Are you grumpy, irritable, overwhelmed, stressed out, like all the freakin’ time? Do you find that you have a short temper? That your road rage has been particularly severe lately? People annoying you at work… every single day? Or maybe you’re having trouble concentrating on what people are saying. Maybe you’re (like me) constantly joking that your memory’s shot and that maybe you’ve got early onset Alzheimer’s (sometimes checking the symptoms to make sure that’s not really true)?

You know what would be worse than that? That all this has been going on for so long that you actually think this is NORMAL!

gasp!

It’s not.

You know what the cure for all that is? Sleep.

Ok so maybe it won’t clear EVERYTHING up, but it’ll definitely get you on the right track.

Get the data

So if you’re reading this and going yeah yeah, I’ve heard all that before but it’s not true for me. I can totally function on 5-6 hours per night. I used to think that too; until I actually saw my numbers.

During one of my courses for my Master’s program, we had to do a self-study and although I chose meditation as a means to help me feel more confident about my ability to be successful at school, I also kept some data on how many hours of sleep I was getting, just to see if that was going to have an effect on my results.

CAVEAT: This was not meant to be “REAL” research in the sense that I would make sure all sorts of variables were controlled, blah blah blah. I actually worried about not having “clean data”; it’s the science nerd in me. Plus, I work with researchers. Data totally turns them on. But my professor assured me that the point of the whole thing was really to gain a better understanding of my own inner functioning; hence why it’s called a SELF-STUDY.

So the best way for me to get good easy data was to use my Fitbit Flex to log my hours of sleep over the 21-day period I chose to collect my data. I actually quite like being able to see how much sleep I’m getting using my FitBit. Plus, it wakes me up in the morning which is also super cool, but I digress. I was also logging how long I was meditating (if I was meditating that day) and how I was feeling in the morning and at night.

So here’s what I found: My tendency to be grumpy, ornery, irritable, short-tempered, feeling overwhelmed, trouble focusing & remembering things… all that crap was WAY higher on days I wasn’t getting enough sleep. For me, that’s 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep per night.

By keeping track of those numbers, I got to know myself really well! I found that if I get even just one night of only 6 hours, I have to sleep 9 hours the next night to get back on track and feel rested the next day. And if I get 2 short nights in a row, then I’m WAY less productive and efficient at work, not to mention bitchy for no good reason.

If you’re a research and data kind of person, you already know there’s tons out there to prove this. It’s not rocket science. Everybody knows this. So why aren’t we all doing it?? For me, even if I knew it intellectually, I still wasn’t really committing to getting a good night’s sleep until I did my own research. I had to see it for myself.

It was only when I saw how it affected ME, how the research applied to ME, that it really clicked. Like “Oh shit! They weren’t kidding!” DUH!!

Napping: The next step in the sleep revolution

If you’ve ever listened to Abraham Hicks, you’ve heard them say something along the lines of “if you’re not in alignment (not feeling it), take a nap.” And you hear the crowd laugh, and you chuckle too… but after hearing it a few thousand times, it finally dawned on me: “OMG they’re serious!” There isn’t just a vibrational reason why we should take a nap when we’re pissy, there’s probably a physical reason too! We probably actually DO need a nap!

I was listening to a podcast where Arianna Huffington (of The Huffington Post) came on and talked about how important sleep is. She even wrote a book about it called The Sleep Revolution. Basically, she says that sleep is the gateway drug to happiness, better overall health, career success and even better sex!

Uh, yeah! Take me to the nearest sleep dealer, I’m in!

Seriously though, when coaching clients come to me and start telling me how crappy their lives are, whatever the topic they’re addressing with me, the first thing I ask them is how much sleep they’re getting. And if they don’t know, I tell them to go get a FitBit. You can easily find a used one for a decent price if you think the cost of the Flex is still a bit high for your wallet. Trust me, it’s worth it. Because like everything else in life, you can’t improve if you don’t know where your starting point is.

In that podcast, Huffington said she had special napping rooms built in her offices to allow people to go take a power snooze if and when they need it. She even set the example herself by doing it too! Imagine that. No more sneaking off to the infirmary room (nobody ever uses it anyway), or an empty boardroom for a quick nap. It would actually be allowed, and even encouraged! How cool would that be. How much more productive would everybody be if we could take time to nap during our work day?

There are a ton of other great ways to turn things around and get happier, but if you’re not making the amount of sleep you’re getting a priority, you’re not going to get as good results. You need that solid foundation. Sleep is like the most basic thing you can do. It’s the most basic thing you SHOULD do!

Oh yeah, and my self-study? I did find that meditation helped me feel less stressed and more confident about being academically successful. But what was most fascinating was I found that on those days where I wasn’t getting enough sleep, meditation helped in the sense that I would feel slightly less like taking a bat to my computer, but only just so. But in getting adequate amounts of sleep, and even more so if I was on a roll with enough sleep AND 20 minutes of meditation a day over multiple days, MAN I WAS ON FIRE!! Best days ever.

So, how much sleep do you get?

And how happy do you feel on average?

Feel like running your own experiment? 21 days. I dare ya.