The average person sleeps about eight hours a night. That’s 56 hours of your 168 hour week. If you do the math that’s 1/3 of your life that will be spent snoozing. Sleeping is a major part of your life, whether you like it or not. If we spend nearly 1/3 of our life sleeping it is vital that we get it right. In fact, getting 1/3 of this area in our life working well can make the other 2/3rds work even better.

The problem is no one teaches us how to sleep well. Unless you went to school to study sleep, no one even thinks about learning how to sleep better. But this is one skill that quite possibly could affect your life more than anything else. When you learn how to sleep well, you’ll set yourself up for a better life in the long run.

Here are a few examples of some sleep patterns from people you’ve probably heard of…

• Basketball Player, Lebron James sleeps 12 hours a night.
• British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill slept 7 hours a night.
• CEO of PepsiCo., Indra Nooyi sleeps 5 hours a night.
• Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin slept 6 hours a night.
• Amazon Founder, Jeff Bezos sleeps 8 hours a night.
• Golf Player, Tiger Woods sleeps 4-5 hours a night.
• Singer, Mariah Carrey sleeps 15 hours a night when she prepares to sing.

When we retire for the night our bodies actually travel through a sleep journey. Little did you know that you are on a sleep adventure or nightmare depending on where you travel to. And the payoff at our ultimate destination is glorious if you get there. During sleep, your body travels through a complex set of stages. The secret is to make it from N1 to N2 to the ultimate destination of N3. N3 or deep delta-wave sleep is the stage where you get the most rest on your journey. It is a regenerative period where your body heals and repairs itself. If you don’t allow your body to get there, your health and productivity begin to suffer. Highly productive people are not sleep-deprived workaholics, in fact, they are quite the opposite. Highly productive people get great sleep thus allowing them to live out their potential.

All sleep is not created equal. In the case of a good night’s rest, quality trumps quantity every time. The quality of your sleep will determine the quality of your day. Your preparation to be productive for tomorrow actually starts tonight. Pull back to get good sleep and it will prepare you to go further than you could have gone otherwise.

Proverbs 3:24 (NIV)

When you lie down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet.