The Case for Sleep

As a young man, I had grand ideas about sleep and how it's tied to success. The formula was easy indeed, less sleep meant more time to work on things and therefore it was me furthering myself towards my goals which at the time were to become a better artist, specifically a professional artist that could earn good money from his creations and ideas.
I know only vaguely where these ideas come from, movies, people around me comparing hours of sleep to see who suffered the most, sleeping habits of others ("Oh I went to sleep at 4AM, was working hard mate!"), false stories of successful people not sleeping like ordinary people and in fact sleeping less to accomplish more.
Those were all lies, or at least strategies that were harmful and unproductive. What actually was happening was in fact very different.
I was surrounded by chronically tired people who were endorsing their own strategies to me so that I could experience the fun of being chronically tired like them.
I fell for that, what a laugh!

Knowing now how sleep is essential for peak performance, it was wrong and took me a few hundred steps backwards denying the need for sleep for years. Meaning, I could've progressed more in terms of professional development have I not held these beliefs about deprivation of sleep. I remember the times at work for a studio or practicing art at home until the very late hours, not being able to concentrate and being frustrated at myself because of that! Looking back, it didn't make any sense. Would you be frustrated at yourself if you needed to drink water? Seriously mate, I don't THINK I need water so stop pestering me. Dehydration soon follows, or as in this practical case, sleep deprivation follows. Dire needs have strong alarm systems, but even those can be overcome.
It's not a joke, being sleep deprived is akin to being drunk. Would you look at your fellow employees or students and say - "Wow, they are doing great today at work/school, they are drunk!". Not a chance and yet sleep deprivation holds strong, as a macho perpetuation to get what we want, faster.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hours to expertise rule in his book "Outliers", but he forgot to mention the stupidly simple idea that you need sleep to accomplish a good rate of retention of what you learn. Without the importance of sleep, as in my case, the 10,000 hours rule can take on a nasty and unproductive form. Working long hours and not enjoying enough sleep can and will lead to a general deterioration of mood and cognitive skills, especially your ability to make decisions (not hard to find evidence for this).

An another book I read recently changed my thoughts about sleep and what things should you agree to take on as projects. The book is called "Essentialism" by Greg McKeown.
The general idea of this is to say no to most offers that come your way and to limit your own "spreading around", to concentrate on what is really important or as the book popularizes, what is essential to you indeed. Instead of having 8 priorities for a day, or a week or a month. Have a single one that is the most important one. Priorities became a plural thing only in the last century, it was a word used in single form only to indicate that one essential item on your mind.
The book also emphasizes sleep and gives a brutal example for a very successful businessman who was performing on 4-5 hours of sleep for years and was constantly flying around the world and suffering from never ending jet lag, and that lead to a total breakdown which crippled him for over a year, he came back from his misery and now appreciates sleep and knows that it's essential for our body and mind (especially the mind). This could be viewed as a trivial and general evidence, but google can easily show you general evidence to support the idea that lack of sleep harms you even if not as harsh as said businessman in the example.

We are in a way like a computer, we load what we learn into our RAM and if we want to retain that information for a long period, we have to save it to our hard drive (or other permanent storage device). If this doesn't happen, we lose the memory and what we learned from our RAM as we restart our computer or close the operating program. Well, it's not as harsh, but we don't retain as much of what we learned if we don't save to our brain (aka sufficient sleep) which nullifies the hard work of pushing ourselves while experiencing diminishing returns and an aggravating mood and elevating frustration levels. Is it worth it? No.
Lack of sleep is a false idea and I urge people who want to perform in their highest and progress faster to never skip sleep if possible. It will reflect better on your mood, your memory and your concentration. You'll be sharper and seriously, you'll be amazed at how you feel compared to what you used to feel when sleep deprived.

We are so used to feeling tired all the time that we forgot what being rested feels like. I have artist friends who work in studios and it's hard to talk to them, since they're usually so exhausted that they can barely keep a conversation. You see it in their unfocused eyes that they are tired and yet they refuse to sleep.
The idea of lack of sleep is taking hits right now, well deserved pokes of criticism and I hope that one day this idea will bite the dust and forever disappear. It will however make mandatory appearances in our lives, having babies will certainly put a strain on our ability to sleep well and so will possible stressful times out of our control. Yes, we'll be able to perform but to make greater leaps and bounds in a highly brainy subject such as painting requires sleep, and sleep will benefit your own progress much more than overextended hours of work.

Take the learning process slow but not too slow, that would be my (somewhat ambiguous and final) advice (hehe).

Salty
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Books mentioned in the journal to check out:
"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell
"Essentialism" by Greg McKeown

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