Whilst a lot is said about how to reduce your sleeping to a minimum not a lot is said about the effects of lack of sleeping. People often ask questions like, “How can I reduce my sleeping time so that I can be more productive?” or “How can I reduce sleeping to achieve more?”. Beware that there is a threshold that should not be ignored. This threshold is built into our nature. Ignoring such thresholds will have the following effects on you.

Less sleeping is harmful for your health

It is scientifically proven that sleeping less than 7-8 hours a day is harmful for health. This is because as has been discussed in [Sleeping cycles], while you are sleeping your body repairs itself: physically and mentally.

Increases stress

Losing sleep makes you feel stressed. Due to lack of sleeping, you will lose your patience. Such stress will affect your life and the lives of the people who live with you like your husband/wife, children and colleagues. Stress is a major health hazard and has a significant list of bad side effects, such as heart problems, and obesity through nervous over eating.

You are not efficient

The idea of sleeping less is to have more time where you can work. Don’t get shocked. The fact that you sleep less means that you will be tired during most parts of the day. This will severely affect your productivity rendering you less efficient. This will lead to more work piling up which leads you to reduce sleep time further. Sleeping less is not a solution. Better time management and fighting procrastination are sure fire ways to deal with your workload.

Other effects of Missed Sleeping

Missed sleep is cumulative; if you lose sleep one day, you feel its effects the next. If you miss a lot of sleeping several days in a row, you build up a ‘sleep deficit’, which impairs the following:

Your reaction time will decrease resulting in higher probability of car accidents.
  Poor eye sight vision
  Slow information processing
  Short-term memory loss
  Lack of motivation

I wise man by the name of Benjamin Franklin once said: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Every now and then several articles pop up in the blogosphere about how to reduce sleeping to a minimum. At first glance this makes sense, since reducing sleeping time will leave you with more time. But not much is said about the benefits of sleeping and why you should allow yourself to sleep the recommended number of hours, which is somewhere between 7-8 hours per night.

Whilst a lot of people look at sleeping as a complete waste of time, scientists deny that. They remind us that sleeping is one of the most important parts of the day for your body and brain. While you are resting in your bed, unconscious, you experience three different cycles, all of which have different purposes.

Light sleep is the first phase that you experience as soon as you fall asleep. After approximately 30 minutes of light sleeping, you enter the deep sleeping phase. During the deep sleeping phase, your body will get repaired. It is in this phase that your muscles relax and get healed from injuries. Once the deep sleeping phase ends, the dreaming phase called REM starts. REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement. This is the most intense phase where your brain gets repaired. Your brain will process information that you have acquired during the day. It will then prune off useless information and classify new information in context with the other information already stored in your brain from past experiences. This process is extremely important for turning raw data into information and knowledge.

So although while sleeping you are not aware of what is going on, just like right now while reading this you are not aware of your heartbeat, it does not mean that your body is also on standby. While you are sleeping your body performs essential functions that keep you healthy and ready to live another busy day.

So make sure you allocate proper time for your body to perform its housekeeping chores. The next day you will wake up refreshed and energetic, and will surely make up for the time spent sleeping.

Last week, I went to a leading consumer appliance store to buy a home appliance. I asked for help because I could not make up my mind on which appliance to choose out of two in particular. A young salesman approached me and started what seemed to me like a pre-learned keynote speech saying things like…

“Sir we are not like our competitors. We here value our customers.” - It was in the first place why I went to the store because I thought that they value me. But he made me ask myself, “Why is he emphasizing it? Maybe it’s not true and he wants me to believe it is?”

“Unlike our competitors we will replace your broken appliance if it is still in the warranty period.” - That is the definition of warranty no? I mean if something breaks down within the period of warranty it should be either fixed or replaced. But yet again he made me ask myself why is he emphasising it?

To cut a long story short, I thanked the salesman for his help and left the store. With the new questions that the salesman made me ask I felt that I’d better get some trusted advice from a couple of close friends.

This experience made me think and from it we can all learn that, when we speak we are instilling feelings in our listeners, be they a family member, friend, or colleague. The feelings that we instil in the people we are addressing are associated with us and what we say. In the case of the salesman, he instilled in me negative feelings which I automatically associated with the store he was representing.

On the other hand if you speak positively, people will associate positive feelings with you and what you do. Hence, next time when you speak, keep in mind what feelings you want to instil in your listeners and speak accordingly.

When producing something, being it writing an article, drawing a painting or whatever you do, you have to learn how to strike a balance between the quality of what you are producing and the amount of time you allow yourself to work on the project. Assuming that you don’t waste time, the more time you allocate to a project, the higher the quality.

The problem with perfectionists is that they only focus on one dimension: quality; without giving any importance to time. A perfectionist produces excellent stuff but most of the time this is done at great cost, since a lot of time is used to finish the work.

In the real world, quality is sometimes sacrificed in order to meet deadlines. Harsh competition forces such attitude since everyone wants to be the first to break the news: “First to produce this… New record in that…”. Perfectionists tend to be conservative and do not accept such reality. When perfectionists are part of a team, they tend to be show stoppers for every single defect that in a way or another diminishes quality. Don’t take me wrong… you need perfectionists in a team; since that way you will make sure that your product will have a certain degree of quality. But you have to be aware as to how many perfectionist you put in a team. Either too few or too many has undesirable effects.

