A few days back I was scouring through YouTube, watching random videos to fill in 10 minutes of my life (an effective use of my time – I know!).
I came across a video called “The Meaning” featuring Jim Carrey, it’s one of those motivational videos that generally I steer clear from, but there was something different about this one, I was seduced by the title and quickly pressed play to find out more.
Do you frequently find yourself scrolling through the black hole of your social media feeds? yeah me too.
Being amazing in your field of work is no easy task.
I can tell you now that there is no secret formula, it takes a lot of hard work and I’m still figuring it out myself.
In a society that seems to encourage and celebrate the ability to have little sleep and work on your thing or hustle or whatever you want to call it — I’m telling you that your severely crippling your ability to be at your best if your screwing up your sleep.
Sleep is one of the most important functions of our body. It allows us to repair physically and mentally, cement new skills, restore energy levels and so much more. I recently listened to a podcast with the great Joe Rogan and sleep specialist Matthew Walker which sparked my curiosity even more on the subject of sleep and just how important it is for all of us. As someone who likes to have as many tools in my kit as possible to manage my own mental health, having a bulletproof sleep routine is a central component to this.
So over the next few months I’ll be writing a special series on sleep, why it’s important, how it affects us and routines you can put in place to make sure you get the best sleep possible — I’m no expert but I hope to open eyes on how important sleep is for us all.
For my first in the series, I’m going to talk about why sleep is the best natural PED that you can ever take for your body. Whether it’s for mental performance or physical performance, sleep is your best friend.
Our friends at Wikipedia provide us with this overview:
Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind and body, characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited sensory activity, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced interactions with surroundings.It is distinguished from wakefulness by a decreased ability to react to stimuli, but is more easily reversed than the state of being comatose. Sleep occurs in repeating periods, in which the body alternates between two distinct modes: REM sleep and non-REM sleep. Although REM stands for “rapid eye movement”, this mode of sleep has many other aspects, including virtual paralysis of the body. A well-known feature of sleep is the dream, an experience typically recounted in narrative form, which resembles waking life while in progress, but which usually can later be distinguished as fantasy.
During sleep, most of the body’s systems are in an anabolic state, helping to restore the immune, nervous, skeletal, and muscular systems; these are vital processes that maintain mood, memory, and cognitive function, and play a large role in the function of the endocrine and immune systems. The internal circadian clock promotes sleep daily at night. The diverse purposes and mechanisms of sleep are the subject of substantial ongoing research. The advent of artificial light has substantially altered sleep timing in industrialized countries.
So in a nutshell, sleep is a natural component of our body and also one of most important processes to live a healthy life. During this magical process our body heals itself and restores it’s chemical balance, it also has a massive effect on your mental health and for me this is key.
If everything is lined up and your sleeping well then your body will perform well too, but what happens if we don’t get the recommended 7–9 hours of sleep? let’s take a look.
And the list goes on and on, the negative impact of not respecting the sleep process has overwhelming evidence.
We all want to be in the best state possible to tackle the challenges of life, so what will 7–9 hours of quality sleep do for you.
If you’re focused on athletic performance or putting on muscle than sleep is essential for you. Sleep is your body’s natural healing and repair process, so all that damage you take on the court or in the gym needs that magical process of sleep to repair and make you better. In simple terms, crap sleep = no gains.
Quality sleep has shown to improve athletic performance in a variety of ways. A number of athletes even have sleep specialists as part of their teams, which shows just how serious sleep is taken in the sports arena as that 1% can be the line between winning and losing.
Many people are taking supplements and drugs to improve their performance whether that’s in sports or just their corporate job, but what they don’t understand are all those sleepless nights they shout about as a badge of honor are a form of self sabotage.
The bottom line is if you want to perform and be the best version of yourself, you need to sleep. It’s a free and very powerful performance enhancer and the best part is that it’s within your control.
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After I left college, I had a bunch of options in front of me to pick for my next move — join the corporate world, continue my education or (like many of my friends and classmates) go travelling to “find myself”.
Now I’ve never been comfortable with the term ‘find myself’.
What the hell does that actually mean?
Who I am at 19 is not necessarily the same person I’ll be at 30, I can actually tell you for a fact now, this is true. Finding myself at 19 would have meant that I loved video games, eating junk food, creating random small businesses and clinging to toxic relationships — my values were pretty weak and more centred around what my hair looked like and if people liked me.
Whereas through everyday life experiences and age with more forms of wisdom and random curve balls, I’ve been able to discover more about myself.
I read a great quote from Tim Ferriss that went:
“You don’t find yourself, you create yourself”.
Tim Ferriss
I couldn’t agree more with this as that’s precisely what happens over the course of our lives.
We learn through experiences and continue to evolve.
I’ve seen lots of friends & family who like myself have struggled with identity and have used various methods to try and find out “who they are”.
The most popular one that most of us have no doubt been in contact with is travelling areas of the world and burning through our finances in doing this to find “ourselves” and then return to our actual life to use that realisation to go forth and conquer.
The problem is I’ve very rarely seen anyone come back from their travels with any other learning than they became good at burning money and taking a billion-holiday snaps for Instagram.
Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t travel the world to experience different cultures, connect with new people and have an amazing time. I’ve toured Europe, America and Asia too. I experienced some beautiful moments and gained a new perspective.
But don’t pin your hopes on backpacking for 6 months and expecting to figure it all out and become an oracle — sadly life doesn’t work that way.
Personally, my path was different from those around me.
I poured myself into literature, podcasts, and videos and embraced new people from different cultures to understand new ways of thinking and gain new experiences.
The caveat for me is that I didn’t have to travel the world for 6 months and burn through multiple credit cards to live on a beach or in a sacred cave to chase enlightenment. I made the time to continually invest in myself.
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Below is a quote I always ponder in relation to the who I am conundrum. Perhaps it will help you too.
“True happiness beats in your chest. Work out what you like to do best and try to do more of that. Don’t torture yourself pondering the purpose of life. It’s here, it’s now and it won’t last forever, so enjoy it.”
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