Sleeping Your Way to Better Health

Could sleep deprivation be keeping you from achieving your health and fitness goals?

If you’re like most people, the answer is probably “yes.”

Although lack of sleep is treated as a badge of honor in our culture, the evidence is piling up that it will cause your body to pack on fat, make you unattractive, and increase your chances of premature death.

Damn.

Stress, Cortisol, and Beer Bellies

Stress plays a key role in obesity.

Whenever you are stressed, be it physically, emotionally, or mentally, your body secretes a hormone named cortisol in response. One of the effects of cortisol? A shift in the metabolism towards fat storage.

But why would our bodies do such a thing to us? Isn’t stress a normal part of everyday life?

In his awesome book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert M. Sapolsky illustrates that stress is a good thing. It allowed our ancestors to high-tail it when they were being chased down by saber-toothed tigers, for example. But stress is only beneficial when it is acute (brief) rather than chronic (drawn-out).

You see, throughout human prehistory, before jobs, 401(k)s, and a constant onslaught of negative stories in the media, almost all stresses were of the acute variety, and they therefore helped us to survive instead of causing us to gain a bunch of weight.

But today, in our go-go-go lives, chronic stress isn’t just common, it’s the norm.

And that means that your body is probably awash in fat-storing cortisol. And with the average American getting less than 7 hours of sleep every weeknight, it’s only making matters worse.

The Dangers of Sleep Deprivation

But the dangers don’t just stop at weight gain. According to a recent study, sleep deprivation will actually make you ugly.

And for all of you students, staying up late cramming for that exam is actually counter-productive, as mental clarity and focus diminish with an increasing sleep deficit. Those of us working long hours will be negatively affected by this as well.

And here’s one for you to ponder tomorrow morning during your commute: tired driving is just as dangerous as drunk driving.

Driver fatigue causes 100,000 accidents each year, a statistic that would probably go up if there were a way to measure tiredness as accurately as a breathalyzer can measure drunkenness.

Again, I think this is just a result of our workaholic culture, where working insane hours is held up as the ideal.

Now, I don’t condone drunk driving, but I do think that the pot is calling the kettle black in our society.

Me vs. Sleep

I’ve never done well with little sleep.

Throughout high school and college, I tried hard to party it up all night and still be Mr. Responsible the next morning. It never worked. As fun as it was to go out all night, and as much social proof as I got for bragging about my 0-4 hours of sleep, I always felt sufficiently shitty enough the next day that I could never really make a habit of it.

My first job out of college was 2nd shift (aka “The Greatest Schedule Known To Man”), which I worked for several years. When you start work at 2:00 p.m. every day, you can always get a good night’s sleep!

But that all changed when I moved out to San Diego and joined the cult of 8-to-5. Getting to sleep early has always been a problem for me. Even though I was waking up at 6:00 a.m. every morning, I couldn’t get to sleep until somewhere between midnight and 3:00 am.

And man, I felt like shit.

After plowing along for several months, I decided enough is enough.

No longer will I be among the walking dead! No longer will I succumb to the temptation to brag about my lack of sleep!

I decided I would do the absolutely insane and start placing priority on getting a full night’s sleep every night.

That means sleeping until I wake up, not sleeping until my alarm goes off.

I know, I know. This makes me look like a lazy-ass, probably some hippie stoner who hasn’t been gainfully employed since ’03. I mean really, how can you get anything done if you sleep 8 hours per day?

Well, from my experience so far, I’d say I get about 10x more done when I’m fully rested than when I’m getting the usual 4-6 hours per night.

When I get 5-ish hours of sleep per night, I spend the next day running around like crazy, but I’m completely worthless. I can’t focus and can’t keep my head straight. I sweat like a pig, my entire body aches, and I’m on the verge of complete physical exhaustion.

But when I sleep until I wake up naturally, even if I know I have an unbelievable amount of work to get done the next day, I’m able to hit the ground running with ridiculous levels of focus and drive.

Tracking Sleep

So I’ve taken the radical step to see if I can sleep as much as possible in 2011.

This may be even a bigger challenge than learning how to enjoy eating liver, kidneys, heart, tripe, and other offal.

The results so far this year have been interesting. I’ll hold off for a while until I get a good representative sample. (Quarterly, perhaps?) In the meantime, I suggest you all join me and start getting more sleep!

If you are used to trudging along through your day, throwing back heavily-caffeinated and sugared beverages to keep your eyelids from drooping and your mind from wandering, you’ll be amazed at how much MORE you can get done, even though you have fewer waking hours each day.

All I wanna know is… who’s with me?