Daily Brain Candy 3: Be Your Best Sleeping Beauty

After drinking water and getting minerals, sleeping is the most important thing you do for your brain. I've begun to take my sleep much more seriously. In my adult years, I've always seemed to work early, so a 6am wake up was no big deal. In 2013, I began to wake up at 5am, 4am and even 3:30am, unable to sleep, simply staring at the ceiling. That's when I decided to write books. My kids were teenagers, so early morning was the only real quiet time in the house, so writing for 30 minutes was easy, and sometimes I wrote for an hour or more. From October 2013 to March 2014, I produced 45,000 words. But it came at a cost. I was harming my brain, my immune response and to some degree my mental health. I said brave things to myself, like 'I will rest when I'm dead', and 'sleep is for weaklings'.

Be A Good Example

Now that I'm researching optimal brain performance for Sport, I'm finding that I was unconsciously incompetent. Once I learned what I didn't previously know, the challenge came to consciously change my sleeping habits. As you can see in the images, both the quality and quantity of my sleep has improved, and so has my performance. My coaching is better, and I get through each day more easily without sleep pressure weighing me down. Take the sleep challenge, track your sleep, develop sleep routines, and plan to get 8 to 9 hours a night, or more.