6. Sleep for success.
Sufficient, refreshing sleep is essential to a high-energy lifestyle. Your body needs sleep to repair itself and function properly. As you sleep, you dream, allowing your subconscious to sort through unresolved psychological and emotional issues. Brain waves slow down, blood pressure falls, muscles relax, the immune system is boosted, damaged tissues and cells are repaired, and the pituitary gland produces more hormones. Without sufficient sleep, the body is more likely to break down.
How much sleep you need depends on your unique makeup as well as the other lifestyle choices you make. Research indicates that individuals who effectively deal with stress and negative emotions need less sleep than those who are stressed-out or worry chronically. Some people function best with only five to six hours of sleep while others may need as much as ten hours. On average, the most effective rest tends to come from seven to eight hours of sleep. Improving the quality of your sleep can usually reduce the quantity of sleep you need.
Sleeping poorly night after night, or partial sleep deprivation, is a major cause of chronic low energy. Here are some tips for achieving optimum sleep:
a. Arise at the same time every day. Don’t sleep in on the weekends, at least not more than an hour. It confuses your body’s biological clock. Oversleeping reduces alertness and energy in much the same way as jet lag. You reduce the amount of time you’re awake, making it tougher to fall asleep the next night.
b. Eat for deep sleep. Avoid caffeine products four to five hours prior to sleep. If you drink alcohol, finish not less than three to four hours before bedtime. While alcohol immediately makes some people drowsy, it actually interferes with normal brain-wave patterns of sleep, preventing deep, revitalizing rest. Also, always eat a light evening meal. This will prevent your body from using too much energy for digestion while you’re trying to get deep sleep. As mentioned earlier in this lesson, if you eat an early dinner, consider a very small but balanced nighttime snack. This encourages a smoother transition into deep sleep while preventing a drop in blood sugar during the night that could disturb your rest.
c. Reserve the bedroom for sleep and sexual relations with your spouse. Your bedroom should be a comfortable, ultra-relaxing haven designed for peacefully letting go of the day. Avoid intense discussions, brainstorming, snacking, TV watching, financial planning and budgeting, and all work when you’re in your bedroom. These types of activities promote excitement or agitation and work against a good night’s sleep. When you allow only two activities in your bedroom, you condition yourself for successful sleep.
d. Develop a calming bedtime routine. You must have a workable system in place that helps you unwind and let go of the day. Applying relaxation techniques; listening to classical music or nature sounds; or praying, reciting affirmations, or reading inspirational material contributes to optimal sleep. Research also indicates that a hot bath or shower or moderate exercise within three hours of bedtime can significantly deepen sleep.
e. Put together your to-do list early, preferably before entering your bedroom and several hours before going to bed or while still at work. Nothing encourages insomnia more than waiting until the morning to write down all that needs to be done. If ideas do come to you after the lights are out, then go ahead and unload them onto your list or into a digital recorder. It only weakens your sleep to try to remember all that needs to be done the next day.
f. Hide the clock! Put your alarm clock where it can be heard but not seen. Difficulty sleeping is only exacerbated by having a clock to look at, highlighting how late it is. No one sleeps well under time pressure. Also, avoid getting jolted awake with a blaring alarm. How you awaken and what you do in those first few minutes sets the energy and performance tone for the rest of the day. Experiment with a positive music or affirmation alarm with the volume set just loud enough to notice it. Decide at night what you want your first thought of the next day to be. Make it an inspiring thought, and repeat it to yourself as you drift off to sleep. I wake up each morning with the first thought of “This is the day the Lord has made. [I] will rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24, NLT). Another energizing first thought could be, “I believe that something wonderful is happening to me today!” You’ll be amazed as this thought races to your consciousness when you awake. Remember, you’re in charge of your attitude. Don’t leave it to chance.
g. Identify your most comfortable sleeping temperature. Sixty-five to seventy degrees tends to work best for most people. Invest in a firm, supportive mattress and arrange for a very dark, quiet bedroom. Dim light and slight noise can damage the quality of your sleep, even if you never wake up completely. Sleeping on your side in a semifetal position with a supportive neck pillow tends to reduce tossing and turning.
