While everyone else is doing a ‘New Year New You’ program (there are thousands of them), we offer you a different path. One often less taken. We present to you the 12 Week Self Remodel. Each Monday for 12 weeks we’ll post one thing you can change in your life, easily, to help create the life you really want. Each one is a small adjustment to your existing life, small stepping stones to a better you. As such, they take little effort or time to accomplish. Each one will be posted later in the day, intentionally. Your work week may start on Monday, but the Reclaimed week starts on Tuesday. Less competition for your time, and less stress (also something to look forward to on your Monday commute). So, let’s begin.

Week 12 – Sleep It Off

More and more, the world is getting faster and faster. To keep up, people are skipping on their sleep, and what sleep they get is usually sub-par. More and more science and health experts are finding one of the biggest keys to your physical and mental health, productivity, even your social life, is the length and quality of sleep you get.

While, yes, there are some people that claim to get by just fine with considerably less sleep than is the recommended, you shouldn’t attempt what they do. And one could well argue that they are heavily hindered by it, far more than they will admit. But, they put on a goo face. Well, not really, either. Let’s take the case of a billionaire inventor (not going to use his name). Aside from the fact that he perpetually looks tired and often unhealthy, and despite the fact he has large numbers of skilled and educated scientists working for him, he’s yet to be very successful in his projects. He gets a ton of money, and press, but he’s not actually succeeded at much of anything. Launching a rocket into space and landing it again has been done already. Believe it or not, it’s not even new technology. As of writing this, he’s yet to have a truly successful attempt. Part of this is the guy running it, himself, is NOT a scientist, but he’s arrogant and sleep deprived enough to think he is. Just like creating extremely fast trains in tubes… the number of practical issues with this are staggering, but never once crossed his mind. And, since he has the money, the projects go forward.

There are many that make the claim they get by with very little sleep. If you actually look at them, you can also tell they’re not in optimal health, and when you really start to think about what they do, they’re not nearly as brilliant as they think they are. In fact, if it wasn’t for an army of people working for them, they’d be unquestionable failures.

So let me ask you, do you have hundreds of people working for you to make your plans come to life? Do you have the resources to make that happen? You certainly won’t if you keep depriving yourself of proper sleep.

Let your brain and boy have the down time the need to function properly. Is it really an advantage to spend all day tired, and taking two hours to complete a project that should take 30 minutes, all so you can skimp on an extra hour of sleep? If you said yes, go to bed right now and sleep for the next ten hours. You clearly can’t do basic math.

Do you need 8 hours of sleep? Not necessarily. Men do tend to need less sleep than women. Seven hours of good, quality sleep beat nine hours of crappy sleep hands down. So you do need to find your individual limits, but do so objectively. Write your results down, don’t just go on what you think you remember. But most importantly, aim for quality first.

By quality sleep I mean quality.

• Stop staying up until way too late and trying to sleep half the morning away. Get good curtains on your windows if street lights come through it. Get it dark in your room – surprising how every sleep expert says this, and he easiest way is to actually sleep at night. For some reason that fact is lost on many.
• Get the electronics out of your room. That especially means your phone. You’re going to be sleeping, get the social media, games, and work away from you.
• Condition yourself to go to bed and get up as close to the same time EVERY day. Even weekends.

There are many more things you can do to improve your sleep, but this will get you started.

Now get some sleep.  A man who is tired and irritable, unproductive, and unhealthy isn’t much of a man. Man up and get your sleep on.

Let us know how you’re doing on the Self Remodel in the comments below.

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