Entrepreneurs are never short of energy, passion, dedication, motivation but one thing they all wished to have more of is Time. Entrepreneurs all over the world will unanimously vote to have more than 24 hours in a day to work. They cramp up their day with work, networking, meeting clients, making business deals and always feel short of time to rest and sleep. Sleep takes the backseat for a budding entrepreneur.
Being an entrepreneur, neglecting sleep has always been a very enticing idea at first. I always thought that doing an hour of extra work instead of sleeping will increase my productivity, but in the long run realized that that one hour of lost sleep reduced my productivity by a lot. Being sleep deprived made me irritable at times and resulted in an inability to get things done.
Therefore I shifted my focus to improving 3 essential Sleeping Tips for Entrepreneurs
my sleeping habits, which not only keeps me fresh and active throughout the day but also has improved my mood and decision making. Therefore, based on my own personal experiences, I am sharing the 3 most essential sleeping tips for entrepreneurs:
Get into the habit of creating a schedule
For us entrepreneurs, each day brings a different challenge and solutions that worked on one particular day, may not work in another. Therefore maintaining a fixed schedule becomes almost impossible as we ourselves don’t know what the next day has in store for us.
It might not be possible to plan and schedule the entire day in advance, however, you have to draw a line when it comes to sleep. For example, after, say 11 in the night, set up an alarm to remind you to start wrapping things up and getting ready to go to the bed. Set another alarm to wake you up after approximately seven six to eight hours of sleep. You can experiment on how many hours of sleep is necessary for you to work proactively. Make sure to get that exactly.
Another important thing is to maintain the time you go to bed and rise each day. A routine helps to filter out stress hormones which help one to avoid stress-induced issues. It even reduces the risk for heart problems.
When you are going to sleep, just sleep!
When the alarm rings, indicating that you should now be ready to go to bed, wrap up your work quickly. That also includes any personal phone calls or texts you have to reply back to. Do not get into the bed with your phone or laptop. Keep your phone on “airplane mode” and away from your bedside table. You should be able to resist the temptation to turn on Facebook after getting into bed. Do not make the excuse of checking just one notification, because this soon starts to another and another and before you know it, you have eaten an hour of your sleep time.
So keep your laptops and phones away from you when you go to sleep. Use a Clock alarm or a secondary phone to set alarms in the morning.
Relax before you hit the bed
We inevitably take our worries to bed. So even if you hit the bed, sleep eludes us for a decent amount of time. Then we start back calculating how many more hours we have to sleep and the situation becomes more stressful. So you need to get rid of the tensions and worries out of your head before you go to sleep.
Here are some things you can do to relieve yourself of the stresses that I have found to be useful.
- Make a list of all the positive things that happened today. This positivity will make you stress-free and happy.
- Don’t bring your work to the bed. This will only increase the anxieties and increase stress.
- Do meditation or Yoga or any plain and simple breathing exercises. It helps to relax the mind and reduce stress.
Originally published at medium.com