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Ok, you can snore, but do not disturb the one you are sleeping with! (Pun intended)

Today let me ask you, “How many hours of continuous sleep do you grab each night?”

What!! Eight hours? There are only 24 hours in a day, and if you spend 8 hours of that on sleep, you’re wasting one third of your life just sleeping, aren’t you?

If you just answered to that question in the affirmative, then think again! If sleeping eight hours each night makes you think that you are wasting your time, then I’m here to be a little in your face and tell you that you need a change of perspective, because sleep is one of the most important ingredients to success!

Yes, I’m actually going to encourage you to grab some more sleep. But, that doesn’t mean you can sleep all morning and blame it on me, okay?

Remember my previous post where I mentioned that loss of health was one of the reasons that kept me away for some time? And you also remember me indicating that it was not work stress that caused it?

No points for guessing! Yes, it was lack of sleep that was the culprit.

Work stress was not the problem, however, work did steal away almost all of my time, leaving me with very little of it to take care of increased responsibilities in my personal life. Result? I went ahead and stole a share of my sleep time to handle those personal responsibilities. To make matters worse, I continued with that routine daily for a few weeks in a row. Lo and behold, the lack of sleep took its toll!

Ironically, last night I was pushing myself to get this post published before going to bed. It was quite late already, and being a workaholic by nature, I saw that, if I were to continue, it would be technically early morning by the time I could sleep. But then, for the very reasons that I was writing this post, I was able to force myself to stop right there and jump off to bed. I was really happy this morning for not compromising my share of seep last night. After all, it’s “Practice what you preach”, right? I’m happy I did, and I look forward to keeping it up going forward

It’s very important that we fetch a good amount of good quality sleep on a daily basis. I recommend eight hours, though seven would be a reluctantly acceptable lower limit, and nine would be good to have if it’s possible for you to toss over that extra hour into your routine. Some say they can do with a lot lesser sleep, and I used to be one of them. I know I’ve been just fine, or so I thought, with just 6 hours of sleep over the last couple of years. But you know what; the side effects begin to show up before long.

Well, there’s a lot more to say about sleep, its benefits, the ill effects of lack of it, and on and on. But I’ve told a couple of my friends and readers that I would be making an attempt to make my posts shorter in order to facilitate quicker reading, so I’ll try to wind up quickly.

At first I thought of listing down some scientifically proven facts regarding lack of sleep, but then you can always find loads of those all over the Internet. So, instead, I chose to just write only a brief summary of my opinion here.

Lack of sleep can cause you to attract an overwhelming amount of negative energy into any and every aspect of your life. It has serious ill effects on a person’s (or, for that matter, any living being’s) vital sectors of life, including and not limited to short-term and long-term health and abilities (physical, mental and spiritual), which then cascades into all sorts of problems related to attitude, perspective, relationships, prosperity, happiness, peace of mind and beyond.

Of what good would it be then, to achieve success in any sense, if in the bargain you lose out on any vital sector(s) of your life? And so I say, snore away to success! Well, cut out the snoring, just sleep well for true success!

What have your experiences been on sleeping patterns and/or deprived sleep? I’d like to hear from you, so do post your comments below.