In Summary—Snooze & You’ll Cruise
There is credible research that validates the connection between good sleep and affluence, bad sleep and poverty.
A good night’s sleep isn’t the effect of having money in the bank. It is the necessary prerequisite to putting that money in the bank. The work ethic doesn’t do it, but a rest and rejuvenate ethic can. Sleep is the last thing we think of underpinning success. Because it is so obvious, it is invisible. People wrongly believe that incessantly long working hours are good for individuals, their companies, and for the economy.
The evidence points to the contrary. An in-depth article titled, The Complicated Relationship Between Sleep, Health and Poverty, on the advocacy website Global Citizen.org addresses how sleep is related to poverty:
People who sleep less earn less. In fact, one study found that one more hour of sleep per night can lead to a 16 percent higher salary annually in the US (about $6,000). This is huge evidence that sleep has a major role in explaining income gaps in society!
This makes sense when you think about it. Poor people tend to face more stress in their daily lives; stress leads to poor quality of sleep; poor quality of sleep compromises a person’s ability to get through their day, which leads to more stress, which makes this cycle even worse. When you throw the health problems into the mix, this becomes a toxic recipe for hard-to-escape poverty.
What’s ironic is we lionize those in business and industry that seem to sacrifice sleep for achieving greatness. Yet, as I’ve pointed out, the facts betray this correlation. Let’s re-examine some famous examples of sleepers and non-sleepers.
Edison, the genius behind so many inventions, is said to have given up a full night’s sleep. Yet he napped, incessantly, reaching REM sleep, the deepest and most creative kind, more times in a 24-hour cycle than most average achieving folks.
Einstein dreamed his relativity theory; he did not “think” it. He said, “I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.”
Admittedly, he didn’t Think & Grow Rich as the classic title put it. He slept and grew rich, dying a wealthy man. His heirs continue to earn approximately $15M a year, passively, in licensing revenue from his contributions and persona.
Contrast these snoozers with Elon Musk, a contemporary creative force behind Tesla and Space X among other ventures. He is famous for boasting that he sleeps very little, often curling up under his desk.
That eccentricity led to his being investigated and fined for fabricating an insomniac’s tweet for taking Tesla private, with funds ostensibly lined-up for that purpose.
Businesses push employees to work super-human hours, yet fail to understand the price they are paying for sleeplessness. Reportedly, healthcare costs are $3,500 per year higher for employees that have a sleeping problem.
As you’ve seen in these pages we are defeating ourselves by sacrificing sleep, especially if we believe by doing so we’ll improve our income and wealth.
That adage, “You snooze, you lose,” is 100% wrong.
When it comes to being truly healthy, wealthy and wise, the expression should be, “You snooze, and you’ll cruise!”
As we’ve seen, the quality of your life increases with being well rested and refreshed.
Gains in income are greatly offset when we sacrifice sleep. I’ve shared numerous examples from my professional life that detail how big paydays can be negated by onerous working hours.
Business travel, whether 500 miles away or around the globe, is arduous enough with missed flights, bad weather, countless delays, and jet-lagged insomnia. Ultimately, the dollar premium we earn, the battle pay we receive, is eroded and destroyed by the fatigue premiums we are forced to pay.
When all you want to do on a weekend is catch up on your shuteye, and you have no inclination or time to spend your earnings, something is terribly out of balance.
Sleeplessness is the leaking pail. We fill it at waterside, but by the time we return to the spot where it can refresh us, the water has escaped.
Our solution is to rush faster to and from the water. But we can’t keep up with the loss.
The problem is in the design of the pail, and on an even higher level it pertains to our lack of a passive water supply, something we can tap and shut off at will.
We have designed our waking and sleeping lives in ways that make us poor instead of rich.
We’ve substituted an external clock for the all-important internal one, the biological clock.
This isn’t new, this regimentation, compartmentalization, and trivialization of our time. It dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when clocks were installed in town squares, to alert people to the start and stop of the working day.
