Work Life Balance and Sleep

By David B. Bohl | March 10, 2007 | No Responses Yet

Have you ever wondered how lack of sleep affects your life? It impacts every single area of your life from the way you think to the way you work and even drive. Darrel Drobnich, Senior Director of Government and Transportation Affairs at the National Sleep Foundation says that people can control sleep so they tend to cut back on it to fit more things into their day. In my report Lifestyles in the Balance: Is Living a Balanced Lifestyle Possible in Today’s World? I talk about how less sleeping and having more waking hours can kill you. You can’t achieve life balance if you cutting something as vital as sleep out of your everyday routine.

Darrel Drobnich, Senior Director of Government and Transportation Affairs at the National Sleep Foundation, speaking about the need to understand how lack of sleep impacts how people live, think, and function, had this to say: “Our 300-year-old Puritan work ethic is running smack into this 24/7 society. The thing people cut back on is sleep. That’s a block of time they have control over.” His comments appeared in an article titled “Asleep at the Wheel” in the April 2007 edition of Reader’s Digest.

We’ve all been there before - we try to pack so much into our days that we sacrifice an hour or two of sleep and, before we know it, it becomes a short-term pattern that leads to mistakes and crankiness.I’ve written about “How ‘24-7-365′ mode can kill you” in my Special Report: Life Balance for Entrepreneurs and about how “The world now operates at the speed of technology” in my Special Report: Lifestyles in the Balance: Is Living a Balanced Lifestyle Possible in Today’s World?

Life balance is not about creating more life for ourselves (i.e. sleeping less and having more waking hours to “live”), it’s about defining what’s important to us and creating a life around those values. There are possibly thousands of books out there on the subject of living an “authentic life.” What we’re simply talking about here is living a life where our values and our actions are in harmony - where there’s no contradiction between what we decide is important to us and the life and lifestyle we choose to live in support of of those beliefs.

To learn more, click here to download the two FREE Special Reports.