"The best asset we have for making a contribution to the world is ourselves." - Greg McKeown
McKeown starts the chapter with a story about a man named "Geoff".
At 36 he was at the pinnacle of his career: he was an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the year, a Young Global Leader, cofounder of a successful economic fund, and CEO of a global microlending organization that reached 12 million poor families. His schedule, as a result of this, was hectic: he traveled 60 to 70% of the year and slept 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night.
Which came at a cost, which manifested itself over time: night-time anxiety attacks with no anxiety, organs shutting down, physical impediments like being unable to stand up. After a series of emergency room visits and doctor visits, he was given two choices: be on medication for the rest of his life or take a year off and disconnect completely.
He chose the second option, swearing that he would only be away for a couple of months. What happened instead was unexpected, at least for him: 14 hours of sleep a night, six weeks of being unable to function. The two months became much, much longer.
Almost 2.5 years after the initial diagnosis, he was asked what his experience had taught him. "Protect the Asset" was his response - the asset, of course, being himself.
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If we are the greatest asset we can contribute to the world, says McKeown, by underinvesting in ourselves - our minds, our bodies, our spirits - and failing to care for them means we are damaging that which we would use to make the highest contribution. And sleep, he, proposes, is one of those things.
Like "Geoff" above, McKeown experimented with his own reduced sleep schedule, trying to minimize it or even pulling once a week all-nighters. His results, perhaps unsurprisingly, were similar to the ones listed above. He may have gotten more "done", but it was not very well done.
Non-esssentialists, suggests McKeown, see sleep as just another thing to be done in an "already overextended, overcommitted, busy-but-not-always-productive life". Essentialists contrarily see it as necessary to operate at high levels of contribution, and thus systematically and with deliberation program sleep into their lives - yet another of the tradeoffs Essentialists acknowledge must be made.
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The rest of this section is McKeown quoting various studies about the benefits of sleep. One that I found particularly interesting is a study by K. Anders Ericsson of violinists. The first factor - quoted in Malcom Gladwell's concept of "the 10,000 hour rule" - is that the best violinists spend more time practicing than the merely good violinists. No surprise there. But the next finding, not nearly as well known, was that the second most important factor differentiating the best violinists was...sleep. They average 8.6 hours a night, 1 hour more than average Americans at the time. Additionally, they spent 2.8 hours napping throughout the week. The authors of the study concluded not just that while the practiced more, the fact that they were well rested meant they could practice with greater concentration and thus get more out of the hours they practiced.
McKeown notes some companies at the time of writing were actively addressing this, by allowing variable hours (to accommodate early risers and night owls) or the infamous "nap pods" of Google or even setting policy that employees need not show up early (or at all) after a "red-eye" flight. Why? Because, he argues, those companies made the connection between well rested employees and excellent, creative work.
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Application:
Sleep is something that has come up quite a bit for me this year.
I am famously a Non-essentialist in this regard: I for years have tried to program my life into allowing me the least amount of sleep that I need to allow me to "do" everything that I wanted or felt I needed to do. The result was completely unsatisfactory on almost every count: I was tired for the bulk of my career and everything I did was often in a haze of activity.
My thinking on this changed a great deal after reading the book Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker (which I recommend with the caveat that although Dr. Walker is as captivating a writer as an academic can be, there is a lot of material around the nature of sleep and how we came to know that and his opinions on policies about sleep to get to the part about actual sleep recommendations. If you can find the Appendix online, that is the application). Beyond just all of the physiological benefits of sleep - which may include helping guard against Alzheimer's, something I am pretty interested in - he makes the very strong recommendation that everyone beyond the age of a teenager (e.g., when we hit our adult sleep patterns) needs 8 hours of sleep a night (or even little more). But not really less than 7 hours.
8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is almost unheard of for me; my sleep pattern seems destroyed after the birth of Nighean Gheal and has never really come back (a casualty of being a parent); at most, I can generally sleep about 6 hours without waking and if I am lucky after that waking, slip in another hour of dozing. What that means is that more like 7 hours a night.
That said, I try to act as if I am going to get eight hours a night.
Two things that Walker recommends are 1) Have a standard going to bed time including wind down that you never vary from; and 2) Have a standard waking up time you never vary from. This has been the greatest challenge for me - not the standard waking up time, but rather the standard going to bed time. Why? Because of course I am trying to fit "one more thing" into my day.
The other thing that I am practicing is that unless it is my waking up time (or within 15 minutes), I stay in bed. I am not getting into the habit of waking up and deciding to get up and do things. My father did that, until he was waking up at 0300 every morning. I may not be able to go back to sleep, but I will not cave in to the fact that like or not, 8 hours is the goal.
Do I really hit that goal? No. I am still somewhat trying to fine tune my sleep pattern between when I wake up and when I go to sleep. A full 8 hours would have me preparing for bed at 2030 and going to bed at 2100 - but I wake up far before 0500 and do not always go back to sleep. And so I am working on fine tuning that time - somewhere between 2100 and 2145 seems ideal; 2200 is too late. And based on those times, 7 to 7.5 hours is the maximum I seem to be able to get a night.