The simple fact is, and you may have surmised this from my tone and text, taking back possession of your sleeping hours is reclaiming all of your time. You are exercising sovereignty over your whole self, your physical, mental, spiritual, and material being.
It is a radical change in your consciousness and behavior.
Doing this, recovering ownership of your days and nights, is as revolutionary an act, as daunting to the status quo as was dumping tea into Boston Harbor.
I may not have made this clear to this point.
When your employer coyly insists on tapping into your downtime, your private hours, your natively endowed needs for rest and rejuvenation, he or she is stealing from you.
Say you’re paid, to use round numbers, $1,000 for 40-hours, this seems to work out to $25 per hour. But if it takes more than 40 hours, each added unit of required time waters down that salary.
Say it takes 60 hours to do that job. It’s a joband-a-half for a one-job paycheck. Suddenly, your pay is $16.66 an hour, not $25.
If you have to catch-up on merely eight hours of schedule slippage, including a modicum of missed sleep, assuming you can physically do it, which many scientists say you cannot, that’s a 48-hour week you’re working. In money terms, you’re being paid $20.83 per hour.
Plus, you’re sacrificing much of your weekend, just to pay back your sleep debt from the period that came before.
To mangle an old laborer’s song that said, “I owe my soul to the company store,” you owe your snore to the company store. There’s really no way to get paid fully for that.
I am especially concerned because this sleep theft resulting in sleep debt is really quite subtle and generally undetected by victims.
What do we tell ourselves when we’ve worked overtime and we’re totally bushwhacked on Saturdays or Sundays?
I guess I’m not getting any younger! Suppose I need a few more energy drinks to get me through the day.
Wrong. Irrespective of your age, you should be enjoying the proper quantum of sleep that will enable you to awaken fully refreshed, be productive when you do awaken, working up to your standards, and allow for the sorts of side projects that can make you rich.
Let’s talk about those side hustles for a minute. Through our hobbies and tinkering we not only do something pleasurable. If we’re good at it, we can sometimes fashion a healthy second stream of income from it.
I was a full-time, tenure track assistant professor with a duty to research, prepare, deliver, and grade papers for four different courses, simultaneously. It was a huge burden.
Somehow, I found the time to conceive of a short, one-day class for business. I offered it at Cal State Los Angeles during a break from my Midwestern teaching duties.
It was fun, it paid some pin money, and it alerted me to the notion that I could offer more of these programs, back in Indiana and elsewhere.
Within a few months I left that regular college teaching job and exclusively did my one-day seminars, finding myself at 35 universities, from Hawaii to New York. I earned more than 10 times the ordinary professor’s pay, and I was independent, financially and otherwise. The side gig became the regular gig, and that spawned other peripheral activities such as keynote speaking and authoring.
Whatever I did, I always allowed time to rest and recuperate. Sometimes this entailed not traveling for years at a clip, because I felt exhausted.
We need to become commanders of our own clocks.
When I left the tenure-track teaching job, which was designed to be a job for life, I took my life back.
Today, there is a lot of publicity about how robots and software are replacing people. Instead of accepting this fact, people are trying to work faster, at breakneck speeds to rival robots. They’re transforming themselves into machines, but unlike their competitors, we can’t easily be upgraded, swapping out faulty and worn parts.
I say this: Don’t even try to emulate machines, though your employers may stupidly entreat you to do so.
In days of yore, when men worked most industrial jobs, Peter Drucker called these unrelenting occupations, “widow makers.” Literally, doing these jobs put workers into pine boxes.
What are the drivers of sleep deprivation, sleep debt, and sleep theft?
Greed and fear are at the top of the list.
A young couple decides to buy a motor home to save on hotels when they take their growing family on vacations.
This means he needs to work overtime at his job selling heating and air conditioning equipment to consumers. Evenings and weekends are repurposed to earning the added dollars it takes to make the new RV payment.