Seven Tips for Better Sleep
1. Arise at the same time every day.
2. Eat for deep sleep.
3. Reserve the bedroom for sleep and sexual relations with your spouse.
4. Develop a calming bedtime routine.
5. Put your to-do list together early.
6. Hide the clock!
7. Identify your most comfortable sleeping temperature.
7. Rest and rejuvenation.
In addition to getting proper sleep, you need to schedule ample time to revitalize your mind. Optimum creativity and productivity require mental rest. This means that your brain, like your body, needs sufficient recovery and renewal to operate at its peak. Unless you balance periods of intense mental work with periods of doing nothing, or margin, you are likely to experience chronic mental fatigue. This begins with a feeling that you’re not accomplishing enough and usually coincides with periods of high stress or mental and physical exhaustion. To compensate for the lack of accomplishment, you put in more time and push yourself even harder. This makes you even more tired and ineffective, which leads to putting in even more hours, and so on. The quantity and especially the quality of your creative projects drop as your focus and judgment fade. You might believe that you are actually crunching out good work, but it’s just an illusion. In addition, mounting fatigue and a tense, overtired state tend to spill over into your family life, generating more impatience and irritability. No skill is as valuable to your overall creativity, vitality, and well-being as learning to disengage from the compulsion toward constant busyness. Here are tips for letting go and replenishing your mental energy:
a. Take frequent, five-minute stress breaks during the day to redirect your thinking to something fun and undemanding. Unplugging from the day’s current activity for just several minutes at a time will be surprisingly invigorating. Here are some ideas:
Visualize a vacation.
Review Bible verses.
Think about your childhood.
Flip through a catalog or photo album.
b. Take at least one twenty-four-hour period a week when you do no intense mental or work-related activity. Research indicates this is more effective than working straight through.
c. Take a four-day vacation every ninety days. Completely shut off your mental gears and refrain from doing any work. Remind yourself that rejuvenation is not just a reward for high performance; it is a prerequisite as well. Lose the guilt!
d. Take at least two weeks of vacation each year during which you do no work or mentally demanding activity. Even if you really, really love what you do, it is simply not possible to relax and work. Dabbling in light work on a vacation defeats the rejuvenating process. Whenever possible, take the two weeks consecutively. If you have been driving yourself aggressively, it may take almost a week just to unwind. The second week is most therapeutic.
e. Declutter your home, car, and office. Having stuff scattered throughout your physical surroundings adds to stress levels and makes you overwhelmed. Straightening up your environment can improve your sense of control and enthusiasm for life. Developing a systematic process of simplifying and streamlining your possessions can be refreshing and energizing.
f. Consider massage to release p
ent-up tensions and benefit the mind, body, and emotions. In addition to seeing a professional massage therapist, learn self-massage techniques so that massage can become a weekly habit. An hour is wonderful, but ten to fifteen minutes gets the job done.
g. Recultivate the simple pleasures of life: conversation, family dinners and walks, reading together, music, stars, sunset, poetry, gardening, photos, home movies, journaling, and solitude.
Seven Tips for Replenishing Mental Energy
1. Take frequent five-minute stress breaks.
2. Take one day every week away from all work.
3. Take a four-day vacation every quarter.
4. Take two weeks of vacation annually.
5. Declutter your home, car, and office.
6. Get a massage.
7. Recultivate simple pleasures.
Think about it. Without your health, the pursuit of your goals can come to a screeching halt. And without enough energy, even a modest goal can seem like an insurmountable challenge. Now, though, you have plenty of ideas and strategies for boosting your overall health and vitality. It is my hope that you will now select the suggestions from this chapter that resonate with you and start putting them into practice immediately. When you do, you will experience an amazing increase in the levels of energy that fuel your mind, body, and spirit, as you continue to follow God’s purpose and plan for your life.
Seven Keys to High Energy
1. Set a goal for how long you want to live.
2. Maintain a positive attitude.
3. Control stress.
4. Exercise effectively.
5. Eat for energy.
6. Sleep for success.
7. Take time for rejuvenation.
Lesson 7 Questions for Reflection
Who are the three highest-energy people you know, and what habits do they practice consistently?
In what ways could you be more of a blessing to your family if you had an extra fifty-five minutes of productive energy each day?
What excuses do most people have for not exercising? Why are these excuses not valid?
What did Vince Lombardi mean when he said, “Fatigue does make cowards of us all”? What could this mean to you and your future?
What would have to happen for you to become the most well-educated person you know in the area of health and nutrition?
* * *
Whom can you influence with the ideas from this lesson in the next forty-eight hours?
Lesson 7 Assignments
1 | Set a goal for how long you desire to live healthfully and productively (determine your age and the year).
2 | Make a list of all the lifestyle choices that are consistent with living productively and healthfully until your target age.
3 | Make a list of all the choices that are not consistent with living to your life-span goal.
4 | Write on a note card the following self-talk statement: “My daily choices create my perfect health.” Tape this note card to your bathroom mirror.
Afterword
Tomorrow Changes Today!
Congratulations!
Now that you’ve reached the end of Success Is Not an Accident, you are at the beginning of a new chapter in your own life. Armed with the time-tested principles and concepts you’ve just learned, you are ready to take your entire life to a much higher level and truly honor the potential you were blessed with at birth. While this quest is, no doubt, a lifelong pursuit, it must start today with just one person—with you—as you take action on the ideas you have just read. By changing your choices, you will change your life. Your future, however, does not improve tomorrow. I have observed that the unhappiest people in the world seem to talk the most about what they intend to do tomorrow. This mind-set is not for you! Your future gets better now. Tomorrow changes today!
