The Power of Sleep
4/06/2011 | | Share

The Wall Street Journal this week featured an article on those unique individuals who can function quite well on just a few hours of sleep each night. One line of the article jumped off the page at me – “most of those who think they’re in this group are wrong.” In our time-crunched world, who hasn’t dreamed (sorry – poor choice of words) of getting by on 3 hours of sleep and having an extra 4-5 hours/day to invest any way we’d like? Unfortunately, the fact is that the vast majority of us (97%+) function best on 7-8 hours of sleep. And, if we kid ourselves into getting by on less, it’s no different than paying our expenses with a credit card – eventually the bill comes due. Less sleep negatively affects our metabolism (increasing the chance of adding extra weight), our relationships, our effectiveness at work, our motivation to exercise, etc. It’s such a big deal that when I was asked earlier this year if I had to pick one thing people could do first to enhance their health, sleep was my first choice. It’s a close to a silver bullet as you can find. How about starting tonight?

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