If Sleep Isn’t One of Your Top Three Life Priorities, You’re Doing It Wrong

New rule: If you’re too busy for sleep, you’re too busy.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

It’s very telling that prior to the invention of Edison’s incandescent bulb, Americans slept an average of ten hours per night. In medieval times, people slept so long they did it in two shifts. Yet today, more than 130 million Americans get less than seven hours per night… and it’s killing our health.

The stark reality is that the bodies of homo sapiens are clearly adapted for far more sleep than we’re currently giving ourselves. We are in no way adapted to a life of artificial light, and probably won’t be for a hundred generations.

So I’ll be completely upfront in telling you the purpose of this article:

I want the entire world to start sleeping nine-plus hours per night again.

I made sleep my #1 physical priority starting two years ago and it’s easily the best health decision I’ve ever made.

Since then, I’ve managed to convince a number of friends and family members to start sleeping more hours each night — glorious, unapologetic, unmetered hours — and none of them have suffered materially in any way, shape, or form. More sleep may have subtracted…