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One less hour of sleep does not equal an extra hour of achievement or enjoyment. The exact opposite occurs. When you lose an hour of sleep, it decreases your well-being, productivity, health, and ability to think. Yet people continue to sacrifice sleep before all else.
In some workplaces, it is a badge of honor to “pull an all-nighter” to get work done. Then comes boasting about having only four hours of sleep the night before a meeting to show your colleagues just how hard you are working. I fell into this trap for many years, until I realized just how flawed this logic is from every vantage point.
One of the most influential studies of human performance, conducted by professor K. Anders Ericsson, found that elite performers need 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” to reach levels of greatness. While this finding sparked a debate about the role of natural talent versus countless hours of practice, another element was all but missed. If you go back to Ericsson’s landmark 1993 study, there was another factor that significantly influenced peak performance: sleep. On average, the best performers slept 8 hours and 36 minutes. The average American, for comparison, gets just 6 hours and 51 minutes of sleep on weeknights.
The person you want to fly your airplane, operate on your body, teach your children, or lead your organization tomorrow is the one who sleeps soundly tonight. Yet in many cases, people in these vital occupations are the ones who think they need the least sleep. And more than 30 percent of workers sleep less than six hours per night.
This sleep-related productivity loss costs about $2,000 per person a year and leads to poorer performance and lower work quality. Getting fewer than six hours of sleep a night is also the top risk factor for burnout on the job. If you want to succeed in your job, make sure your work allows you to stay in bed long enough.
Professor Ericsson’s studies of elite performers — including musicians, athletes, actors, and chess players — also reveal how resting more can maximize achievement. He found that the top performers in each of these fields typically practice in focused sessions lasting no longer than 90 minutes. The best performers work in bursts. They take frequent breaks to avoid exhaustion and ensure they can recover completely. This allows them to keep going the next day.
Prevent sleeplessness from slowing you down. Working on a task too long can actually decrease your performance. To avoid this, work in bursts, take regular breaks, and make sure you get enough sleep to be productive. When you need an extra hour of energy, add an hour of sleep.
Big Changes Through Small Adjustments
Every Bite Is a Net Gain or Loss
Each bite you take is a small but important choice. Every sip requires another brief choice. If you make a decision that does more good than harm, such as opting for water over soda, it is a net gain. When you pick a side of fries instead of vegetables, it is a net loss. Even seemingly positive choices can turn into a net loss if you are not careful about everything that goes into a particular dish.
The same thing occurs with drinks. Coffee by itself is good for you. Each sip you take is a net gain for your health. However, if you add cream and a few packets of sugar, each sip becomes a net loss. Or look at any of the packaged “green tea” drinks in a supermarket. In most cases, the added sweeteners and preservatives turn it into a much less healthy drink than real green tea.
You can modify many choices to ensure they are a net gain. One of my favorite meals is the hickory-grilled salmon at a local restaurant. While it sounds healthy, I eventually realized the tasty barbecue sauce covering my filet of salmon was almost pure sugar.
After studying the nutritional content of common barbecue sauces, I found it is essentially pancake syrup for meat. I could have told myself that the benefit of eating salmon outweighed the downside of the sugary sauce. But the only way to make this a clear net gain was to order my salmon without the barbecue sauce. A few months after making this switch, I learned to enjoy the actual taste of fresh salmon without the overpowering sauce.
There are a few good and bad ingredients in most meals. No matter how hard you try, you will eat some foods that are not ideal. But do a little accounting in your head. Ask yourself if what you are about to eat is a net gain, based on what you know about all the ingredients. If you develop a habit of asking this question, you will make better decisions in the moment.
Sitting is the most underrated health threat of modern times. This subtle epidemic is eroding our health. On a global level, inactivity now kills more people than smoking.
Sitting more than six hours a day greatly increases your risk of an early death. No matter how much you exercise, eat well, avoid smoking, or add other healthy habits, excessive sitting will cause problems. Every hour you spend on your rear end — in a car, watching television, attending a meeting, or at your computer — saps your energy and ruins your health.
Sitting also makes you fat. Over the span of the last two decades, while exercise rates stayed the same, time spent sitting increased, and obesity rates doubled. One leading diabetes researcher claims that sitting for extended periods poses a health risk as “insidious” as smoking or overexposure to sunlight. He contends that physicians need to view exposure to sitting just like a skin cancer expert views exposure to direct sunlight.
“Sitting disease” takes a toll in the moment. As soon as you sit down, electrical activity in your leg muscles shuts off. The number of calories you burn drops to one per minute. Enzyme production, which helps break down fat, drops by 90 percent.
After two hours of sitting, your good cholesterol drops by 20 percent. Perhaps this explains why people with desk jobs have twice the rate of cardiovascular disease. Or as another diabetes researcher put it, even two hours of exercise will not compensate for spending 22 hours sitting on your rear end.
Yet for many people, sitting for several hours a day is inevitable. The key is to stand, stretch, and increase activity as much as possible. Get up and move around while you’re watching television. Walk to someone’s office instead of calling them.
Simply standing in place increases your energy more than sitting. Walking increases energy levels by about 150 percent. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator increases energy by more than 200 percent. Instead of viewing a long walk as something you don’t have time for, think of it as an opportunity to get in some extra activity that will make you healthier.