Advice for Executives: Get Some Sleep!

Give your legs a break

Sleep provides your body rest. With work, family, networking, community, pets, sports, and catching up on what you missed yesterday, your body gets tired too. While you sleep, the chemical and electrical connections that keep you going reset themselves so you can embark again tomorrow. Weary muscles prove distracting to everything (including learning), and they can prevent you from focusing on what matters most. A tired body is also more likely to affect your immune system, your heart, and lead to other health problems that ultimately mess up your well-manicured plans.

But, but, but….

Some of you are doubtful, or maybe you’re too tired to make the connection between your life and those of people who regularly don’t sleep enough. Perhaps you even know a medical resident who saves lives while working a 36-hour shift. Surgery rotations are not only being reexamined as a troublesome educational model, but they were initially designed so that young doctors could gain the skill of working while stressed, not because the doctors were sharper that way. Watch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy to be reminded that people who go without sleep frequently lack good judgment. Did you know that studies of medical residents regularly find they perform at least as badly when sleep deprived as when they are moderately drunk?

Mask physical sleepiness with a cup of coffee, a can of cola, or Red-Bull—but don’t expect those drinks to remedy an over-stimulated brain or reenergize a physically tired physique. That requires sleep.

And if none of these reasons speak to you… consider this.

If you believe you will catch up on sleep when you die, you can be as productive on five hours of sleep as you are with eight hours of sleep, and you actively choose to skip opportunities to sleep: let me beg you to reconsider.

There are people in the world--people like me--who need everyone who can get a full night’s sleep to be quick, well rested, and leading the world with all their faculties intact. Go to bed early tonight. Please.