Get More Energy – Sleep Less

I’ve always said that you’ll have much more energy if you train your body to wake up naturally.

I’m not a fan of jarring your body out of sleep with a harsh, piercing, screeching sound. To snooze and do it repeatedly – I can’t imagine what that must do to your nervous system!

I’m also a believer that more sleep doesn’t necessarily equate to having more energy. The theory that you ‘need’ 8 hours sleep feels flawed to me.

I’ve been a regular sleeper, for about 34 years in fact, that makes me a kind of expert, 😆 and I can kind of say through my many years of research, that 8 hours is not an optimal amount of sleep.

As babies, obviously we require quite a bit of sleep but I think that the amount of sleep we require reduces from around the age of 25 onwards.

I rarely feel like I need 8 hours of sleep. My body usually tells me how much sleep I require. A quick example; last night I went to bed at around 2am. My body was ready to get up at around 8.10am. That was the time at which my body woke up naturally. That’s just around 6 hours after going to bed.

I could’ve woken up and been full of energy but I did that thing where I went back to sleep out of sheer laziness! 😛 (See we personal development guru’s don’t always awake get it right!) Then I had to rely on my alarm to wake me up at 9.30 (Which I do only to ensure I don’t wake up late for important engagements)

By that time I felt exhausted. I woke up groggy and feeling like I needed more sleep.

I believe it’s way more important to listen to our bodies and understand them, rather than to think squarely that we are all the same, and 8 hours should be a blanket policy for everyone.

There is much research on sleep and many people have proved, by undertaking experiments and sleeping in a biphasic or polyphasic patterns, that our bodies are much more flexible than most people realise.

The key here, is training your body into a new paradigm.

Suggestions

If you have a fixed pattern of living, i.e. you work a 9-5 then this may be a bit of a stretch but I still believe it’s worth trying to allow your body to awake naturally.

1. At night, it’s worth telling your body at what time you wish to wake up. Try this as an experiment. Turn away all clocks and access to anything that tells you the time.

2. Then wake up when you feel like getting up, get past the initial drowsy stage, and when you know you won’t be able to sleep again, check out what time you’ve gotten up.

A lot of the time we’ll go back to sleep because we allow ourselves to be aware of the time. If you change that habit, you’ll get your body into a pattern whereby you’re taking control, rather than a clock having control over you.

Once you mastered this you’ll be able to wake up daily without an alarm. You can still have a buzzer there as a backup. Set it for the latest possible time that you can wake up. What you’ll find is you’ll start to wake up before your alarm is due to go off.

I’ve found by doing that I tend to wake up more refreshed and relaxed. I’m sleeping much less but as a general rule I’m feeling more energised and productive.

I’m not going to lie and say I feel like I have more energy all of the time. However, generally speaking, when I listen to my body, don’t use alarms, and I allow myself to wake naturally, I find that my energy levels are higher and I am also more productive.

If this is a new concept, try this for yourself and let me know what kind of results you get.

Do you already do this? How much do you sleep a night? Do you have lots of energy or are you always tired?