Who Needs Sleep?

​I’m a driven person attracted to driven people. I put a multitude of systems in place to feed that drive, to capitalize on it.

Calendars, priorities, overwhelming projects broken down into manageable pieces. I get an undeniable high off of completing a task.

I’m driven in personal aspects of life too. My relationships with my husband, children, friends, and community – each of these relationships is a weighty and treasured asset, not one that I take for granted.

I’m driven in terms of my health. I implement daily exercises to improve it physically, mentally, emotionally, and intellectually.

Putting all of that together leads me to one truth: Time is our most precious commodity. Never enough hours in the day. We like to think that this is unique to us and our time, but we did not invent the wheel; we just continue the grind. Of this, I am sure.

Needing more time is a problem that breeds a nasty and negative solution: sleep less.

That’s the answer, right? Get up earlier. Stay up later. I took this a step further and combined it with my already established, unhealthy sleep habits: laptop and phone by my side at night, the DND setting off. Sleep like crap. Rise. Repeat.

There are other ways to find time: Less television and less Internet produce more time for other things. And if you actually track the time you give to keeping up appearances on Facebook or watching America’s Got Talent, you’ll realize how much time you could have used cultivating your own talent.

Once I understood the folly in letting sleep become a casualty, I began to see how often sleep deprivation is worn like a badge of honor in our hyper-productive world. Pissing matches over which entrepreneur works the latest and gets up earliest, continually upping the ante by dialing back the alarm.

The INTELLIGENT early risers make no excuse for the fact that while they might rise long before the sun comes up, they are also in bed at an hour that gives them time to get the sleep they need.

Getting by on little sleep does not give me more time. In fact, it robs me of time, because the hours I do have will find me irritable, dull, and incapable of focus.

To martyr yourself in this way is to demonstrate the ultimate act of disrespect to yourself and your health.

So, who needs sleep?

I do. And so do you.