She has to keep her job in teaching, of course, to help pay the other bills.
But they don’t have the time to use the motor home because of the added need to pay for it. Plus, he’s always feeling physically zapped by the time he gets a day or two off from work.
If this sounds like the plot of O. Henry’s classic short story, The Gift of The Magi, in which the love struck couple each secretly sacrifice their prized possessions to buy Christmas items for the other, you’re catching the essence of what I’m saying.
What can be worse than tying yourself down to an eight-year RV loan and to working incessant overtime, all preventing you from enjoying that RV?
Or, for that matter, tethering one’s spouse to a job simply to pay for status objects and expensive toys you and they don’t need. While this is happening you are warehousing your kids in day care or after school care, that will never deliver the goods like parental attention and a close relative’s loving kindness.
Do the math. Is that second income really getting you where you want to go? Given the costs of above mentioned warehousing, and nannies, and the avoidance costs of not-parenting, plus taxation, how much happiness are you bringing home with that second check?
Allow me a brief history-of-economics digression.
Immediately after World War II, the United States had captured 70% of the gross industrial output of the world. Japan, Germany and other countries sustained extraordinary damage to their manufacturing capacity and supply chains.
For about 20 years, one income in America bought a house, with the help of the GI Bill. It put two cars in every garage that wanted them. It clothed, fed and schooled millions of newborns.
The American economy did this miraculous trick on a single earner’s paycheck. That breadwinner might have had at most a high school diploma, and many did not have even that. And many who did receive a college education were also able to get there with the GI Bill.
Prospects were bright and earning capacity was unquestioned because America was the industrial engine of planet earth.
I don’t need to tell you that the world rebuilt itself and now if you want that home it typically costs over $400,000 instead of $15,000. Car loans are stretching to seven years, because prices keep going up and earning power doesn’t keep up.
Two entire generations are sensing that their economic lives will not be as easygoing as their parents’ and grandparents’ were.
Still, there is a choice to be made. Keep chasing those material goods, and in doing so keep driving up prices, well beyond your reach.
Or, change your material aspirations. Henry David Thoreau said the cost of a thing is how much of what we call “life” you are willing to trade for it.
Let me put it this way, in keeping with the theme of this book.
How much sleep and tranquility are you willing to forego by trying to buy and keep a house that you cannot afford?
Will you trade tranquility and innate wealth for an RV, or third car, or private school tuition, or student loan debt?
Please appreciate the fact we discussed earlier: You simply cannot consume your way to riches. Most things that you’ll buy lose most or all of their resale value.
Regarding this point I had a lucky conversation with the president of a car-leasing firm I worked for straight out of college. His family were pioneers in the business, in which he grew up.
Therefore, Jim had a lot of credibility.
“Gary, what is the single biggest expense in a person’s life?” he asked.
Mulling it for a few seconds, I replied, “A house?”
“Nope, that’s what most people say,” he retorted. “It’s their cars.”
How could that be, I wondered.
“Cars are an expense. Financing them, repairing and maintaining them, and then selling them for a fraction of their initial value, and doing this maybe 20 times in your life, that costs a fortune,” he explained.
“Houses go up in value,” he added for emphasis.
Generally speaking, buying things of all kinds, and not just cars, is costly. Furniture notoriously loses its resale value, unless you’re speaking of antiques.
So, you won’t buy your way to riches.
Much is written about how much Americans are in debt. A trillion and a half bucks are owed in student loans, and an amount nearly that in car loans.
But there is good debt, which I detail in another book of mine, Stiff Them!
Good debt includes money borrowed to obtain assets that do appreciate, such as real estate. Say you own a string of apartment units. Rents will be raised periodically, putting more profits into your pocket.
And while there are maintenance costs and vacancies to be filled, generally apartments will give you passive income. Countless folks have amassed fortunes by patiently building portfolios of real properties.
I love that term, real properties, when speaking of real estate. It reminds us that most other forms of physical property are comparatively unreal.
