As a partner, father, collaborator, friend and athlete, you no longer have enough time, so one day you sit down to think of a strategy and your brilliant idea is to stop sleeping eight hours and start sleeping five and a half so that the time enough for everything. Well, mangoes, Alejandro already fell into the trap, I hope you don’t.
He is already getting bread for the present at the cost of hunger for the future, because probably with this change of sleeping less he will have a little more success in his career, maybe he will be better with his partner or his children, maybe he will have good times doing sport, but only for a while, what he decided is not sustainable because in the future nothing far:
– It will lower your physical and mental performance.
– It will reduce the recovery capacity of your organs.
– It will mess up your mind’s ability to heal emotions.
– It will remove possibilities to be more creative. And, in general, you will be harvesting stress and chronic fatigue.
As the sleep scientist explains, in his book “Why do we sleep?”, Alejandro can reduce his life expectancy by up to 30% by sleeping poorly. Matthew Walker, after showing us research that shows the relationship between chronic and terminal illnesses and lack of sleep, sentences us like this: “The less you sleep, the shorter your life will be.”
The author tells us that since the Industrial Revolution and the creation of electric light, humanity has fallen into an epidemic of lack of sleep, which in those who suffer from it reduces their lucidity, intelligence, body repair, immune system, levels of happiness and life expectancy. Imagine the size of the epidemic, in industrialized nations, two thirds of the population sleeps poorly.
This #ChidoBook Why do we sleep?, made me conclude three specific things that changed my sleep, I hope they impact you in some way:
First: sleeping well is transcendent
It is very useful to know what we mean by sleeping well. It turns out that humans have a biphasic sleep, that is, we need by law to sleep seven to nine hours a night, that is the first phase to achieve the types of sleep that repair the body and mind.
There is a very beneficial second phase of sleep that is to take a nap, not too late, so that you do not lose sleep at night. Our brain is very old, unlike electric light, so getting a good night’s sleep for our brain means a couple of hours being exposed to artificial light as little as natural light has already gone by itself. Maybe someone will tell me that it is nocturnal and it can be, only that in more than 99% of humans, the brain is made to sleep at night.