Sleep is underrated.

I usually go to bed around 10-11 p.m. and wake up between 6 and 7 a.m. This means I sleep 8 hours on average, which works very well for me. This week, I had to wake up at 3 a.m. to attend an important meeting, so I ended up sleeping for less than 5 hours that day. Although I napped 2-3 hours after my meeting, this still couldn’t save the day.

That day, I was super unproductive, grumpy, and tired (please feel free to add any bad adjectives you like). This reminded me of something that I learned in the third year of PhD:

If you constantly feel tired, unhappy, and unproductive, the first thing that you need to do is to establish a regular sleep schedule.

Since then, whenever I feel something is wrong in my life, I first ask this question: “How have I slept recently?” If the answer is “not well,” I know what the problem is. Simple.

And it's not just me, but unfortunately, sleep is underrated by so many of us. I believe that if people can establish a regular sleep schedule, most of their problems will disappear. Of course, there is a science behind my argument. So, I would like to share a few podcasts, YouTube videos, and books that provide scientific evidence of the importance of sleep.

1. “The most powerful thing that is governing when you want to be asleep and when you want to be awake is light.”

2. “Phone can’t be used after 9:30 p.m.”

3. “Adults should sleep 7 or more hours per night.”

4. “Take anyone on this earth and start depriving them of sleep and that person will become vulnerable to both physical and mental illness… When you haven’t had enough sleep, everything feels ten times harder. Sleep has a profound effect on every aspect of your wellbeing, so if you think your sleep is not as good as it could be it is well worth your time and effort to try improving it.”¹

5. “I was lying on the floor of my home office in a pool of blood. On my way down, my head had hit the corner of my desk, cutting my eye and breaking my cheekbone. I had collapsed from exhaustion and lack of sleep. In the wake of my collapse, I found myself going from doctor to doctor, from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion. There wasn’t, but doctors’ waiting rooms, it turns out, were good places for me to ask myself a lot of questions about the kind of life I was living.”²

I hope this post encourages you to give enough importance to your sleep schedule.

Cheers,

Sidika

1. https://amzn.to/3BQEDN4

2. https://amzn.to/4f1om6e