When you think of powerful women that are leading their industry and kicking butt, what do you think of?
If you’re anything like us, images of jet setting, traveling the globe, working 16-hour days and building successful companies floods your mental vision.
However, one of the most overlooked tools that powerful women utilize to their advantage is their ability to have healthy, deep and restorative sleep each and every night. If you’re an aspiring female entrepreneur, or you simply want to have a more efficient lifestyle, keep reading and learn how sleep can take you to the next level.
Why Sleep Is Vital to Your Success As a Woman
When we hear mega-rich billionaires talk about their daily routine, something keeps ringing out: They always undermine the importance of maintaining a healthy sleep schedule. However, within a few years of hearing their proclamation about how they hate sleep and try to rest as little as possible, they hit a brick wall.
In fact, Arianna Huffington — the co-founder of the Huffington Post and a multi-millionaire entrepreneur — used to sleep as little as four hours per night. It was only when she found herself unconscious on the bathroom floor that she knew she had to change her sleep schedule.
The Sleep Foundation reports that despite needing seven to nine hours of sleep per night, most women only get less than seven hours per night. They also say that women need more sleep than men.
In her book entitled “The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time”, she goes on to say that “It’s also our collective delusion that overwork and burnout are the price we must pay in order to succeed.”
With words like that being spoken from a highly-efficient rock star, it’s time that we stop placing our rest and recovery on the back burner in exchange for extra work and sending more emails to prospective clients and coworkers.
Instead, we must adopt the belief that our rest is the fuel that allows us to be effective in day-to-day transactions. If you find that you’re groggy, lethargic, lacking energy and irritable, people can sense that.
The Healing Power of Rest For Women
In order for us to transform how we view leisurely activities, it’s important to understand the technical aspects behind sleep and why it’s beneficial in the real world.
The first aspect that we must explore is the two stages of sleep that occur in our hours of slumber.
In a general sense, there are two depths of sleep that are commonly referred to as rapid eye movement sleep (REM) and non-REM sleep. The most restorative and refreshing sleep occurs when the body enters REM sleep, where growth hormone is released by our system to repair damage and inflammation that we’ve accrued throughout our waking hours.
However, prior to REM sleep we engage in four levels of non-REM sleep that lead up to the most restorative part of our night. These stages occur in the following order:
- The foggy stage where you’re not quite asleep, but not entirely awake.
- The shallow-level sleep where you can easily be awakened by small noises.
- Stages three and four are very deep levels of slumber, but not quite the typical REM-level sleep.
An easy indication that someone has entered a REM cycle is when you see their eyeballs moving underneath their lids. This may indicate that the person is dreaming or experiencing healthy rest that will influence the following day. These REM cycles usually occur in 90-minute windows before slipping back into surface-level sleep.
Finding the Perfect Bed
Finding mattresses in Melbourne is, without a doubt, made a lot easier when you understand your unique preferences. Do you prefer a hard surface or a soft, cushioned texture to rest your head upon? Similarly, some customers find that they enter a restorative night’s sleep more easily when their legs are elevated just slightly.
For some women, partaking in a sleep quiz may give them insight into the type of mattress that would best suit their needs. According to the scientific literature surrounding our sleep habits, the person that lives for seventy-five years will, on average, sleep for twenty-five years of their life.
With statistics like this placed in front of us, we begin to understand how finding the perfect mattress is critical to our quality of life, but also how we tackle new challenges daily.
Count Sheep and Get Some Sleep!
As we’ve clearly illustrated, getting your eight-hours of rest is one of the most important tools a female entrepreneur has at her disposal. Embrace the power of relaxation and knowing when to give your body a rest. Some of the most successful females on the planet have long since kicked their lack of sleep to the curb!
When you realize that your body is like a battery that needs to be recharged through better sleep, you’ll soon soar to unfathomable heights in both your personal and professional life.
