Vishen Lakhiani used to sleep under six hours until research showed him experts sleep 7-8 hours and that losing 90 minutes of sleep tanks cognitive performance. He now tracks sleep, uses pods, and cuts caffeine to protect it.
Chapters
I used to have a crazy goal. I was going to set a goal to live my life sleeping under six hours a day because I was busy. I have things to do, people to see, places to visit. Why waste so much of being alive on planet Earth? Asleep today I know that I was wrong. Sleep is a goal in itself. Sleep is essential to how we show up and function in the world. My goal is to sleep under six hours. I've tossed it out the window. Now I aim every day to sleep between seven and eight hours because I've seen what sleep gives me. Sleep is a form of recovery. It is so essential to our health, but so many of us misunderstand it and do it wrong. You may have heard of the 10,000 hours study by K. Enders Ericsson. He studied masters and found that to achieve mastery in any topic, you gotta put in roughly 10,000 hours of practice. But a lot of people missed a certain aspect of that study. Where Erickson looked at sleep, he found that the great masters of the world were sleeping for almost eight and a half hours a day. The average American, six hours and 50 minutes. Masters were sleeping more. In fact, if you look at the world today, many of the most optimize human beings in the world are spending more time dedicated to sleep, dedicated to rest, dedicated to recovery, because we know our bodies need it. Tom Rath in the book Eat, Sleep Move said that if you deprive yourself of just 90 minutes of sleep, it's like operating at work the next day as if one third of your brain capacity has been suppressed. That's like starting your day downing a pint of beer. Would you do that? Well, why then do we think that sacrificing our sleep is something acceptable? So here's what happens. We when we are faced with overwork, sacrifice, sleep, we come back from work later, we stay up late, sacrificing our sleep, hoping to make up for it the next day. It never works. A drop in cognitive ability, the change in our moods and emotions make the next day harder, thus causing us to stay up late again, to pile in more work. It's a vicious cycle and it hurts you. It ages you. Give your body the rest you need. Today my goal is to sleep for seven to eight hours a day. I track my sleep. I log my sleep in the mindvalley office. We even have sleeping pods so that if our people feel that they need an afternoon nap, they can take it freely without being judged. I take sleep supplements to allow me to go deeper into sleep. I cut off caffeine as much as I love coffee after a certain hour every day so it doesn't interfere with my sleep. And my sleep process is as disciplined as my meditation process or my exercise process. Yet many people in the world still don't get enough sleep. And this is why one of the projects that we are looking at at Mindvalley is is to work with world class sleep doctors to help people all around the world get better sleep. Too many Americans are hooked on sleeping pills. Too many people drink so they can sleep at night not realizing that alcohol actually creates poorer quality sleep. Too many people stay up late or wake up too early in the morning thinking this is the hallmark of a productive life. The result is is that our bodies don't get the nourishment and the sleep that is necessary for us to be our best selves. So if you find these ideas interesting, sign up for my new masterclass on the power of sleep with Dr. Michael Bruce, the biggest name in sleep in America today. I'll see you there.
