How many of you actually feel energized and rejuvenated after a full night of sleep? More importantly, how many of you actually GET a full night of sleep?
Getting enough sleep used to be taboo in many industries, with sayings in business and finance surrounding the lines of “Oh I’ll sleep when I’m dead”… and although those saying may still be around, we’re actually realizing that if you don’t get quality sleep, death may be knocking on your door earlier than you expected.
Lack of sleep costs our US economy somewhere around $86 billion a year due to lost workplace productivity and additional healthcare expenses.
This number is staggering for multiple reasons, specifically as it relates to the biggest factor we all want to optimize: the brain. We now realize how impactful sleep can be for the overall health and wellness of our body and brain function, with studies showing that sleep can have a significant impact on memory, cognitive processing, energy conservation, controlling inflammation, and improving your body’s ability to remove toxins from the brain.
Sleep is a significant indicator of general health and wellness, which comes as no surprise that 1 in 3 adults in America rate their sleep as “poor” or “only fair”.
In specialized populations where individuals have suffered from various forms of physical, mental, and/or emotional trauma, these numbers skyrocket and can develop into a positive feedback cycle of poor sleep over days, weeks, months, and even years.
We used to think that everyone needed to acquire 8 hours of sleep to feel well rested and provide adequate recovery time, but there are significant differences between the needs of the average adult, an olympian, and a developing child. Keeping this in mind, it is important for each person to experiment with their sleep patterns to determine their specific sleep number for hours spent sleeping and time(s) for going to bed/waking up.
Although sleep is merely a general indicator of our health and wellness, it is a significant factor in recovery and maintenance of our health.
What types of tactics and tools do you use to sleep at night?
