Thought for Food

Sleep Challenge: 9 hours, 1 week

Thank you, friends, for your advice regarding my sleeping problem!

After reading my post, Jane wrote to me to tell me she is on Day 3 of a week-long Sleep Challenge that a professor teaching a law and psychology class at her law school gave to his students. He’s encouraging them to create healthy sleep patterns because studies have shown that more than anything else — family, friends, job, money, love, exercise — sleep has the biggest effect on happiness.

He may be referring to the study cited by Arianna Huffington (who is also taking a Sleep Challenge):

It found that getting just a little more sleep had a greater effect on a person’s state of mind than a large increase in income. According to psychology professor Norbert Schwarz, one of the authors of the study, “Making $60,000 more in annual income has less of an effect on your daily happiness than getting one extra hour of sleep a night.”

It didn’t take much to convince Jane or myself that sleep is a key to happiness. I feel pessimistic about the world and awful about myself today, I can barely concentrate — and why? Just because I got a bad night’s sleep.

So here’s the professor’s challenge, in Jane’s words:

he says you need 9 hours a night (NO EXCUSE) for a full week.  eight hours of sleep, and one hour ritual pre-sleep.  he says the first half hour of that time you do the same thing every night (it can be a bath, reading, sex, whatever, but it has to be the same thing) then the second half-hour is just laying in bed to allow yourself to fall asleep and ensure you get the full 8 hrs.

I’m going to commit to the challenge when I get home from California. Maybe I can even convince my favorite nightowl to take part, too.

Who’s with me?