Generally, real properties gain value 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year. Owners can sleep well, knowing they are resting on valuations that almost inexorably rise, even while they personally slumber.
Don’t look for your labor alone to make you wealthy. Riches will come to you through other means, and the best ones are relatively passive.
Psychologist Dr. Srully Blotnick studied the careers of hundreds of people, tracking their ups and downs over the course of 20 years.
Who got rich? And how did they do it?
In his book, Getting Rich Your Own Way he doesn’t say you must invest in real estate—at least, not directly.
He says wealth can be earned through almost any occupation. Here’s how it happens.
You fall in love with plumbing. Plumbing fascinates you so much that you keep up with every trend, reading all the trade publications you can find.
You join trade associations and get to be known in the industry as the preeminent troubleshooter in the plumbing field. You’re tapped to offer consulting advice on tough projects, and you earn exceptional money.
In the meantime, you are offered a partnership stake in the plumbing firm you work for. That becomes more and more valuable as the firm expands, opening more locations.
You invest your surplus earnings in real estate and in stocks and bonds, not worrying much about the highs and lows of the economy.
Before you realize it, your personal wealth runs into the millions of dollars.
It wasn’t your goal to get rich. Wealth was a byproduct of falling in love with plumbing and sticking with it for the long haul, becoming an expert in what you loved.
Essentially, that’s the path most of Blotnick’s wealthy research subjects followed.
They got into a field that interested them. They stayed with it, developed their skills, were gradually paid more and more, and invested the extra earnings in other, generally passive ways, such as in real estate.
All were surprised by how their wealth grew.
Those that started out with the explicit goal to get rich didn’t fare so well, according to Blotnick. They flitted from one field to the next, never quite developing the skills and knowledge base to exploit their potential advantages.
Another interesting and significant footnote is that in the long term there were no significant differences in the wealth earned by high school versus college graduates.
What Blotnick didn’t discuss was the overall happiness of his subjects, those that grew rich versus those that didn’t. I can’t help but infer that the financial winners not only achieved a huge payout from their careers; since they remained vitally involved in them they were probably happier and more eager to go to work each day that were the money-seekers.
I’m guessing they slept better, partly because they weren’t in a rush to get rich.
DON’T HEED THE SIREN SONG OF SLEEP DEPRIVATION
At this very moment I’m studying an ad that appeared in a recent magazine, which says,
You Eat A Coffee For Lunch
You Follow Through On Your Follow Through
Sleep Deprivation Is Your Drug Of Choice
You Might Be A Doer
An online freelance marketplace sponsored the ad. It shows a sallow but still attractive young woman. It celebrates “lean” entrepreneurship and is part of a campaign, “In Doers We Trust.”
This ad was critiqued in a New Yorker article by Jia Tolentino, appearing in 2017, The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself To Death.
The article recalls how a very pregnant Lyft driver squeezed in accepting another fare moments before giving birth. Lyft used the tale as a device to demonstrate the driver’s heroism and the company’s ability to deliver an income earning opportunity in an instant.
These examples are the very antithesis of what we have dedicated ourselves to convey in this book.
Incessant busyness, just-in-time birthing, sacrificing your health, endangering others on the highway because you are sleep deprived, relinquishing your life to the demands of employers and even mere gig providers, are the sorts of sacrifices that will not make you rich.
Quite the opposite, they are calculated to impoverishing you while enriching exploiters.
Stop allowing others to determine what your work-and-life-balance should be. These lifestyle decisions shouldn’t be left to self-aggrandizing zealots. They should come from within.
FIGHT BACK AGAINST SLEEP SHAMING.
Fight back against what I call sleep shaming. This is when your nearest and dearest relatives, roommates, and friends deride you for being lazy or selfish or a slacker because you are heeding your own biorhythms.
Don’t con yourself into thinking you can go into sleep debt, interminably. Incessant sleeplessness, sleep interruption, sleep sacrifices, are simply a different type of anorexia.
