Just Go to Sleep
There aren’t that many good reasons not to get eight hours of sleep.
If you’re working two jobs to get food on the table, yeah, sure. If you’re defending a client in a death penalty appeal, and there’s an urgent brief due tomorrow, yeah, grab some coffee and get that done.
But for the rest of us, we should just go to sleep. It’s hard to read any of the literature and not conclude that sleeping is literally the most beneficial thing we do—for physical health, emotional health, and, ironically, for productivity.
The challenge is concluding that most of the things that keep us from sleeping just aren’t that important.
On a recent episode of the Jocko Podcast, Dr. Kirk Parsley recommended creating an evening routine that boosts our sleep. Most of the suggestions were about eliminating blue light (especially from our phones and other screens) in the evening and optimizing one’s environment for restfulness.
However, one practice he recommended struck me as particularly helpful. Each evening, Parsley suggests, one should take a piece of paper, and draw a line down the middle. On the left side, write To Do, and on the right side, write To Worry (e.g., things you can’t control, but don’t want to lose track of). The point of writing the list is to reduce the anxiety we might experience during sleep about whether we’re ready for the next day.
But the key to realizing the benefits of better sleep, Parsley says, is a mindset shift: convincing ourselves that “the best you’re ever going to be at handling [the To Do] list is after you’ve slept well.”
The reason I included sleep in this series on joy and satisfaction at work is that I’ve seen many leaders whose struggle to enjoy their job is directly tied to the fact that they’re exhausted. It’s not that their job is bad; it’s that almost everything is more difficult in their lives because they cannot pursue it with energy.
More than once, I’ve suggested to coaching clients, “How about you try to get three consecutive nights of full sleep and see if that work challenge is easier?”
It always is.
But this gets to a large point: We run into trouble anytime we’re arrogant enough to think our brains can outrun the health of the rest of our bodies. A Porsche brain in a poorly-maintained Pinto body crashes every time.