In the Introduction, I mentioned that Success Is Not an Accident was written to be internalized. Have you accomplished this yet? Once these ideas are internalized, you own them. They become your ideas. They become second nature. They become part of who you are. When this occurs, you find yourself naturally putting these principles into practice. You choose to succeed and become a greater blessing to others. You choose who you intend to become and then you write down goals that will steer your life in that predetermined and purposeful direction. You choose to invest your time wisely so that you achieve what God wants you to achieve. You choose to get out of your own way and build beliefs that make success inevitable. You choose positive visualization because you know that positive results follow positive mental pictures. Finally, you choose a maximum energy lifestyle to ensure that you have the fuel of achievement. When do you make these choices? You make these choices today. Tomorrow changes today!
Over the years, I’ve received hundreds of letters and e-mails from readers all over the globe who have read Success Is Not an Accident multiple times. This seems to be an approach worth imitating. These readers report to me that they take away a new insight each time they reread the book. More important, though, they report extraordinary improvements and results across each area of life. These types of breakthroughs for readers of Success Is Not an Accident are widespread, and they are certainly possible for you as well. I truly hope you’ve learned what you intended to learn when you first opened this book. As your coach, let me challenge you to take just a moment to evaluate your understanding and application of the seven lessons outlined in Success Is Not an Accident with a quick review below. Rate yourself on a scale of 1–10 (with 10 being the highest):
______ Lesson 1: Choose Success. Do you fully understand the connection between your choices and the life you are living today? Do you believe that God wants you to succeed? In what ways has your success already blessed others? Have you written your personal definitions of success and mediocrity?
______ Lesson 2: Choose Who You Want to Become. Have you given much thought to how the world could be different because of your particular life? Do you believe God had one specific thing in mind when he made you? Do you have a personal mission statement written in the present tense as if it were true today?
______ Lesson 3: Choose to Write Down Compelling Goals. Have you brainstormed 150 life goals in writing? What are your top five goals right now? Can you clearly and concisely explain to the important people in your life why goal-setting is essential to maximizing your full potential? Why do so many resist setting goals?
______ Lesson 4: Choose to Invest Your Time Wisely. Do you sense that you are spending or investing most of your time? How frequently do you verbalize the phrase, “I didn’t have time”? Have you calculated the cost of misusing just fifteen minutes a day over one year? Are you keeping a record or time log to specifically track how you use your time?
______ Lesson 5: Choose to Get Out of Your Own Way. Do you talk more about what you want or what you do not want? Are you aware of “the first rule of holes”? Is your self-talk in alignment most of the time with the person you are striving to become? What would you believe about yourself, which you don’t believe today, if you had already achieved your most important goals?
______ Lesson 6: Choose Positive Visualization. Have you developed a visualization script for at least one of your most important goals? Can you explain why positive results tend to follow positive mental pictures? Have you started to surround yourself with visual reminders of your goals? How do images of victory and success help tame doubts, fears, and insecurities?
______ Lesson 7: Choose a Maximum-Energy Lifestyle. How long would you like to live healthfully and productively? What current lifestyle choices do not support that longevity goal? Have you already developed an effective system for managing stress in your life? Have you ever been stressed out without thinking stressful thoughts? What are your sources for trustworthy information about health and nutrition?
How did you do? Did you isolate some strengths or weaknesses? Did you identify some areas for further study? I imagine you’ve learned a lot, maybe even more than you originally anticipated. H
owever, the reality is that simply learning something new has very little if any practical value. It is only when you begin to make better choices that your life gets better. Things don’t improve by themselves. It is only when you begin to think and then act differently that worthwhile improvement and positive change occurs. You were born. That was not your choice. And you have no choice about dying, either. What you do in the interim, though, is completely up to you.
The presence of a thoughtful, written plan for each of your goals is the clearest evidence that you are a serious participant in your own life, that you are determined to make a difference in between those two choices over which you have no control. With a carefully crafted plan, you distinguish yourself from the masses that hope and wish and even pray for more joy, passion, and success, but never do anything to help create it. Think back to lesson 3, Choose to Write Down Compelling Goals. Did you identify the goals that are important to you?
Do you want to strengthen your relationship with God?
Show me your plan!
Do you want to get leaner and healthier in the next year?
Show me your plan!
Do you want to connect at a much deeper level with your spouse?
Show me your plan!
Do you want to live a life full of adventure and passion?
Show me your plan!
Do you want to eliminate clutter and complexity in your life?
Show me your plan!
Do you want to exert much greater influence with your children?
Show me your plan!
Do you want to work less and still earn more?
Show me your plan!
An extraordinary life is simply the accumulation of thousands of efforts, often unseen by others, that lead to the accomplishment of worthwhile goals. Regardless of your personal financial situation, remember that you are most definitely rich with choice. And your choices reveal who you really are. More than any other single factor, you are where you are today because of the choices you have made. To achieve things you have never achieved before, you must take action today that you’ve never taken before. Tomorrow changes today. Consider these examples from my coaching practice at The 1% Club. I’ve witnessed numerous clients
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