You are starving yourself of the vital essence you need to sustain your very life.
Lest you think I’m making up the idea that today’s businesses are sneakily trying to steal your sleep, look at this comment on the job posting website Indeed.com, from a former employee of a company that is advertising job openings:
Pros—Flexible schedule, hard rewarding job. Great customers!
Cons—Worked around the clock.
Putting the two together, what is this job rater saying?
Good news: There is flex time! Bad news: Choose any 24-hour period of the day you want to work.
Beware: This is a pact with the devil, working around the clock.
I’ve had some very interesting epiphanies after engaging in sleep starvation. There is a point that I reach, of almost giddiness, feeling that I’m getting away with murder, so to speak, by denying myself shuteye. This has been a frequent perception at the end of very taxing consulting assignments, usually far from home where I have commuted in an out on a weekly basis.
About my bone busting routine, I think, “This isn’t so bad. I’m on top of this. I can handle it.”
And you can almost time this with a stopwatch, that super-heroic sentiment comes a day or two before my mind and body crash and burn.
One symptom is that I get sick.
I realize it won’t take a mere day or two in order to recover my stamina. It’s going to take a lot more than a week or two, or even a month or two.
I need to go cold turkey to break the addiction to self-denial. These incidents are not helping me—all of the jet lag, the shortened temper, the dangerous racing to, through, and from airports, along with all the accompanying stresses.
They’re killing me. And from a monetary standpoint, they don’t enhance wealth; they threaten it.
I have “mini-retired” several times in my life, removing myself from the road and from a lifestyle with everything I could want at my fingertips, except rest and relaxation. Remember, I’ve had concierges that got me impossible-to-find Rolling Stones tickets and rarified interactions with movers and shakers.
But I’ve also sheared years from my career at a time, simply to restore sense and stability to my life. Every time I have done this it has entailed a financial retrenchment, a dissipation of earnings, and a scaling back of spending.
The words of Edward Albee come to mind, expressed by a character in his play, The Zoo Story:
“Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance, correctly.”
The long distance he’s referring to is what I see as leaving behind our true natures.
I traveled the world to prove I could get rich when it was returning back home, a short distance correctly, that showed me I was rich where I was before the journey began.
We don’t prosper by suppressing our humanity, and by training ourselves to subvert our native impulses and imperatives. When we do, we achieve a false prosperity. It vanishes sooner than we expected.
Sustainable wealth depends on sustainable health.
We started this book by noting that the richest person on earth, Jeff Bezos, is also one who properly values his sleep.
Judging from interviews with him that I’ve seen, he also values his overall health. He is a fitness devotee and when asked what he would like written on his epitaph, he quipped:
“Here lies the world’s oldest man.”
I don’t mind saying I admire him because of the long-term view he takes of building a business and a rich life.
Repeatedly, he has chosen growth of his flagship, Amazon, over quarterly or annual profits.
His space exploration company, Blue Horizon, is a venture that Bezos realizes will require a multi-generational effort to bring to fruition. You simply cannot have the attention span of a fruit fly and build organizations for the ages.
TRANSITIONING INTO SLEEP SOBRIETY—A 30-DAY INACTION PLAN
In this book I’ve skirted around the edges of calling our impoverishing habits everything under the moon. It’s time to indict them for what they are.
Bad sleep, and the everyday choices that lead to it, is an addiction. It isn’t an acute condition. It’s chronic.
Therefore, it is going to take some time to cure.
And you will need to clear the decks and make time for a saner, more sober sleep routine.
Ideally, you would take some vacation time to start. I suggest taking time off of work.
What? Am I nuts?
Well, you’d be calling in sick if you went into drug rehab, and sleep rehab requires some safe space in which to explore and practice lifestyle alternatives. Plus, you are sick if you’re sleep stressed and missing your proper quantum.
