Give yourself a realistic goal. For example, let’s say for the past 7 days you slept a total of 40 hours. Maybe this week you commit to getting just 2 more hours of sleep.

By commenting below, tell me how many more hours of sleep will you gift yourself with this week!

Next week, we’ll continue the conversation on the importance of optimal Sleep, Food, Mood, and Exercise – Stay tuned!