Dave Asprey explains how your body treats sleep deprivation as a threat, amplifying exhaustion through stress. Reframing jet lag as a choice can halve perceived energy loss. He recommends hypnotherapy and heart-rate-variability practices to shift your nervous system from stress to rest mode.
Chapters
If you don't get enough sleep, guess what your body thinks is going to happen? You're going to die. All the body cares about is not dying and making sure you live long enough to reproduce, and then you're done. That's the meat operating system. Well, if you are short on sleep, your body's fear of being tired can tax you enormously. If you can change your mindset to say, you know what? I'm jet lagged. I didn't get enough sleep last night. I chose not to get enough sleep or something happened. I didn't get enough sleep. My body doesn't feel as good as I want it to feel. I'm not going to die. You'll have twice as much energy that day. You're still tired. There's still a biological cost of not getting enough sleep, but the biological cost is much less because the stress about being tired was worse than the actual tired. And that's an interesting thing that you don't hear talked about. The cure for that is just coffee. Just kidding. The cure for that is hypnotherapy. Heart rate variability. In fact, if you're really exhausted and you do a little bit of heart rate variability, you'll feel that your body's like, God, I feel like I'm going to die. You're in that sympathetic state and you can shift yourself back to parasympathetic and you're like, okay, I, I accept the fact that I'm tired, but I'm not going to die. And this comes down to controlling your nervous system.
