the essentialness of sleep

And now, let’s discuss the last and final takeaway from The 5 AM Club.

Key Takeaway #3 – The Essentialness of Sleep

Deep sleep is incredibly important for enhanced creativity, peak productivity, and exceptional performance. If we don’t sleep well, we won’t be able to properly execute The 20/20/20 Formula. What makes an impeccable performance is a delicate balance between the mastery of our morning routine and the optimization of our evening ritual. 

There’s a wave of sleep deprivation sweeping across the globe, also referred to as ‘a ferocious global sleep recession’ in the book. The advancement of the Internet, social media, and video-streaming platforms and the increased absorption with our devices are the main contributors towards this. Research has now confirmed that the blue light emitted from our smartphones, tablets, computers and TVs reduce the amount of melatonin within us. Melatonin is the chemical that informs our body that it’s time to get sleep. Not only using our devices all day impairs our cognitive function, but increased screen time before hitting the sack causes sleep dysfunction as well by negatively affecting our circadian rhythm.

When we don’t get to bed on time, and get enough hours of sleep, it makes it incredibly difficult to wake up early. Along with that, it diminishes our work performance, productivity, health and happiness. 

Studies are now confirming that in order to ensure optimum levels of creativity, productivity, vitality and longevity, we need five complete ninety- minute sleep cycles, which is seven and a half hours of sleep each night. Research has also shown that it’s not only sleep deprivation that’s dangerous for our health but over-sleep, nine or more hours, has also been reported to impact health negatively shortening our life. 

It’s best to design our own pre-sleep ritual that can help us prepare for bedtime and sleep consistently for the long-term. A great resource that you can follow is the ‘The Pre-sleep Ritual of Iconic Producers Deconstruction’ framework mentioned in the book. 

So, these are the three key takeaways from the book The 5 AM Club by Robin Sharma. If you’d like to get the book and read it, which I highly recommend, here’s the Amazon link (this is an affiliate link).

And if you’ve already read the book, I would love to know what other key lessons did you learn from it and how the 5 AM Club concept has influenced you. In addition, if you’re taking the 5 AM Club 66-day challenge, do share your journey and any progress that you’re making with me and the wonderful community here. Write your insights and experiences down in the comments section below, and I look forward to reading them.

Own your morning. Elevate your life.