Essentially, Sleep!

If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?

Sleep is very important for a properly regulated body and mind.

For reference, I worked night shifts through the winter of 2023 into the early spring of 2024. My metabolism and habits are still recovering from that mistake.

There’s a way that one of my textbooks puts it; when your suprachiasmatic nucleus (the part of the brain concerned with sleep) is not sated with sufficient sleep, you lose charisma.

Without sufficient sleep, sanity grinds to a halt. We become irritable, impatient, easily angered, impulsive, unfocused, non-creative and nearly useless. Our chances of making avoidable mistakes are heightened.

Looking to create extra time for yourself? That’s doable!

The problem with humans and time is not that we don’t have sufficient waking hours; rather, we don’t have enough alert hours. Especially for larks(early risers), their alertness tends to peak and drop all within cooperate working hours.

So even if they are awake at the end of an 8hr day shift, their mental alertness is no longer optimal. This is why we think that we need more time.

While there are psychotropics (substances that offer heightened alertness by altering brain chemicals), it should not be a go to because some of them can affect other aspects of your body e.g. your heart.

If you want to increase your alert waking hours, you can very easily add two hours of alertness to your waking hours by undertaking a brisk thirty minutes of walking at the end of your eight-hour daytime shift.

This works like magic! What’s better? After you’ve exhausted that additional 2hrs of energy burst, your sleep will be very restful, and you’ll wake up feeling refreshed the next morning.

Except in very few unavoidable situations, losing sleep worsens things for both the individual and everyone else involved with the individual.

While this might be bogus, I have observed that people who believe in losing sleep a lot often exhibit bipolar traits. It may not be such a coincidence that high achievers tend to suffer bipolar symptoms much more than the general population.

Get your sleep in while you work on that demanding project.