14 Steps to Help you get more Sleep and Save Money

mental health

Mar 18

This article is an excerpt from the book Our Money Stories.

In today’s blog post, we’re going to uncover how sleep affects our money stories and how it affects decision-making. There will also be actionable steps at the end to help you sleep!

Sleepless nights means code of honor

Everything happens in the physical. Until we all augmented ourselves with robot bodies, it's good to appreciate our bodies on an everyday basis. How we present ourselves, communicate, and of course, exercise.

There have been countless times that you’ve had had a conversation with someone at work or school bragging about their lack of sleep. Sleep deprivation is the killer of the modern world, but why do we wear our lack of sleep as a badge of honor?

I am productive with a bit of amount of sleep.

I can remember talking to a girl in one of my financial wellness workshops, and she said that the sleep doctor told her that she is one of those small percentages of people that thrive off five hours of sleep. I was so impressed by her data that I started researching sleeping for five hours. I kept thinking maybe I should sleep less.

As I researched the benefits of sleeping less, I noticed a significant flaw in the research. As it turns out, the ability to sleep with five to six hours of sleep by one study “women who slept between 5.0 and 6.5 hours each night were likely to live longer than those who slept more or less.”

The lack of sleep study took the world by wildfire.

The columnist was talking about raving this study and the ideas as truth. What was interesting was that the study said that people could “survive” between 5.0 and 6.5.

Many other studies from Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard have found that “a lack of sleep can wreck your body clock and increase the risk of severe health problems, including cancer, heart disease, type-2 diabetes, and obesity.” Sleep benefits still haven’t been retested as the best option, but the rhetoric is potentially damaging.

Teens and sleep

We’ve all started a trend of competitive sleep deprivation early while we are teens(rock).

According to Better Help, most adolescents” only get about 6.5 – 7.5 hours sleep per night, and some get less.” We were already moody from growing into adult bodies, and this just adulthood exacerbated the problem. Yikes!

As we grew into our workspace, many of us used to “lack” sleep as a life skill…

What about the CEOs or creatives that don’t get sleep?

Folks love to say that Thomas Jefferson only slept for two hours a day, and Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein after having insomnia. From quoting the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelly, or Leonard Di Vinci, people love saying that insomnia makes creativity. Shelly was creative, but she had a lack of sleep.

In Shelly’s defense, she saw a monster because of lack of sleep, which became a best seller. CEOs believe in the same sleep myth.

Many leaders are sleeping less on a national scale. The less sleep you get, professionals get, on average, six hours or less of sleep (Tuck) and several more seniors at work.

The problem is that seventy-two percent of managers say they have trouble focusing due to lack of sleep (Tuck). A lot of this has to do because people plan on taking their work home; they’re less productive at work (Tuck). They end up working at home and can become tired, But then they work at home and become even more tired.

On an economic level, there is a massive loss of money when we don’t sleep. Time is our most valuable asset in life. We are all fighting for time, and it is through the allocation of work, play, and sleep, a large chunk of us chooses work or play.

Lack of Sleep Is now a Public Health Problem.

The center for disease control and prevention has declared the United States as now declared insufficient sleep as a ‘public health problem(rand). The OCED collected data from all over the world to determine that five countries: Canada, the USA, UK, Germany, and Japan, have a significant economic cost of insufficient sleep (Rand). The OECD has lost up to 3% of the GDP from these five countries, costing the countries billions of dollars.

How many times have you powered through a workday only to find yourself too tired to cook, so you purchase takeout? How many of you pulled an all-nighter thinking that you do well under pressure? How many of you brag about working hard with lack of sleep (I’m guilty of this)? How many of you go online shopping when you should be sleeping? Chances are overworking and not sleeping enough makes Jackie a dull girl.

SLEEP QUESTIONNAIRE

Questions to ask yourself:

Do you get more than six hours of sleep a night?
Do you “thrive” off five hours of sleeping? Have you gone to a sleep specialist?
Is there something that is keeping you up at night?
Do you go (shopping, eating out, etc.) when you are tired?
Do you believe that procrastination is a part of your execution process?