Let's start by acknowledging that sleep deprivation is an awful experience, and not good for anyone. There are many reasons that people struggle with sleep, and there's absolutely no denying that a good night's rest is one of the most essential and important activities that we can undertake.But in certain circumstances, a night of bad sleep can be a good thing.
Throughout my entire life, I've struggled with sleep. As a kid I was always the one at sleepover parties that would wait until everyone else passed out during the movie to step over my friends on my way to the TV to turn it off and only then, in total darkness and silence, was I be able to rest.As a teenager I loved to sleep until noon on the weekends, cherishing every extra minute I could rest peacefully in bed. But in my 20's, I found that often my sleep patterns directly correlated to my levels of mental activity.There are many types of bad sleep. There's bad sleep from pain and discomfort. There's bad sleep from anxiety and stress. There's bad sleep from being in an environment with loud noises and bright flashing lights. All of these types of bad sleep are terrible to experience.
But as an entrepreneur, as someone who lives in a world of ideas about what the future could hold and the whether it's possible to create a new reality that other's don't quite yet see, I find that the periods of greatest progress are also directly connected to restless, sleepless nights of mental exploration and imagination.In some ways we're trained to fight off the nights of bad sleep, to instead calm our minds and drift off into peaceful slumber.But if you're in a period of your life where you are creating something new, I find that it's often in those spaces of liminality when you're removed from the normal waking hours that breakthroughs can surface.
If it's stress, anxiety or discomfort, perhaps some meditation or other efforts to still your mind can help take you away from those feelings.But if it's explosive ideation and creative forces brewing in your mind, I'd encourage you to remove the harness and lean into those thoughts.Maybe they'll just take you down a path that you wouldn't otherwise discover during the normal hours when cognitive overload and nonstop stimulation distracts your mind from its pursuit in those late night hours.So if you find yourself waking up in the morning after a restless night, don't just assume that it was all "bad sleep."Recognize that in those waking spaces, maybe that's when you were actually architecting the dreams that you'll build into reality in the very near future.
