When was the last time you woke up in the morning before your alarm clock, bursting with energy, bounced straight out of bed and just felt great to be alive?
My bet is, if you like 99.9% of the rest of the Western population, it was a long time ago.
As a society we are chronically fatigued. Most of us are so chronically fatigued we don’t even recognise the symptoms of this fatigue, we simply accept them as part of the human experience, that this is how we should feel.
In fact it is calculated that it would take the average Westerner three weeks of quality sleep to repay their sleep debt and take them back into optimal functioning.
Three weeks seems a tall order when most of us struggle to get 3 hours uninterrupted good sleep.
Why is this important to us?
Deep wave sleep is the time when the brain organises and enhances the cognitive skills learned during the day. This is the time when new neural path ways are laid down and old ones strengthened and any cognitive skill you practised during the day becomes fixed in your physiology. Thus by denying ourselves deep wave sleep we are massively impairing our ability to learn and to progress.
Now I’m not about to tell you you need to get eight hours sleep every night. Personally I believe that sleep quality is much more important than sleep quantity and that the amount of sleep you actually need varies greatly by individual and even for the same individual will differ on a day-to-day basis depending on what you’ve been doing and eating during the day.
What I do know is that when I started paying attention to my sleep, my performance, my retention of information and probably most importantly, my general well-being and happiness skyrocketed through the roof.
Now that’s not to say it doesn’t require some effort to hack your sleep effectively. Most of us are so ingrained in the Western lifestyle where sleep is the first thing to be sacrificed and we wear our fatigue as a badge of honour to show how hard we work or how tough we are.
Breaking through these barriers in our own brains and in society’s eyes does take a little effort and in future articles will talk about how this can be done.
I will however leave you with one little titbit, something you can get started with very, very easily, which can have a profound effect on your sleep. I use the app Sleep Cycle to track my sleep on a nightly basis. I have found that the simple act of monitoring how much sleep I’m getting and the quality of that sleep, has led me to search for ways to get better and longer sleep. As a result of this I’ve improved my sleep exponentially over the last few months and this has impacted positively on a LOT of other areas of my life, most importantly, my kiting!
And this from a man who used to struggle to get more than 4 hours sleep a night (and crappy sleep at that) and could still barely get out of bed in the morning.
Go download this app and start using it (we’re not affiliated) it’s much cheaper and has much greater performance enhancing effects on your kitesurfing than buying a new kite!