If you like you can call it a vacation and take vacation time, if you have accumulated it.
But don’t pack your bags. Don’t go on a trip. Stay right where you are, because your everyday abode is where you’ll be hunkering down into dreamland after the initial 30-days have passed.
You do appreciate how exhausting most conventional vacations are, correct? They are anything but restful. We pack into them so many new sights and sounds and places and foods that our routines are completely upset.
Vacationing-in-place for the purpose of becoming sleep-sober, is the diametric opposite.
Choose an exercise that you haven’t been doing. You’ll be adding this to any other workouts you’re doing.
It could be Tai Chi, the gentle martial art of slow, graceful movements. Or, if you prefer, it can simply be walking around the block a few times, every day.
There are You Tube videos on nearly every exercise you can imagine. Watch one, but don’t allow yourself to think you have to be a professional or invest in a new outfit to do what I’m saying.
Your new exercise serves several purposes. For one thing, it tires you out in a good way.
This predisposes you to getting more sleep, to falling asleep faster and to having a more restful sleep.
Drink more water than you normally do. This will cleanse you.
Listen to your body. Eat only when you’re hungry, not at the usual times. If you can, cut back on the junk food.
Instead of reaching for a third cup of coffee to stay wired, take a nap after your lunch or at some point in the afternoon.
It will feel decadent to some and delicious to others. How long should your nap be?
You’re on vacation, so who cares?
Still, as a general guideline, there are folks that find 30 minutes refreshing while others require 60–90 minutes. You’ll quickly determine what works well for you.
What if you can’t disconnect enough to enter full slumber? Then turn this time into a meditation. Become aware of your breathing. Take deeper breaths.
Allow your mind to think happy thoughts. Observe the fancies and fantasies that come and go without judging them.
Count butterflies. Wow, look at all of those colors! They’re merging into a kaleidoscopic tapestry.
See?
Researchers tell us that the blue light emanating from our phones and computers interferes with our ability to fall asleep. So, on your sleep-cation, try to disengage from screens an hour or two before you go to sleep at night.
Listen to soothing music instead of the agitating kind. Composers Debussy & Ravel are good. The classical guitar and the lute can be very relaxing.
What you don’t want to do is to turn your sleeping routine into work!
Yesterday, I checked out a book that just appeared in my local library titled, How to Not Always Be Working, by Marlee Grace. It’s a small gift book.
The gift of the book is its very title.
Appreciate that we’re turning nearly every activity into work and we need to create zones where we’re off the clock.
What is not work? The author lists eating pie, sitting on the beach, taking a shower, reading a book, and a few other activities.
I’m adding sleep to this list, and taking a sleepcation is your announcement to yourself and to the world that you’re restoring this essential rest time to its proper place in the pantheon of human activities.
During your 30-day routine change you’ll need to alter some other things. I suggest less TV bingeing. Don’t check your email or social media accounts after working hours.
Become less available to others and more available to you and to your inner drives and rhythms.
Imagine a mud-filled glass. As you agitate it, the mud coats the inner surface making it impossible to see through it. When you wait for the mud to settle, the glass becomes clear.
As I noted earlier, the ancient book of wisdom, Tao Te Ching, asks: “Can you wait for your mud to settle?”
This is what changing your sleep routine will accomplish.
It will give you clarity. Your mind will become less populated by rants. Whispers from your inner being will become audible to you, suggesting you try this or that.
Connecting with your deep self, or should I say, connecting with your sleep-self will lead you to appreciate the occupation and career you currently have. Or, it will signal you need to make an appraisal, perhaps distancing yourself from what you’re doing.
By coming into alignment with your subconscious, with your natively endowed wisdom and bio-rhythms, propitious paths for your development will emerge.
You’ll grow richer in self-acceptance, in self-guidance, and if you want to attract material wealth, you’ll be open to that as well.
As the Tao says, when your mud has settled the right thing will arise by itself.
Sleep well, and prosper!