For many years, I was in an illusion of 5am in my life.
I was pretty much carrying the tradition of 5am from older people from our society.
I used to think waking up at 5am is the biggest achievement for a productivity hack for a successful life.
I used to think running a few miles after waking up at 5am, doing some weight lifting followed by running, and then taking cold showers were requirements to start a perfect day.
But, in reality, I came to know late in life that it was an illusion.
If you are sleeping less than eight hours of deep sleep and waking up at 5am in the name of productivity, you are playing the losing game of your life.
You are hustling here and there to run life with no proper orientation and long term focus because your brain is still not cognitively fully functional.
In the past, I didn’t know the science of deep sleep and its influence on cognitive bandwidth and overall human performance.
“If you are sleeping less than eight hours of deep sleep and waking up at 5am in the name of productivity, you are playing the losing game of your life.”
Now, I know, waking up at 5am is not a formula of success, the key is sleeping eight hours of deep sleep and finding the peak performing hours of our life’s key task and doing the most important and valuable task first after waking up from deep sleep.
The secret I learned is that this task must be not urgent but an important task for life, sometimes also called ‘The One Thing’.
Remember, urgent tasks are rarely important in life because most of life’s important tasks don’t have deadlines and approvals.
A well rested body and well slept mind communicate to each other for best performance and give the best results.
Everybody is different in many aspects in this world.
Everybody has different biochemistry running in their body.
Everybody has a different work schedule, family, and life, which means everybody has different peak productive hours designed by the body itself where our brain works the best.
Many productivity gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk and Grant Cardone talk about eighteen hours working and 10x rule, but when you see their successful life, it is not from working more hours and sleeping less hours, it is from investing in the right work at the right time with right leverage.
Robin Sharma’s ‘5AM Club’ book is inspirational but, probably, his decision to write about 5am club came in his mind only after sleeping a full eight hours.
It has nothing to do with working more hours and waking up at 5am, it has more to do with right timing, right thinking, right decision, right work, and most importantly, the right leverage after sleeping eight hours.
You can’t make the right decision by only sleeping five hours as a workaholic person because an unslept brain makes many errors in the name of decisions.
Ask Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist and sleep expert; Ariana Huffington, business woman and founder of Huffington Post; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; and Warren Buffett, the founder of Berkshire Hathaway; what is the value of a deep eight hours of sleep in life.
They are the best to give answers for peak productive hours and the link of peak performance to eight hours of deep sleep.
They are the living proofs of hard core science behind deep sleep and its impacts in their own life.
“Ask Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist and sleep expert; Ariana Huffington, business woman and founder of Huffington Post; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; and Warren Buffette, founder of Berkshire Hathaway; what is the value of a deep eight hours of sleep in life.”
Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington post and the author of ‘The Sleep Revolution’ details her painful collapse in her book ‘The Sleep Revolution’.
She said that she was exhausted from running on short sleep while building The Huffington Post in the name of productivity and her body couldn’t tolerate it at one point due to sleep deprivation.
She fainted at her desk, hit her head, and woke up in a pool of blood with a broken cheekbone.
This medical emergency taught her as a major wake-up call, shifting her focus from chronic burnout, sleep deprived person to sleep advocate.
After the painful learning, she became more productive and more valuable following eight hours of deep sleep, the result, she now owns multiple successful companies including ‘Thrive Global’.
Warren Buffett said multiple times again and again that you can’t become wealthy by doing only more hours of hard work, you need right thinking, right work, right decision, and right leverage.
These only come on your doorstep from a well slept mind and well rested body.
He said that his decisions to buy Coca-Cola and Apple shares came from a well-slept mind that made him multi billionaires, not from a sleep deprived hard working workaholic mind.
The importance of quality sleep in our life is more clear now, but most of us don’t follow it because we are not fully aware of its significance.
Quality sleep is probably more important than quality food in priority order.
How does our internal body mechanism deteriorate to make us ill and what eight hours of quality sleep does in our body?
Why do we die in eleven days without sleep but it takes a little longer twenty one days to die without food?
How do ninety percent diseases link to stress but still we never prioritize relaxation in our lives?
Why do we lose cognitive power, clear thinking, and good judgement rapidly based on what we do and what our lifestyle is?
Now we have the answer, we lack quality deep sleep which we take for granted, we neglect it over and over again.
One of the major functions of deep sleep is waste disposal as a plumbing system in our home.
Body plumbers work for our body during the sleep in our biological system.
Our brain cells shrink during deep sleep letting cerebrospinal fluid to flush out harmful toxins, especially amyloid beta and tau which build up during the working day time.
This cleanup process lowers our risk of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis.
“Our brain cells shrink during deep sleep letting cerebrospinal fluid to flush out harmful toxins, which build up during the working day time and lowers our risk of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis.”
Matthew Walker, PhD, a neuroscientist and author of ‘Why We Sleep’ gives an insight of years of investigation of sleep, its benefits, and the negative parts of depriving deep sleep and the effects on our brain and body the next day and, most importantly, on the long run in life.
In the book ‘Why We Sleep’, there are eye opening research facts that we ignore all our lives.
I also recommend watching Dr. Walker’s TedTalk ‘Sleep Is Your Superpower’.
Dr. Walker says “sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day”
Remember, our brain actively sorts, strengthens, and transfers newly learned information from short-term memory to long-term storage during deep sleep.
Dr. Walker adds “The shorter your sleep, the shorter your lifespan.”
