Call me crazy, but I’m certainly not the only person who things so. I asked a dozen of the academic boldface names in my Brain Trust Contact List what would be the first thing they’d look for when a patient or client complained of flagging energy. Every one-every single one-said sleep problems.
That’s not sexy, hip, trendy, or fun, but, unfortunately, it’s 100 percent true.
Good sleep habits are the structural foundation of energy. If that structure is weak, then eating well, exercising regularly, managing stress, and following all the other strategies offered in this site will be like spackling and painting the cracks on the wall of a house with a faulty foundation. It might look good for a while, but the house will still be crumbling underneath. Unless you attend to the cause of those cracks, you’ll never have a sound structure.
Keep depriving your body of the sleep it needs (and serves) and eventually – like the house with the faulty foundation – it’ll simply collapse.
FATIGUE-RELATED DISASTERS
The media and the public seem to be finally waking up to the importance of sleep and the role it plays along with stress management, good nutrition, and regular exercise in the energy equation. And not a moment too soon.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating whether the pilots of a go! Airliner in Hawaii overshot their intended destination and failed to respond to repeated calls from air traffic control because they were asleep in the cockpit. I don’t know about you, but when I think of a high-energy airline pilot, I don’t picture him or her nodding off in the cockpit.
Underscoring the concern about pilot fatigue was a story that appeared in The Christian Science Monitor shortly after that incident. The paper obtained a series of confidential safety report made by pilots, listing potentially dangerous fatigue-related incidents. ‘They range from failure to level off at assigned altitude to inadvertent taxiing onto active runways to actually failing asleep at the flight controls. In one report, a captain who accidentally crossed onto an active runway wrote that his copilot tried to warn him, but he was tired and didn’t listen”.
Fatigue-related errors have been a factor in some of the biggest disasters of recent times, including the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear accidents, and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
Although those cases are some of the most dramatic consequences from sleep loss, millions of us operate with some level of impairment and energy depletion because we don’t get adequate sleep. Sleep affects how we work, how we relate to other people, how we make decisions, and how we feel in general.
“Our culture has forgotten what it means to be awake”, said Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School’s Division of Sleep Science. “I think we spend most of our days a little bit groggy and a little bit inefficient”. You think?
Cheating sleep makes you more prone to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, and anxiety. It resets our internal clock, throwing off our endocrine, immune, and metabolic systems. And, oh yeah, lack of sleep makes you dull and fat. By getting adequate sleep, you’ll perform better and feel better, and your energy levels will soar.
Isn’t it about time we remember what it means to be awake?
Good sleep habits are the structural foundation of energy. If that structure is weak, then following all the other strategies offered in this site will be like spackling and painting the cracks on the wall of a house with a faulty foundation.
No comments:
Post a Comment