What You Feel: You don’t have time to sleep.

Perspective:  We all feel that sleep is a luxury that we just don’t have but you must sleep. It is impossible to maximize your time, potential and brain power unless you sleep. I know what you are saying to yourself “who has time to sleep?” Not sleeping is the same as not protecting an asset of the company. If your vision was to make widgets, and you had a killer widget machine, wouldn’t you make sure it had fuel and was properly oiled? It is hard when you are the entrepreneur but you must. Here are a few suggestions.

• Eight hours once per week. One day per week – preferably in the middle of the week – get eight hours of sleep. After the financial crisis of 2008, I was working twenty hours per day, but every Wednesday I went to bed at 10 p.m. and got eight hours. Made a world of difference.

• Take daily naps. Each day close your eyes for thirty minutes. No more than thirty minutes. Any longer and you run the risk of developing “sleep inertia” – that groggy feeling that takes a considerable amount of time to shake off. Power naps not only alleviate sleep deficits, but they boost our brains, including creative problem solving, verbal memory, perceptual learning, object learning, and statistical learning. Napping improves our mood and feelings of fatigue, is good for our heart, blood pressure, stress levels, and surprisingly, even weight.

• Hitting the pillow means sleep. When you put your head on the pillow at night, don’t waste time worrying about what you can’t control. When you are lying in bed, there is nothing you can do about your company’s issues. Once you decide to sleep, don’t think about the business.

If you follow these, you will increase your opportunity to move your company forward.

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