TN50#17, Don’t Forget About Sleep, 26 April 2021

Hi Team,

Happy Monday and welcome to The Next 50 #17.

First Principles Performance, LLC has the mission of making better humans.  I use the following 3 performance buckets to help clients improve their lives: Eat, Sleep, Move. I wouldn’t say any one of the 3 is the most important but I would say that sleep seems to be the most elusive to pin down for me as a coach, and for my clients, day to day.

On one hand, many of you reading this have spent prolonged periods of time getting really poor sleep and yet you still performed at a very high level in high consequence and highly chaotic environments; and on the other hand, most of my long-term clients have looked back over a year or more, during which sleep slowly improved and they have said that their improved sleep is the surprise game changer in their overall performance.

I personally agree with this as my sleep has improved over the last year (thanks COVID-19!). I can’t say I noticed it day-to-day as it slowly improved but I definitely appreciate the overall improved performance now.  I would also say that basic sleep hygiene protocols executed nightly (or as often as possible) along with reducing chronic pain points (can anyone relate to having their shoulders wake them up multiple times a night?) are the best practices for improving sleep that I have seen.

For those of you who aren’t convinced and feel like getting 5 hours of sleep is good enough I offer the following 5 minute educational video, you will learn about the links between poor sleep and dementia.  Thanks to Dr. Rhonda Patrick, for making this video.  Dr Patrick is one of my favorite big brained scientists who regularly helps me understand things at the cellular level, you might say she is a mitochondriac!

Have a good one, Alex