Get 8 hours of sleep
Your body is a meat vehicle and your consciousness is trapped inside of it. If you want to do anything in your life, this meat wagon is your one and only ticket to getting that shit done.
And this meat wagon needs to get 8 hours of good, solid sleep every damn night.
If you miss just 1 or 2 hours of sleep at night, you have worse reaction time, worse memory, worse reflexes and worse mood.
When you’re trying to make changes in your life--no matter what they are--it is going to be hard just by themselves.
But if you’re trying to do those things without sleeping enough, it’s going to be 100x harder.
Even if you’re not trying to make optimizations or start a side-hustle and you’re just trying to raise kids or live with your spouse. Life is just harder and shittier when you’re not sleeping.
If you want to be a better parent, partner, or change certain things about yourself; you want to make more money, quit smoking, quit drinking, quit sugar, lose weight, get a boyfriend or a girlfriend…
The very first place that you can start is with…
Sleep.
It took me 3 years to learn that sleep is the key to everything that I wanted to do with my life.
Once I did learn it, it was the first physical, practical step that I took that had a real, meaningful and detectable difference in helping me accomplish my goals.
What Happens While You Sleep?
Now, while you’re laying there, your body and your brain are still working.
Sleep affects all of the tissues in your body. Your body releases hormones and undergoes cell repair that nourish your brain, heart, muscles and organs.
You Getting Bad Sleep Is Bad For Your Family
Getting poor sleep means that you do not have the mental, emotional, or physical strength to adapt well to new situations and changing demands, which is a huge part of parenting and life.
So what I see happen to a lot of dads is they just check out. They sit on their phone or they just watch TV.
As a dad you need a ton of emotional strength because your kids take all of it from you. You have to always put their needs above your own. That takes emotional strength and courage, which you build during sleep.
When you don’t sleep you will be frustrated at everything. The whole world gets framed in this negative lens and you can only fix it with a two hour nap.
You will feel sad and hopeless, like you have no strength to change your circumstances and that you will never become successful. You will feel defeated and that you don’t matter, that nothing matters.
Negative behaviors become easier to justify.
“What’s the point of staying on my diet when I’m exhausted and can’t work out? I’m not going to lose the weight anyways...so why not eat that bag of chips?”
“I’m not going to be able to accomplish my goals anyways, why try? Why not just finish that second bottle of wine and enjoy another hour of television?”
Why Sleep Is Good For Your Family
When you do get sleep, it means that even if your kids are soaking up all your spare time, emotional and intellectual resources, and physical strength…
You can deal with that. You can give your kids your time and energy during the day because you know that later on during their naps or when they go to bed that you will have time to work on stuff and the energy to be productive.
Getting sleep means that you have the emotional resources to give to your spouse and also to your passion project. You can support them while also supporting your dreams.
If you want to maintain or acquire the aggressive, energetic and positive mindset to continue to grind and reach for your dreams, you need to have sleep. It will give you the courage to continue putting yourself in uncomfortable and difficult situations; to continue putting off present satisfaction and pleasure for future rewards.
The only way you can maintain that kind of power...is to have the resources to create it and the very first ingredient is sleep.
How do you get better sleep?
So hear this right now: if you want to make changes in your life, do something hard, make more money, or accomplish anything, it starts with fortifying your brain and your mind with sleep.
Do not have another beer or glass of wine at night. Do not watch another episode of your show on Netflix, if it’s late right now, turn this video off and go to sleep.
Do that every single night. Set a bedtime for yourself.
I want you to think about how shitty it is to drag your exhausted face out of bed, that moment when your eyes peel open and they burn, how you can’t focus, how every little thing will set you off, and how you just can’t deal with anything.
You must sleep every single night. If you want to level up, sleep is the foundation upon which you can start to plan your jump.
Vince Lombardi said, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Get to bed.
I’ll see you out there.