Today I want to talk about sleep.

You know life on earth is adapted to the rotation of our planet, and we have known for many years that we, as humans, have clocks that work with this regular cycle of the the planet turning around itself. So we have these body clocks but how does it work? That’s not something that we’ve really known. I’m from Sweden and in Sweden we have the Nobel Prize, I’m not sure you know about it but here it’s a big thing and I usually hear about it every year and there are all these prizes for scientists who’ve done things that most of us don’t understand.

But this year they really had a very nice subject from the winners of the medicine and physiology prize and what they’re talking about is this clock that I was talking about at the start. So what they have found is that there’s a gene protein that accumulates during the night in the cells of the body and then it degrades in the day and that makes this kind of a self-sustainable clockwork inside the cell and I think that’s really cool because what they found is that it regulates critical functions in in the human body.

Critical functions like behavior, hormonal levels, sleep, body temperature, metabolism, blood pressure etc. You know when you have jet lag, well that’s when your internal clocks are out of order or they are in the wrong place because you now moved on the planet and your body clock gets lost. These clocks are also associated with the risk for a lot of different diseases so they are very important and something that we can all relate to.

So we all have something called a Circadian rhythm, this is the name for the 24 hour clock in our bodies that regulates a lot of different genes. Knowing this also means that we know our body wants regularity. I think that’s something important to remember when we talk of disturbances that can be connected with sleeping disorders with depression, cognitive dysfunction and even a lot of neurological diseases.

In addition to all this this interesting news I also saw a T.V. program about sleep and the memory, and in this program they had some toddlers that they played with a puppet and what they had was this little ritual that they did with the puppet. After they played half of the kids then had their nap and slept well and the other half stayed awake. Sometime later they did the same Puppet Show again and they were looking to see if the toddlers remembered what they had done previously. Did they know what was going to happen next in the show?

The interesting thing was that the toddlers that had, had their nap and slept all remembered what they had done before, but the ones that didn’t take the nap and sleep didn’t remember. They then went on and did the same experiment with grownups. They did tests with them and after then some slept and others stayed awake. The adults that had their good sleep they remembered and ones that didn’t sleep they didn’t remember so I think that is very interesting. There is a lot of great research going on in this area right now. .

I bet you’re wondering why I am talking to you about this, to you busy business leaders. Why do stressed business leaders need to know about this? Well I would say that all this is just good news for all of us that are business leaders who are stressed out because this is such good knowledge that confirms that we need our regular sleep.

I meet so many busy business leaders who say okay I’m just going to sleep two hours less each night and then I get two more hours to work. And I have to say to them; no you don’t really get two more hours to work you actually get less hours to work because you get tired and grumpy and you don’t have the focus or memory to remember things well enough to work efficiently.

It doesn’t really work for you to sleep less because you really do need your sleep because that’s when you do the body’s “house cleaning” so to speak. That’s when you your brain and body restores itself so less sleep equals less done and more sleep equals more done. Sleep is such a basic function for efficiency and getting things done right the first time and also to get all that energy and all that good health.

So to get your good sleep pattern started I want to give you three little easy tips:

1. The first one is make the bedroom cool and dark because if it’s too hot we don’t sleep that well and also we need the dark so that the brain can get its rest otherwise it’s going to be alerted by the light.
2. And secondly no work in bed. I said no work in bed or in the bedroom even. Leave all your electronic devices outside the room and especially don’t look at them right before you’re going to sleep because there’s another kind of light in them that stimulates your brain instead of having it going down for sleep.
3. And then the third thing is to set regular hours for bedtime and it’s best if you can do that for every day of the week, even the weekends. Doing the same helps because the body needs or the brain and the body needs regularity and it doesn’t know if it’s Saturday, Sunday or Monday.
It wants the same routine all the time.

To recap here are the three things to remember for better sleep:

Make your bedroom cool and dark
The second no work in bed
The third regularity is set regular hours for sleeping.

If you need some help with this feel free to reach out and if you want to more free tips feel free to browse the blog. If you have friends that would need this kind of information then please do send them the link.

To your success and keep smiling!