• December 13, 2021

THE GREAT REALIZATION

Forget The Great Resignation. Forget The Great Reshuffle. This year, focus on The Great Realization—your key to consistent high performance in how you live, love, and lead. 

What is The Great Realization of 2022? 

All sleep is NOT created equally. 

This has been proven repeatedly. Technology has demonstrated that you can get “enough” sleep and still have sleep performance problems. In fact, 50% of men and 25% of women get low-performance sleep.¹

And while you can seek out state-of-the-art technology to measure your sleep performance, we have a far more reliable indicator hidden in plain sight:  our daytime performance.

When it comes to daytime performance, the most important KPI is this:

Do you maintain consistent energy throughout the day?

For far too many in our modern world, the answer is a resounding no.

Instead of maintaining consistent energy, they compensate for energy dips during the day. Compensations such as:

• making daily pilgrimages to the altar of Keurig in search of caffeine-filled, performance-enhancing mugs;
• ducking into quiet conference rooms for power naps and vowing to move to a company that has nap pods—if not the Silicon Valley companies, then Proctor & Gamble or even PricewaterhouseCoopers; and
• prioritizing, above all else, the daily exercise routine—and believing that training for that Tough Mudder is just about the team building.

There are two problems with these compensations:

1. The first problem lies in what they represent: energy dips where our performance slips–and we live, love, and lead at a level lower than our optimum. We can easily see this played out with our smartphones.  When we remember to put the phone on the charger overnight, we start the day with a fully charged battery. That gives us consistent access to the full capacity of the phone. But when do we forget to charge it? Soon that phone is in low power mode—the capacity is there, but it’s just not available.
2. The second and larger problem with these compensations is this: we’ve come to accept the need for caffeine, naps, and adrenaline as a normal part of modern life.

As a result, we do not recognize the signs of low-performance sleep, and therefore, we do not realize there are solutions.

And the costs are huge.

In the short term, it’s the cost of lost opportunities because of presenteeism related to things like chronic sinus infections, IBS, and even anxiety. 

In the long term, it’s the erosion of our overall functioning. Low-performance sleep is implicated in Alzheimer’s Disease. And that’s only if other known comorbidities like cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, and type 2 diabetes don’t curtail your performance first. 

Unavoidably, those costs impact the bottom line:

• decreased productivity
• increased workplace accidents
• higher health care costs
• retention problems that dry up the leadership pipeline

So what can you do? Follow these simple steps:

1. Realize that all sleep is not created equally. Sleep performance is not a numbers game. Get the recommended 8 hours, and watch for daytime signs of low sleep performance.
2. Realize energy dips are a sign of low-performance sleep. Caffeine, naps, and adrenaline are compensations for low sleep performance.
3. Realize you can achieve High-Performance Sleep™ for consistently high performance in how you live, love and lead. It starts with determining your sleep performance profile. Take the Sleep Performance Assessment.

Begin 2022 by honoring The Great Realization: All sleep is NOT created equally. When you do acquire the key to consistent high performance in how you live, love, and lead.

Take the Sleep Performance Assessment.

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^{1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272296734_Prevalence_of_sleep-disordered_breathing_in_the_general_population_THE_HypnoLaus_study}