Do I feel better? Somewhat surprisingly, I do. I still struggle with not "getting enough done". But I can now very definitively tell when I have enough sleep - and when I have not.
TB, your post brings to mind a term I've learned recently, "self care." I've struggled with it a bit because my mind wants to align it with self-centeredness and self-indulgence, which are both negative to me. I have focused for years on self-sacrifice, but I'm realizing that self care is an important discipline; one that I must begin to allow myself to learn.
ReplyDeleteYour post is the third reference to Why We Sleep I've run across recently. I've discovered my library has it on offer as an audiobook, so it's next on my list for listening.
Leigh, it a much more common term than it used to be. I think a lot of people of a certain age struggle with it precisely because of the reasons and associations you mentioned. There can be a fine balance: there are plenty of colloquial examples of individuals who self care to the point that they seem to not care about anything else. But the principle - that we are as important in that sense as anything we do because without the ability to do anything - by damaging ourselves through poor nutrition, lack of sleep, lack of exercise (or over exercise to the point of injury) - is valid.
DeleteI found Walker's book very interesting as he discusses multiple physiological aspects of sleep that I did not know - for example, some of the most "valuable" REM sleep comes at the end of our cycle and thus if we do not sleep long enough, we lose that regenerative activity. My "complaint" is simply that he is an academic and writes as one (although more engaging that some), and cannot resist the urge to pontificate a bit at the end. That said, I think you will learn a lot.
The experts in wilderness survival tell us that kids under the age of 6 have surprisingly high rates of survival when lost. They sleep when tired. Find warm cubby-holes when cold. Drink when thirsty. Conversely, kids between 8 and 14 have very poor rates of survival because their perceptions are very heavily overlaid with "SHOULD". They fail to deal with what-is.
ReplyDeleteInteresting Ed -and that totally makes sense. I would be remiss in not also mentioning that I, too, suffer more often than not from "SHOULD".
DeleteWhen I entered the workforce bedtime became 9:30PM and the alarm was set for 5:30AM....a chance for eight hours of slumber and a shower before hitting the sack to relax the body along with a dark bedroom. With post-retirement came more nights with waking up at least once a night......and trying to not watch any electronic screen before bedtime, grab that book and read a bit! Never had to fight that feeling of getting "enough done" TB......dunno why.
ReplyDeleteNylon12 - I admire your diligence. Sleep has not been my best priority.
DeleteI will say that sense moving and having to purchase blackout curtains (because we are in an apartment building now with brighter lights) has been a game changer.
Like you, I usually wake up at least once a night. I am trying, as you are, in minimizing screen time (much easier as social media and media in general falls by the roadside) and reading. One thing Walker also strongly recommends - supported by others I have read - is having a bedtime routine.
My "getting enough done" has largely been fueled by a rather delusional sense of grandeur.
ADHD has a component "not to miss out" on anything. I have that in spades. I used to stay up way too late. Rest is all important. I can learn something quickly when I'm well rested. Not just a day or two, but in a pattern of resting well.
ReplyDeleteNine hours is the norm for me. I wished I could get by on four like a few others I've met. But if I do that once, then the next several nights were ten hours or more.
STxAR - I have a hint or two that had I been born 20 years later than I was, I would have been diagnosed as high functioning ADHD. Not something I have pursued at this point; I have learned to live with whatever condition I may have.
DeleteI admire that you realized that aspect of sleep early. I have struggled with finding the "minimum" that I could get by on, which turns out to be no minimum at all. I will say that since I have made small attempts to regulate my sleep, I can definitely tell the times where I got enough sleep and when I did not.
Last night's note: I went to bed (lights out) around 2145. It takes me less than 5 minutes to fall asleep anymore. I woke up once for sure but went back to sleep and came out of a dream at 0500. That was somewhere between 6.5 and 7.25 hours of sleep and it does not feel like enough. I will try scaling back to the time to 2115 and see how I do.
I'm at the crossover of the Boomer / X gen. I would never had found out about my wiring if I hadn't whapped my head and had that concussion. One of the greatest gifts God has given to me.
DeleteSTxAR, it stuns me that I have known you long enough that I remember when that happened. I am glad that it has turned out to have some benefit; I know it was difficult at the time.
DeleteSleep has always been valuable to me, not that I mandated getting a certain amount for myself but because my body just seemed to just require it. I am usually in bed for nine hours every night though as of a few years ago, it isn't an unbroken rest anymore. There is a midnight trip to the bathroom involved along with maybe some time spent thinking about something going on in my life before I'm able to drift back to sleep. I still find myself wishing I could sleep uninterrupted sleep like I used to through most of the first five decades of my life.
ReplyDeleteEd, my body was either not loud enough or it got drowned out by by mind. I would oscillate between lack of sleep and recovery. Things are in a more steady state now.
DeleteI seldom have an "uninterrupted" night, although I have really tried to scale back my drinking of any liquids at night. And if I wake up, I have about 30 seconds to fall back asleep, or else my mind is up and I am up for a minimum of 1.5 hours.