In order to meet their own high standards, perfectionists put a lot of effort. They are ready to work long and extra hours, even if not getting paid, redo work of others which in their opinion is not up to standard and stress themselves by worrying too much. It is interesting the results obtained from a study published in the New York Times, where a group of perfectionists were made to slack on purpose. They were allowed to leave a messy desk, arrive at work late and leave early. When these perfectionists were asked for comments after such an experiment, they reported that they felt more relaxed and happier with this new life. They showed their surprise that things went well even though they ‘slacked’.

Even though perfectionists suffer from stress due to their ‘defect’, they still find it hard to get themselves not worrying too much about quality. It is the same like procrastinators cannot help themselves from delaying stuff to a later time. From my experience, I believe that perfectionist suffer since they are abused by others. Slacking team members tend to spot out perfectionists to do their job knowing that with the right words they will manage to use perfectionism to their advantage

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A true friend always finds time for you

Irrespective of whether your friend is busy or not, the fact that you need his/her help has a higher priority. Therefore a true friend will put aside everything else and come over to give you a helping hand in whatever you need.

A true friend is always on your side even though you are losing

The ultimate test to verify if someone is a true friend is when you are going through difficult times. When you have money and you offer drinks on the house, everyone smiles and says that you are a great person. But when you’re broke or down, not everybody will stand by you to listen to what you have to say. Only true friends will stay.

A true friend gives without waiting for something back

Friendship is give and take but it does not necessarily happen in a sequential manner. A true friend is ready to give a lot before asking for something back.

A true friend respects your opinion

Even though you don’t agree with your friend about something, s/he will still respect your ideas and agrees that you don’t agree on that particular point. A true friend values your friendship more than the topics that you don’t agree on.

True friendship is shown through small things

A true friend shows that s/he cares by giving attention to small things like remembering your birthday. Even though you may have not met for a very long time, a true friend would still remember about your birthday, for example.

This is a guest blog post by Vanessa Van Petten. Vanessa is the teen author of the parenting book “You’re Grounded!” She writes a parenting blog from a teen’s perspective to help parents understand what is actually going on in the mind of kid’s today to make life a little bit easier.

Parent, teens and family advice blog

My mom and dad always seem overwhelmed with chores, dinner, morning routines and driving my siblings and I here there and everywhere. Recently, we decided to streamline many of our sticky areas to save everyone time and headaches! Here are some of our favorite tips:

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Supermarkets are a good choice to get the best value for money. Due to their large volumes of sales, they tend to offer the best prices around. The way how supermarkets are designed makes boring shopping chores enjoyable. The aim of the supermarket designers is to present you with a wide selection of products (both competing and also complementary products) with the aim of making you spend more. Even though supermarkets tend to offer the best prices around, you still have to stick to your own budget or else end up overspending. Here are some tips on how to control yourself whilst you are between one shelf rack and another:

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Once there was a tree which stood up on a very high hill. The tree was big and could be seen from far. A lot of people used to come from far to have a look at this old tree. Every one used to astonish how big the tree was and how delicious its fruits are. 

One day, the roots of the tree started to complain to the tree. They said: “We’re fed up. We don’t feel that we are important. People always speak about how nice and strong the branches are and how good are the fruits. People simply ignore us as if we don’t exist.” The tree replied, “Roots, you are very important for every part of the tree. If you stop functioning, there will be no trunk, no branches and no fruit. You are valuable for the life of the tree.”

The leaves came along with their complaint arguing that they are the hardest working. They suffer the heat of the sun and have a very short life span. They threatened to leave the tree since they didn’t feel that they were important. But again the tree replied gently: “Dear leaves, like the roots you are valuable. With you help, every part of the tree gets the required nutrition to live healthy and produce tasty fruits.” 

Ever felt like the leaves or the roots? Ever felt that you are not important in your family or a team that you are part of? Think of the tree as your team… can you imagine a tree surviving without its roots?

A couple of days ago I met an old friend of mine, an old classmate. He is now married and has a child. I could tell from the way he talked that he was very happy with his new born child. He really made my day, since I was happy for him.

While I was walking back home, I kept on thinking about what he said. My friend told me that unfortunately due to a lot of expenses he is doing 3 jobs. In fact when he met me he was on his way to his second job. He was working over 60 hours a week, leaving him with almost no time to enjoy with his wife and his son. Quoting him, he told me, “… I am doing a sacrifice not seeing my son for days …” But is that a real sacrifice? At face value you will agree with him, that’s what happened to me.

But after thinking about this, I concluded that my friend was using the word sacrifice wrongly. In his case, he is denying his son from his parental care in order to work. While I don’t want to go into the nitty gritty of the story, I personally believe that there could be other ways how to reduce expenses like: not taking a holiday, maybe own one car, rent instead of buy a house or buy a small house. In my opinion it is his wife and his son who are doing the sacrifice since they are missing the love of a husband and father respectively.

This is just one example of wrongly using the word sacrifice which struck me. Sometimes the real sacrifice is to stick to our duties and not concentrate on doing more, since more most probably will mean less.

A short one for the weekend, before another week starts.

On my way back home, after a hard day at the office I got stuck in traffic. It was raining so heavily that cars had to slow down, since the weather conditions were extremely bad. While stuck in traffic, I stared at the wipers going from side to side every time removing new drops of rain. Wipers were in constant battle with the rain. Isn’t that a good analogy of life? 

The rain represents constant obstacles in life which block our view and slow us down from achieving our goals. On the other hand, wipers represent our constant effort to remove obstacles from our view. This effort helps us get a clear view even if for a short time. While the view is clear we can think clearly and move closer to our personal goals.

Moral of the story: What would you do if the rain increases? Would you simply switch the wipers on a faster mode?