The matter of the fact that, “The saying like, oh, I was busy yesterday, I didn’t have time for eight hours of sleep, is a long gone excuse now. Each nights’ sleep is compounded in both ways, negatively or positively to show its consequences in the later part of life, mostly after middle age.”
The bitter truth, after middle age, life doesn’t give warnings, only consequences because this is the time to see the result of compounding of how we spent our previous years.
Another important result of quality sleep is our own happiness.
Many of us are unaware that quality sleep breeds happiness in different ways because it makes our brain healthy, active, and positive.
We become more active and positive, more aware about things and people in unimaginable ways.
We develop clarity, focus, and freedom, we communicate effectively, and obviously, that brings more happiness.
Happiness is pretty much not to regret what’s already gone and trust, respect, and enjoy what’s around us, and firmly believe what’s coming in the future positively.
This kind of life perspective is only possible through clear thinking, clear brain, and clear judgement.
In the long run, these all become the byproducts of deep sleep.
“Happiness is pretty much not to regret what’s already gone and trust, respect, and enjoy what’s around us, and firmly believe what’s coming in the future positively.”
Dr. W. Chris Winter, MD, a sleep scientist and author of ‘The Sleep Solution’ says “sleep is a stress-free biological need moment and it always wins in life”.
From my personal experience, I passed my middle age but each passing year I’m realizing that my happiness is somewhere else rather than in my envy and ego of being smart in the room.
Deep sleep helps you to be quiet in the room but alert, absorbing information from the room like a sponge.
We should be good at what we are doing and shouldn’t hesitate to say three words ‘I don’t know’.
My happiness is my own quiet morning where I don’t have to return the calls of people who drain my energy.
My happiness is my commitment to excellent health for a long time, no financial stress, and the work that I love to do without other people’s supervision and demand.
Our life’s happiness is inherently linked to our health and is linked to our sound sleep.
To understand what kind of life we have to live, visit nursing homes and hospitals, where you see how fragile our life is.
All rich, poor, and middle class are lying in the same type of beds, hooked in the same type of machines, and eating the same type of medicines.
All are begging for more time for their life.
After seeing this you will realize that there is no greater wealth than our own health in life.
After all, many things in life that we struggle to possess by sacrificing our good night sleep are just noises.
Warren Buffett says “If you become a multi millionaire by losing your health and relationship, then you didn’t win in life, you lost the game of life.”
“Warren Buffett: If you become a multi millionaire by losing your health and relationship, then you didn’t win in life, you lost the game of life.”
Deprivation of sleep has many negative consequences on many parts of our body, especially in our gut.
The relationship between deep sleep and gut health is a bidirectional, two-way street called the “gut-sleep axis”.
Deep sleep allows our digestive system to repair and regulate metabolic hormones, while a healthy gut microbiome produces the neurotransmitters and melatonin required to achieve deep and restorative sleep.
During deep sleep, our body also diverts energy to the digestive tract to repair intestinal lining and regulate mucosal stability.
Deep sleep controls our appetite hormones ghrelin and leptin and lowers the stress hormone cortisol.
High cortisol levels from sleep deprivation can lead to a “leaky gut”.
Deprivation of deep sleep reduces good microbes like Lactobacillus and increases bad inflammatory bacteria.
Remember, up to ninety percent of the body’s serotonin, a precursor to sleep-inducing melatonin, is produced in the gut.
Michael Greger, MD, author of ‘How Not To Age” says “An imbalanced microbiome called dysbiosis sends inflammatory signals to the brain, frequently causing fragmented sleep and insomnia.”
Here is another fact behind intestinal lining.
If you think about the folding of our intestinal lining, its surface area is about the size of the badminton court.
For the immune system, our intraepithelial lymphocytes which are essential white blood cells act to defend pathogens.
‘Ah receptors’ cover these lymphocytes and activate cells.
This crucial receptor is significantly upregulated in centenarians, whereas its loss leads to premature aging.
If we eat broccoli, we activate these cells.
Not only that, broccoli’s phytonutrient sulforaphane combates inflammation and clears carcinogenic pollutants from our body.
Sulforaphane can increase melatonin levels and combat inflammation that interrupts our sleep cycle.
Sulforaphane is also the most potent natural inducer of Nrf2.
Nrf2 regulates and controls how our body cells defend themselves against toxins, inflammation, and oxidative stress.
Broccoli is an amazing vegetable not only with sulforaphane but also with tryptophan, an amino acid our body uses to produce serotonin and melatonin, the sleep-inducing hormone.
The essential minerals like magnesium and calcium found in broccoli support deep-restful sleep and muscle relaxation.
Just don’t neglect the power of broccoli.
Dalai Lama, a spiritual leader and author of ‘The Art of Happiness’ says “Sleep is the best meditation.”
Conclusion
If you are sleeping less than eight hours of deep sleep and waking up at 5am in the name of productivity, you are playing the losing game of your life.
Ask Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist and sleep expert; Ariana Huffington, business woman and founder of Huffington Post; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; and Warren Buffette, the founder of Berkshire Hathaway; what is the value of a deep eight hours of sleep in life.
Our brain cells shrink during deep sleep letting cerebrospinal fluid to flush out harmful toxins, which build up during the working day time and lowers our risk of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis.
Happiness is pretty much not to regret what’s already gone and trust, respect, and enjoy what’s around us, and firmly believe what’s coming in the future positively.
Warren Buffett says “if you become a multi millionaire by losing your health and relationship, then you didn’t win in life, you lost the game of life.”
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.”
