The US Department of Defense Spent Millions of dollars to study this white crowned sparrow, what I’ve learned is an unfair advantage.
I been following Tony Robbins for a while now, an A-list entrepreneur who have been a preacher of the saying “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” kind of philosophy.
But lately, his tune was reverse, and been an advocate of sleep, even backing up those technology that tracks sleep.
What gives?
When he mentioned in one of his podcasts or books that he encountered sleep researcher Mathew Walker, Ph.D. The encounter changed Tony’s life.
Tony challenged Dr. Walker, “Sleep for 8 hours? Give me a good reason why I need to…”
Walker replied, “I have a data all over the world that proves sleeping even for one hour less than your usual, you are prone to accident and heart attack.”
Walker added, “The data doesn’t even come from my lab.”
“Prove it to me”, Tony said.
Then the scientist explained that in every country in the world that follows the daylight-saving time, it shows that when it’s time to change the time where the people in the country losses an hour of sleep, reports in the hospitals all around the country goes awry.
Increase in accidents!
From highway fatalities to work related.
That’s why I still don’t understand why the US government change this daylight-saving time rules, it's an outdated rule (another story in another day).
But here’s the other side of the coin: when the time change giving people an extra hour to sleep, accidents plummets.
At this time, Tony realized that we really need sleep, an eight-hour sleep.
Don’t Cheat Yourself
The car was stopped in front of the red light at Union County, Florida. Behind the car was a school bus full of kids for school. Then out of nowhere, a huge truck rammed the school bus, including the car Infront of the bus, throwing the car out to the next lane and into the in-coming traffic.
It’s a sad story.
After the dust settled, it was determined that the guy driving the truck was asleep.
How could that be?
That’s what happens when we are deprived of sleep. We sleep, even when we are driving a deadly truck. The body will doze off no matter what.
I worked as a chemist, dealing with dangerous chemicals sometimes. Every time a company takes my dangerous trash of used chemicals, I was told that the guy driving the used chemicals, is required by law, to have sleep 8 hours before driving long drives.
You don’t want dangerous chemical spills in the interstate, with poisonous and toxic gas and smoke billowing up into the sky.
If a garbage driver is required to be fully refreshed in doing its job, should we follow suit?
The Sparrow and hell week
The infamous hell week of the Navy Seals is a freak training that only the toughest survive.
For starters, it’s a week of running, swimming, running again with log in your head, in a team, in the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean, in the sand, and anything you can think of.
I haven’t mentioned that in the whole week, these warriors only sleep for 4 hours, give or take. I’m not saying 4 hours straight in a night, I’m saying four hours in total.
A two-minute power nap here, a 10-minute nap two days after and so on.
Four hours total in the whole duration of the week. It wasn’t called hell week for nothing.
That’s where the white-crowned sparrow comes in. The white-crowned sparrow is a freak of nature in terms of sleep. These birds can fly long distances without sleeping. Sleep-deprived but evolution built them for this long-distance travel without sleep.
Of course, the US government wants a 24-hour soldier always on the go.
I understand the US government would spend millions of dollars to research this avian, but we are design to sleep.
Although the army is still searching for answer on how this bird deprive itself of sleep when it’s time to migrate, should we all learn that we evolve to need sleep, and shortchanging sleep wreaks havoc.
I eat more and can’t control myself if I shortchange sleep.
You know what happens to me when I deprived myself of sleep, for even 30-minutes in a night? My self-control with food goes awry when the afternoon comes, and dinner is close. I just throw things into my mouth, without regards of how much calories are coming it.
I was hungry, what can I do.
But the reality is, my body is told you need more calories because lack of sleep tells your body you are in a caloric restriction.
What does that mean? For me, I just eat when I’m in the kitchen after work. When the elepephant in me should be controlled by me, the rider of the elephant.
So how did I geot back my 8-hour of sleep back? I beat those smart engineers from Facebook and Tik-Tok and Instagram and YouTube.
How to beat those Tik-Tok engineers and sleep early.
You know the drill, you fish out that phone from your pocket after dinner, and before you know it, it’s time to sleep, but you still have house errands to do.
What just happened?
Those Instagram and Tik-Tok engineers have designed their platform for you to stay longer in their app. They are very good in their job, and if you don’t know that you are being manipulated, you will spend toms of time in their platform.
Win for them, not for you. You know what suffers? Your sleep.
Here’s my first step in stopping those engineers to manipulate your time:
- Develop a routine in sleeping — When I say this, what I meant is that you religiously follow this routine everyday, even on the weekend. There’s a prescription that I follow, it’s called 3–2–1 method. Three hours before bedtime, avoid eating. Two hours before sleep, stop work. That means no more laptop to check emails. One hour before bedtime, no more screen time.
- Sleep at the same time every night — This advice is almost the same as rule number 1, but I want to go on in detail for one more, and that is to sleep at the same time every night. I sleep around 10:30 PM, and I do that even during vacation and weekends, especially weekends. Am I good at it? No, but I tried very hard, cause I know I can’t control my elephant the following day.
