Your new superpower- Sleep!

Welcome to my weekly CMO newsletter, where you will find insights about Marketing, Life, Family, and Happiness. All the good stuff. I hope my stories will help inspire during these turbulent times.

Today's read time is ~5 minutes.

My name is Michelle. I am the mother of two young kids and have been commuting weekly from PR to NJ for the past 18 months. Very quickly, I realized that if I were to maintain my intense schedule, I needed to up my game in terms of #productivity. One of my key strategies to do this was to hack my sleep routine.

Last month tested us all on our sleep. Well, it was that time of the year! You know, the one where we have loads of Holiday office parties, family celebrations, and maybe one too many glasses of bubbly and late nights. There is no doubt that these celebrations and social reconnects are so much fun in the moment, but perhaps the morning after can be a grueling experience. Not because of the party, but because of the lack of sleep hurting us in more ways than we could imagine.

Just google and you will see that there is a wealth of scientific research building the case that sleep is critical for happiness, health and for cognitive function. However, when we talk about sleep, it is often the most underrated productivity hack. So, I will talk about the link between sleep and productivity, and more specifically, how I hacked my sleep so I could supercharge my productivity.

Why is sleep so important for productivity?

Keeping it high-level without boring you to sleep (😊) with the science, many studies have concluded that people who slept more were more likely to perform better on tasks involving memory, attention, and problem-solving. They also found that the inverse was true, that inadequate sleep was associated with an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

There are two reasons why sleep improves cognitive function. Firstly, it allows the brain to consolidate memories and process information. During sleep, the brain is able to transfer information from the short-term memory to the long-term memory, which improves learning and retention of new information. Btw this is the reason why studying just before bedtime (at a reasonable hour) helps immensely with retention. Matt Walker refers to this as ‘future proofing new information’. Secondly, when you are well-rested, your brain is able to process information more efficiently and make connections between different pieces of information.

3 simple hacks to turbocharge your productivity

I have always been an early riser per se, but for some reason, I had not seen the connection between early rising to productivity. I only really started to reap the benefits of waking up early, when - it may sound obvious but - I made sure to have a high-quality sleep as an essential component of that early morning routine.  I'm not preaching that you need to sleep x-number of hours a night. In my experience it's the quality of your sleep that counts much more than the quantity.

So, after studying best practices and findings from Matt Walker, Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia, I made 3 interventions that have dramatically improved my sleep. 1) Enhanced my sleeping environment, 2) Created wind-down routine, 3) limit food and alcohol close to bedtime

1: Enhance Your Sleeping Environment

To enhance my environment I changed a few things: 1) Bedroom temperature is significantly cooler now at 67°F. 2) I bought the best bed linen, duvets and pillows that I can afford. Then last but not least, 3) I bought an Eight Sleep mattress pod cover. Out of all 3 changes, I would say the game changer for my husband and I was the eightsleep mattress where it cools and adapts to your needs. Check out the website here.

2: Create a Wind-down Routine

About an hour before bedtime, I turn on AC in the bedroom and dim the lights. In fact, all the lights on my house are dimmed. I take a very hot shower to cool my body’s core temperature and use lavender sleep beauty products to relax me. I find lavender being the best cue for triggering sleep. Another thing we stopped was to watch high-energy or very violent TV shows. We tend not to watch tv during the week anyway, but if I do, I only want to watch happy shows. Needless to say, the Husband is not so keen on this change. I loved what Tim Ferriss had to say on curating a great night time routine. Check out the clip below.

3: Monitor the impact of Food/Alcohol

I have been using my smartwatch for years, but after a few years my husband and I noticed that if we were to drink alcohol close to bedtime our stress levels during our sleep would skyrocket for a few hours. Hampering the amount of restful deep sleep that night. Now after reading up on this, I realize it is due to our body metabolizing the alcohol and sugar being excreted into our blood system and in some cases waking us up. Same goes for eating late at night. If you want to learn more about this, check out Matthew Walker, PhD 's take on this below.

Now I will say, I still have much to learn here. For instance, the best practices state that you should also meditate before sleep, and keep your routine for every day- I only do school nights and have not fully eliminated electronics from my room. So I clearly have room to improve. However, with these 3 changes alone, I have been able to dramatically improve my sleep and productivity.

In conclusion

In uncertain times like this, productivity will be a critical currency in the workplace. And now that there is so much evidence supporting the concept that sleep fuels your productivity, this is the next hack to conquer for us all. I personally made 3 interventions: 1) Enhancing my environment, 2) Creating a wind-down routine, and 3) Limiting food and alcohol close to bedtime, that have dramatically improved my sleep, productivity and cognitive function. Perhaps if you do the same you could have the same impact, so why not give it a try?

So, pick one of these interventions this week and build the others on in weeks after. You don’t have to be perfect, you just need to form the habit of doing these. Let sleep become your next superpower. Sweet dreams!

#Sleep #Productivity #YOLO #Leadership

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Author: Michelle is the Chief Marketing Officer of Ulta Beauty. Before that, Michelle was the Chief Marketing, Citizenship & Communications officer for Samsung Electronics America and spent 16 years at Procter & Gamble, most of her time in Prestige Beauty, then moved to become the CMO at Vertu, British luxury handmade mobile handsets. For upcoming posts, follow Michelle on LinkedIn and twitter. All statements made, and opinions expressed in this article only reflect her personal opinion.