We Are In The Midst Of A Sleep Renaissance

The above quote is fairly long, but I encourage you to read it in it’s entirety.

Dr. Matthew Walker is the world’s leading researcher on sleep.

Before his work, our knowledge of sleep and why it is important was essentially limited to experiential knowledge and a basic understanding of the different phases.

But we know so much more now than we did just 2 decades earlier.

In this post, I’m going to demonstrate why sleep is so important and give you some easy to follow tools to ensure you’re not self sabotaging literally every area of your health, wellness and performance.

Being Awake Is A Necessary Compromise For Life

That’s a strange concept to consider, so let me elaborate a bit.

Every second we are awake, our biology is breaking down.

Our cells deteriorate, toxins build up in our brain, our muscles break down and our performance suffers.

If we stay awake for too long, this takes a sharp and dramatic downward spiral

But when we sleep, everything repairs.

Muscle cells rebuild, the brain clears away the toxins and your mind works to file away important information and disregard what doesn’t serve you.

If Life Had Its Way, We Would Always Be Asleep

But unfortunately, we can’t eat or procreate while we’re asleep.

So as a compromise, we go through periods of being awake.

But every second awake is a second we break down.

Now you understand mortality.

This Is The Inspiration Behind The Name “The Weekly Charge⚡”

Your phone is a perfect metaphor here.

When you’re awake, its like your phone is unplugged and in use.

The battery is being drained, apps are clogging up the memory and performance slowly degrades.

Keep it unplugged long enough and it stops working entirely

When you sleep, it’s like you’ve plugged in your phone and restarted it.

The battery starts to rebuild, the cache and memory clears out and unused apps are closed down.

If you don’t allow yourself enough time to charge back up every night, it’s like you’re continually unplugging your phone while it’s only 60% charged.

Just to get through the day, you’ll need to put it on battery saving mode.

And soon, you forget that mode isn’t its normal performance.

What Are The Impacts Of Inadequate Sleep?

In short, everything negative or suboptimal in your life is linked to poor sleep, up to, and including, all cause mortality.

Rather than spit out a bunch of facts and data though, I’m going to quote some excerpts from the life changing book (which I encourage you to read) “Why We Sleep” by Dr. Matthew Walker.

Here’s Your Weekly Charge ⚡

This week, I want you to challenge yourself to remember what it feels like to be well rested.

To be fully charged.

As usual, I’m not going to bombard you with too much information or too many steps.

I’m only going to lay out 5 things to do.

And I’m going to allow you some grace on not strictly adhering to 1 of them.

If you do this, you will be shocked at how much better you feel every day, even after just 1 week.

1. Keep a consistent schedule sleep and wake schedule
   Your body thrives on consistency. If you go to bed at different times every night, it’s like you’re constantly jumping across time zones. Stop confusing yourself. Pick a set time to go to bed each night that allows you at least 8 hours in bed and stick with it, weekends included. The same is true for the time you wake up.

2. Regulate your light exposure
   Get at least 20 minutes of sunlight as soon as possible after waking up and limit your exposure to bright lights after the sun sets. This is especially true for phone and computer screens. If you can’t avoid this, get some blue light blocking glasses.

3. Control your meal timing
   When you eat helps dictate your circadian rhythm, which means it helps control when you go to sleep. Don’t eat anything at least 2 hours prior to going to bed.

4. Avoid caffeine after 1 PM
   Caffeine has a half life of 4 hours. That means, if you have a cup of coffee at 2 PM, there’s still 50 mg of caffeine in your system at 10 PM. That’s more than enough to mess with your sleep. Even if you don’t think you have trouble falling asleep, it is messing with your sleep quality.

5. Avoid all alcohol (for this 1 week)
   This can be hard for a lot of people, but I promise you it’s worth it. Once your body gets used to sleeping without alcohol for 1 week, your sleep quality will be noticeably, astoundingly better. After remembering what normal feels like, you can always reintegrate alcohol, but with the new knowledge of the tradeoff you’re making

Want someone to help you adhere to this?

This booking invite is just for this newsletter and just for helping you sleep better. It’s not a sales call to action, I promise.

I genuinely want you to remember what normal feels like by getting your sleep back.

If you’re a premium subscriber, keep reading to learn why quality is just as important as quantity in sleep along with some specific tactics to help you maximize your sleep efficiency

If you’re not a premium subscriber, it’s only $7 per month to get access to all the tools and resources I use with my performance coaching clients.

That’s less than a quarter per day!

Share the Weekly Charge⚡and earn rewards!

Do you find this content useful? Others will too, so share the love! Even your first referral gets you a free gift!

Share our customized referral link so you get credit:

{{rp_refer_url}}

Check your current Referral and Reward Status here!

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.