Sleep Hacks for Entrepreneurs: Elevate Your Energy and Efficiency

I always chuckle a little bit whenever I hear someone ask a famous person what their secret to success is. As if there is one simple hack that will magically transform their lives, making them millions of dollars overnight at the same time as giving them beach bodies. While there may not be one simple thing, or one single thing, I've discovered that there are three things that almost every successful person has come back to time and time again.

I refer to these as the wellness triad of sleeping, eating, and moving. I know it sounds simple, but I assure you, it's not easy.

In today's episode, I'm going to share some surprising facts about sleep and show you how you can tweak your sleep routine to overcome that feeling of tiredness throughout the day. I'm Amin Ahmed and welcome to Be Well, Do Well.

In her book The Sleep Revolution, Arianna Huffington talks about how she passed out and woke up in a pool of her own blood with a broken cheek bone. The reason for this was sleep deprivation and exhaustion. She was working 18 hours a day and that took a toll on her health and led to a total collapse of her body. An even more tragic and extreme example of this is the death of Matsuri Takahashi.

She was a 24 year old Japanese woman who took her own life after working extreme hours for months on end. According to the Tokyo Reporter, Takahashi was working 130 hours of overtime a month, with only 10 hours of sleep a week. That's right, not a day, but a week. Her suicide is sadly not an isolated incident. In Japan, the work culture is demanding and complex. There's even a term for this, called karoshi, which loosely translates to overwork death.

Many Japanese workers would suddenly die at their desks from heart attacks or strokes, or, more recently, by suicide. What we see in Japan with karoshi is just a wake up call for the rest of us. With the pace of technology and business around us, we see seemingly successful entrepreneurs such as the ex founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, getting only four to six hours of sleep. And it's also been said that Thomas Edison survived on only three or four hours of sleep a night.

Does that mean that we should also follow suit? Of course not. There's got to be a better way. The obvious solution is to get sleep. But how do you get more and better quality sleep? One where you realize that getting more quality sleep will actually improve your performance and productivity rather than reducing it.

This is where Parkinson's Law comes to play. Parkinson's Law states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. For example, if you give a task one hour to complete, it'll often take the full hour, even though it could have been done in less time. Or, another example is that if someone's income increases, their expenses also increase. Let's apply Parkinson's Law to our topic of sleep today. By sleeping more at night, you obviously have less time during the day.

But leveraging Parkinson's law, you should be able to get done the same amount of work in less time. However, it's not that simple. There's one more thing that you need to do to master the time that you have during the day. Rather than jumping from task to task frantically trying to get more done, focus on one task until you're done. My favorite acronym for this is FOCUS. Follow one course until success.

Here's a framework to get you doing more during your working hours. It's worked for me and for countless other entrepreneurs. Getting high quality sleep is so much more than just the number of hours that you're unconscious. The three big factors that determine the quality of your sleep are when you end your workday, when you finish your last meal, and what I call digital sunset. The first is when you end your workday.

The sad fact is that as entrepreneurs, especially those working from home, work really never ends. We can take time during the day to jump in the shower, go for a walk, and then work after dinner. this lack of full work shutdown means that our brains are really never off, which makes it impossible to really be mindful. My favorite productivity scheduling app, Sansama, has a built in end of day routine that ends in just saying out loud, shutdown complete. The second is your last meal.

Put simply, going to bed with a belly full of food is just going to result in poor quality sleep. I might even do an episode just about this topic alone. It's that important. The last is digital sunset. When do you actually turn off your screens before going to sleep? There's endless studies online that have shown that staying on your screens late into the evening disrupts your circadian rhythm and increases stress and anxiety levels.

So as a recap, the framework to getting better sleep is eat less before bedtime, shutdown complete at the end of your workday means no more working after that shutdown time that you define, and no screens in the bedroom. Get an old school alarm clock or whatever you need to do, but no phones, no screens in the bedroom.

This framework is great for feeling better in the long term, but here's something even more simple that you can do right now in the next 5 minutes to improve your sleep and productivity over the next 14 days. You may have heard the saying that what gets measured, gets done. If you want to improve your sleep, a sleep journal is super helpful. With a sleep journal, you can track your sleeping and waking times, the quality of your sleep, and other simple metrics like how you felt that night.

I've linked to a downloadable sleep journal here in the show notes. Download it now and you can get started right away. If you'd like to go deeper on this topic about sleep and how it affects productivity, I've put a link to a YouTube video in the show notes and a link to a book that I think you might find fascinating.

this journey of the fundamentals about sleep, eat, and move The wellness triad, if you remember in the intro. In the next episode, we'll talk about how food impacts your mood and energy and effectiveness and all that you do. I'll share a cool little hack that'll help you keep your energy stable throughout the day. Thanks again for joining me and I'll catch you in tomorrow's episode.