One of the perks of becoming a grownup is you no longer have an imposed bed time. It still might not hurt to schedule one for yourself if you want to keep your sleep cycle steady though.
Picture: Tambako the Jaguar/Flickr
As business blog Inc suggests, sleep is an appointment just like any other. You need to make time for it, and there are consequences if you don’t. Because sleep won’t fire us if we miss a meeting, we tend to think it’s less important to put it in the calendar. However, we schedule what’s important to us. And sleep is incredibly important:
Sleep deprivation drastically impairs our judgment. You are more likely to achieve success and health with a regular and generous sleep schedule.
Treat your bedtime like an appointment, with the same urgency and importance that you give your work-repeated appointments. Determine what time you need to get up and count the hours backwards to allow for the seven or eight hours of sleep your body needs. Like a flight or important meeting, your sleep should be thought of as the fixed point of your day — everything else should be adjusted as needed.
Not only will having sleep in your calendar remind you that you need to do it, it also forces you to move it out of the way if you need to schedule something else. Friends want you to go to a party at 10pm on a Tuesday? When you enter that into your calendar, you see exactly how much sleep you’re going to have to pay for it.
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