Don’t Cut Sleep – Especially Not When You Want to Learn Something New

Sleep is an important part of our life. While it may seem to be a waste of time, nothing is further away from the truth. Without sleep, you will be unable to do those many things you would rather do than sleep.

So many people cut sleep to learn new things. Unfortunately, this is the worst thing you can do. Not enough sleep reduces your ability to learn new things more than the extended hours you are awake can compensate. In other words: You just waste your time and would be much better off if you would sleep longer hours.

You can find it out for yourself: How do you feel when you do not get enough sleep? How productive are you when your third mug of coffee still has no effect? Not only are you tired, your motivation goes down and you get frustrated a lot faster than usual. Without the energy to fix the underlying problem you go for the obvious symptom and fight one after the other. That not only needs much more time, but it does not solve the real problem. You are running constantly but do not make any progress – like a hamster in its wheel.

 

What does research say?

There are many sources with diverging ideas on how much sleep you really need. The National Sleep Foundation went through all that, conducted a systematic literature review, convened an expert panel and used quantitative techniques to summarize expert opinion concerning recommended sleep durations per age group. The result was published as a research paper in Sleep Health

The expert panel recommended these sleep durations by age group:

• Young adult (18-25 years): 7 to 9 hours
• Adult (26-64 years): 7 to 9 hours
• Older adult: (≥65 years): 7 to 8 hours

These are general recommendations and may be good for most but not all people. You find an easy-to-read explanation of the results here, including a nice graphic that also covers the ranges that can be appropriate for some individuals.

 

Our toxic culture

Unfortunately, in IT we see a constant stream of messages in the other direction: How little sleep do we need? Industrial leaders are in a race to the bottom and declare sleep deprivation as the only way to go. If you work 130 hours per week you cannot sleep much – yet success is not guaranteed. That is an extreme example, but by far not the only one.

Just follow the countless comments and remarks around you. You will be surprised how often sleep should be reduced. One’s own health is completely ignored – with fatal consequence: Burnouts, stress and many different health problems are rooted in too few hours of sleep. We pay a high price for the few hours we spend awake more – while lacking the energy to use them well. Is this the way we want to take?

 

The spiritual side

There is another source for the 7-8 hours we should sleep: The Dalai Lama. He argues from the point of happiness and not the physical need declared by medicine. (If there really is a difference is a topic for another post.) Nevertheless, when science and religion come up with the same amount of sleep, they may be up to something and we should at least try it.

 

Is there hope?

Yes! We can influence how much we sleep. It may not be possible to get 7-9 hours of sleep every night, but at least we can try and steadily increase it. The culture is changing, slowly but at least in the right direction and we can find more and more examples of successful people who sleep that much without falling behind. It is a long way to go, but we need to start somewhere.