Should You Be Getting More Sleep?

by Royane Real

Do you get enough sleep?  If you’re like most people living in modern society, you’re probably on the go all the time, and you’re probably suffering from some degree of chronic sleep deprivation. 

In modern societies, most people work very hard and they have very busy schedules.

And if they want to get ahead or if they have families, they’ll work even harder, trying to get everything done.  Very busy people often decide that the easiest place to cut back is not on their many activities, but on the hours of sleep that they get each night.

Many success gurus will tell you that if you want to get ahead, you have to be willing to sleep less and work hard.  They may tell you that sleeping eight or nine hours a night is just a bad habit that will stand in the way of your success.

They’ll tell you that you can easily cut out two or three hours of your sleep every night and you’ll never miss it.  They’ll recite the famous saying “If you snooze, you’ll lose”.

They’ll tell you that a full night’s sleep is just for losers and weaklings. 

Unfortunately, this type of advice completely ignores the biological needs of the human body.  In particular, your brain needs to use your sleeping hours to process the thoughts and events of the day.  If you cut back on sleep, in the long run you will also cut back on your mental productivity and your creative ability.

Researchers have conducted many experiments on volunteers to study the effects of sleep deprivation.  Even a few days spent without enough sleep will negatively affect the mental ability of the person involved.  They will find it much harder to concentrate and to analyze information correctly.  Without enough sleep, it becomes harder to remember important facts, or to make good decisions. 

People who are short on restorative sleep become more short tempered.  They become less creative and less logical.  They make more mistakes and make foolish decisions.  It becomes harder to understand the implications of new information.  Trying to drive or to handle complex machinery can be very dangerous.

When people are sleep deprived, they may become more depressed or they may have erratic mood swings. They are less able to work co-operatively with others.

Some very famous major accidents are believed to have been caused at least in part, because the workers were over tired.  

After the Challenger space shuttle explosion, the near melt-down at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, and the catastrophic failure of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, lack of sufficient sleep was identified as one of the major contributing factors that led workers to making decisions that led to disaster. 

In addition to these major, well known accidents, many hundreds of thousands of other smaller accidents every year are caused by people who are so exhausted or so sleepy that they cannot pay attention properly or make good decisions.  They crash their automobiles or trucks, or they have accidents in homes, offices and factories.

They make decisions rashly because they can’t grasp the full implications of what is happening in their environment.

While there are a few people who really only require five hours of sleep, these people are a very small minority of the population. Most of us need between seven to nine hours of good sleep each night to function at our best.

The more we learn about the importance of sleep, the more it becomes clear that cutting back on our hours of sleep really is not the key to greater productivity. 

Instead of sleeping less, if you really want to boost the quality of your performance, the answer for you may be to sleep more. Try it for a few weeks and see!

For more tips on how to make your brain work better, get the book “How You Can Be Smarter” by Royane Real ... download it now for just $16.76 US.