Embracing sleep and moderation

Embracing sleep and moderation will help keep you at your best.

Though Churchill discovered the joys of bricklaying at his own estate, it was in Cuba where he made arguably the most important discovery of his life. It wasn’t a military strategy or a rhetorical device.

No, it was the energy-giving powers of the siesta.

Sure, taking care of ourselves physically means being active and finding ways to invigorate and enrich ourselves. But it’s easy to focus too much on activity, as many of us do at work. It’s all too common in our society to trade health for a few more hours in the office. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” say bankers, lawyers and start-up founders, as they put in another grueling shift.

But the true greats – the Winston Churchills of this world – know that no matter how active we are, we should never neglect the simple power of sleep. Sleep is something to be protected, because it allows us to perform at our best.

The psychologist Anders Ericsson studied master violinists, and found that they slept a full eight and a half hours each night on average, and napped most days. What’s more, the greats napped more than lesser performers.

There’s more to this than just physiological benefits. Accepting that you need to stop working and get some sleep is fundamentally a question of knowing your limits. And this, the embrace of moderation, is another great route to stillness.

Too many of us are simply trying to do too much. Prince Albert, husband to Britain’s Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century, was a prime example.

Prince Albert didn’t just take his role as Prince Consort seriously. He took it too seriously, with an endless series of meetings and social obligations. He threw himself into organizing the 1851 Great Exhibition, a six-month-long celebration of the British Empire, and spent years of his life on the project. By the time it opened, he told his family that he felt more dead than alive. The event was a great success, but Albert’s health never recovered from this overwork. When he died in 1861, his doctors believed that his constant overwork had seriously damaged his health. He had literally worked himself to death.

Many of us today feel that there is always something to do. We tell ourselves that we need to reply to that email. That we have to join the last-minute out-of-state business trip. We don’t.

Stop. Be present. Know your limits. Embrace moderation. Protect the gift that is your body.

Give attention to your physical health, to your spirit and your mind, and you can cultivate stillness. You can feel its power in your life. So slow things down. Calm things down. Quiet things down. Embrace stillness today.