Do you get enough sleep? I’ll bet you don’t. Surveys usually show that almost half of Americans don’t get the recommended seven hours of sleep a night, and I know from experience (which I’ll relate shortly) that the recommendation really should be eight hours. And if we use eight hours as a standard, then two-thirds of Americans aren’t sleeping enough.
But ignore the experts’ blanket population-based recommendations for a minute: those are statistical averages, and everyone is different. There is actually a very simple and accurate way of gauging whether or not you are getting enough sleep:
Does an alarm clock wake you up in the morning? If so, then — ipso facto — you are not getting enough sleep.
If an alarm is waking you up, then your body wanted to sleep longer and you are forcing yourself to wake earlier than you naturally would. Given how the modern world operates, and how everyone you know wakes up to the sound of an alarm every weekday, it might (paradoxically) seem un-natural to wake naturally. But the reverse is actually true: in a natural state you would only wake to an alarm in an emergency. Alarm, in fact, means emergency.
The clue is so obvious that it is easy to miss: if you wake when an alarm tells you to instead of when your body tells you to, then you are not getting enough sleep.
My Story
Let me tell my story, because: people, I have seen the light. Lord Almighty, I was lost in the haze of the under-slept for decades, but I discovered the error of my ways; now I want to stand on a mountain and tell the world how important it is to get enough sleep.
I went to architecture school for my undergraduate degree, so the problem started for me quite early. Architecture students have a habit of spending too much time in studio. In addition, the culture of architecture school is one of all-nighters and dedication to the craft of design. I already have a tendency to workaholism, so this lifestyle was right up my alley.
I’ve also started a few businesses in my day, and owning your own start-up is yet another world in which working long hours and getting little sleep is lauded (and, I will certainly admit, frequently necessary). So from the age of around twenty onward, I probably never really got enough sleep. Things got really exacerbated between 2012-2015, as I had to work far harder than I’d expected to keep a huge project from completely failing.
So I took the “macho” approach for decades, with “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” as my rallying cry. This attitude meant that even when I didn’t need to operate on 6-7 hours of sleep a night, I usually did by force of habit. I had become so used to the idea of feeling tired that I began to believe it was the natural state of affairs. And most people I was around were the same: nodding off in afternoon meetings, drinking several cups of coffee a day, and forcing ourselves out of bed each morning to the obnoxious sounds of an alarm clock.
And then I learned my error. Due to a combination of burnout and a slow work cycle, I decided to work part-time for a few months in 2015. And I started sleeping more. Often 9-10 hours a night, and naps many afternoons. After maybe two months of catching up my sleep debt, I began sleeping almost exactly 8 hours every day, and I started waking up naturally every morning. But that is not what is important.
Here’s what’s important: After catching up on what must have been a massive sleep debt, I achieved a clarity of mind that I had not known since … well, far longer than I can remember. It was like a spiritual revelation.
It turns out that not only had I become used to the idea of feeling tired, but I had become used to having a listless, hazy mind unable to truly think as clearly as it was capable of. The muddening of my mind had happened so slowly during my 20s that I just didn’t notice it. But now it truly felt like a fog had been lifted and I could think and feel clearly for the first time in ages.
I also had a deep well of energy that I had completely forgotten existed. I felt twenty years younger. That was five years ago. I vowed never to go back to my sinfully sleepless ways, and I haven’t. Sure, sometimes I need to lose a little sleep to meet a deadline or set an alarm to catch a flight or some good surf at dawn. But I will never again let an alarm clock wake me for multiple days in a row.
Please: Sleep More
This isn’t a post about the techniques for getting yourself to get to sleep more. There’s s some advice in my book The Thinking Person’s Guide to Fitness, but you can also do a simple internet search and find lots of advice. First, though, you have to decide that getting enough sleep is a priority. Without this decision, no tricks or hacks will help you.
And that’s the point of this post: that you should make getting enough sleep a priority.
You may well think that it is not possible: you are too busy or too important to get the sleep you need; or perhaps too tough to need as much sleep as others. But if an alarm wakes you up more often than not, then your body is calling you out on those lies. Though it might seem hard to imagine if you have been muddling along with insufficient sleep for a long period of time, please trust me — if and when you do finally catch up with your sleep, you will have an energy and lucidity of mind that you can’t currently imagine.