Good quality sleep is the foundation for health and performance, any strategy aiming at improving performance, physical as well as mental, which is bypassing sleep, will ultimately fail.
Please go through this module and take the quiz at the end to help us identify your weak links. We will send you individualised guidance to help you fix your sleep.
The Link Between Sleep And Health
You can’t fully experience wakefulness during the day if your sleep during the night is compromised.
Everyone is likely to know about the importance of sleep, but too often we forget the crucial link between sleep, both good and bad, and our health. Sleep is the backbone of enhancing recovery, reducing stress and empowering not only rejuvenation and anti-aging, but also mental and physical performance.
There are three main links between sleep and health:
1. Sleep is the most important solution for stress management.
This is the main fundamental to achieving your peak performance and without it you won’t even get close. Trying to manage stress without proper sleep would be like driving a car with flat tyres. Your performance will be compromised and risk of doing damage is high. Proper sleep is not a luxury, but rather an absolute necessity.
2. During sleep, you recover from the day before.
If your sleep quality and quantity are poor, you will not fully recover and fatigue will accumulate from day to day until you reach a state of chronic fatigue. The big negative impact will not only be on your performance, but more importantly on your health.
3. During sleep you detoxify.
You regenerate and build new cells, including neurons, release growth hormones (GHs) and other androgens, and produce neurotransmitters. Sleep is the antidote to fear and anxiety, aging and degenerative diseases. If your brain were a computer, you could view sleep as the mechanism to reboot your system and reset the memory.
I have always been amazed by how many people naively think that a few hours of sleep will be enough and question why they should waste time sleeping if they could accomplish more things otherwise. I’m not being extreme in saying this; I’ve heard it many times. People can become so focused on the main goal of increasing their performance, they ignore the fact that every peak must have a base and a foundation.
Good-quality sleep is fundamental to good health, wellbeing and the quality of work, achievements and performance.
I once had a conversation with a highly ranked colleague. She was talking about her techniques to be more productive, and when I asked her what her trick was, hoping to learn something new, she said with conviction that she was sleeping less. She had taught herself that she just needed a maximum of 4 hours’ sleep per night because she had more important tasks and responsibilities to manage, and she was feeling ‘splendid’.
Seven years later, I had a conversation along the same lines with another high-ranking colleague. His answer was similar: he had cut down on his sleep time to be able to achieve more, but he recognised that his strategy had failed as he was abusing and disrespecting his body. This second example showed me where this particular way of saving time can lead. My colleague was literally falling apart. He was overstressed, having problems with stomach pains, suffering from sleeping disorders and an atrophied torso, and was weak in general. He was also having difficulties concentrating and recalling important information. Tasks he had once been brilliant at, such as memorising any type of information and doing complex maths calculations in his mind, were now causing him problems. And, most disturbingly of all, he was still under thirty years of age. He recognised the necessity for change and asked me to coach him.
Diving your way to great sleep
Sleep may seem like a passive time where we close shop and reopen the next day, but it’s not a homogeneous state, and that’s especially true for the brain. When we fall asleep, we go through multiple consecutive cycles, each of which lasts for about 90 minutes.
When we dive into a sleep cycle, we start with the shallow sleep, which is called rapid eye movement (REM). We continue to dive deeper until we hit the non-rapid eye movement (NREM) with its different stages, which depend on sleep depth.
Each phase has its corresponding processes, which are also consecutively scheduled. During NREM sleep, neurons are firing in their slowest pattern – delta brainwaves with their cleansing powers – and the information in the short-term memory is being copied into the part of the brain where long-term memory is stored. During REM sleep, healing and rejuvenating alpha brainwaves are being emitted and the brain interconnects all the pieces of information with each other. It’s during the REM sleep that our emotional quotient (EQ) is fostered [1].
How much sleep do we really need?
Research has shown that the safe window of sleep for adults is between 7 and 9 hours, but there is evidence that 8 hours of sleep is the golden number [2]. After 10 days of sleeping 6 hours, the brain is as dysfunctional as if you’d missed one whole night’s sleep.
A recent sleep extension study suggests that the average underlying sleep tendency in young adults is about 8.5 hours per night. By comparison, the average reported sleep length of 7.2–7.4 hours is deficient, and common sleep length of 6.5 hours or under can be disastrous [3].
Fewer than 6.5 or more than 9.5 hours is potentiallyharmful. Certainly, there are people who come out just fine under these circumstances, but they are rare cases. Ideally, sleep time needs to be somewhere between 8 and 8.5 hours. Furthermore, it has also been shown that a missed hour of sleep requires four proper night’s sleep to recover from and not just one, as many of us think [4].
Why eight doesn’t equal eight
Opinions may differ on the best timespan for sleep. Personally, I need to be asleep no later than 10pm if I really want to be at my peak the next day. Just half an hour later and I definitely feel the drawbacks during the day with less energy and clarity of thought.
The positive effects during early sleep are profound. An hour between 10pm and 11pm doesn’t equate to an hour between 6am and 7am. It’s not possible to gain the benefits of early sleep once you’ve missed the best sleeping time as sleep is not a homogenous state of the brain. During the early hours, we are more in deep NREM sleep, and later on we have more REM and light NREM sleep. The early hours of sleep are crucially important for memory saving.
A further argument in favour of going to bed early is that you avoid the typical binge time in the kitchen. Feedback and experience have shown me that the late evening hours are when people tend to struggle the most to resist carbs. By going to bed early, you eradicate the risk of temptation and increase your chances of getting into shape in record time.
Your Sleep Goals
- Timing:
- Within golden window 10pm - 6am
- Synchronisation with Bright Dark Cycle
- Length:
- Between 7,5 - 8,5h
- Allowing all sleep phases to happen
- Latency:
- Shorter than 5min
- Better Efficiency
- Continuity:
- Zero Interruption
- Better Sleep Depth
- Energy:
- Feeling rejuvenated
- Better Sleep Quality.
For more details and resources on the subject please refer to the book Stress Less Sleep Better, available on Amazon and major book stores.
[1] Matthew Walker, 'Why we sleep: the new science of sleep and dreams' (Penguin, 2007).
[2] J-P Chaput, C Dutil and H Sampasa-Kanyinga, ‘Sleeping hours: what is the ideal number and how does age impact this?’ (2018), www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6267703/
[3] M Bonnet et al., ‘We are chronically sleep deprived’ (1995), www.researchgate.net/publication/14456961_We_are_Chronically_Sleep_ Deprived
[4] S Kitamura et al., ‘Estimating individual optimal sleep duration and potential sleep debt’ (2016), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC5075948/
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