Habit #6

Get at least 7 hours of sleep a night

The Why

According to a recent Gallup poll, 40% of Americans get less than 7 hours of sleep a night, which might sound reasonable until you look at the results for 1942, when only 11% of Americans fell into that same category. Indeed, there are a number of factors that could be contributing to this rise over the past 75 years. The pervasiveness of late-night television, increasingly busy schedules, and the struggle to find work-life balance can lead people to withdrawal more and more time from the ever-available “Sleep” account. I mean, sleeping a 1/3 of your life away seems like a waste of time. How necessary can that really be?

Dr. John Medina, developmental molecular biologist and author of book Brain Rules, wrote “Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity,” There is even evidence in his book to support the idea that our brains use sleep as an opportunity to upload and replay information that we gathered the previous day. So in short, sleeping well can actually make us smarter! From a physical standpoint, our bodies also benefit from sleep. Catching enough z’s has been associated with maintaining a healthy weight, lowering stress, faster recovery from injury, and decreased fatigue (surprise!)

The How

So how does one go about getting more sleep? This is not as simple as my other habits, in regard to the time frame required. Most of my other habits only take a few minutes each day. So I will look to an unlikely source for my sleep inspiration, my two boys. They are excellent sleepers, in part, because their mother and I made them that way. In following the principles of a sleep schedule, we are now able to put them down at 8:00 pm each night and they will sleep until roughly 7:00 am. So why can’t this principle work for me? While I’m not going to call my parents up to put me to bed each night, I will attempt to establish a consistent bed time (say 10:00 pm). This time will allow me to get at least 7 hours of sleep, even during the earliest mornings I have to wake. I will also attempt this on weekends. I don’t magically let my 2 year old stay up late because it’s a Saturday night, so it couldn’t hurt if I followed suit.