If there is one monumentally important thing you can do for your health and wellness it’s to get better sleep. That’s right, not eat better or exercise but simply get adequate sleep. Not a minimum of sleep, but adequate sleep. Here is something that will hopefully put into perspective the physiological need for sleep:

It’s certainly a false dilemma to say that just one of diet, exercise, or sleep is more important for your health but it is a reality that people will often trade sleep for one or both of the other. To the best of my knowledge none of my clients have ever skipped a workout so that they could prepare a healthy meal, but I recently turned away a new client because he told me he would “sacrifice sleep to make it in to class.” Nope, nope, nope. Not going to happen.

Problems with sleep generally fall into two categories. There are people who don’t prioritize sleep, treating it as something they can do when they’re dead. Which they will be able to do sooner than later as the cumulative cost of  chronic sleep debt is a shorter lifespan in addition to poor quality of life. The other category is someone who dedicates adequate time to sleep but has problems getting good quality sleep. Allow me to first address the former.

Sleep is such a critical and auto-regulated function of the human body that to the best of our knowledge it is actually impossible to die from sleep depravation. The reason for this is not that it couldn’t kill you if you could actually achieve it, but that the body will begin a process of micro-sleeping within the gaps between whatever stimulus is keeping you from actually sleeping. In other words, you can try to stay awake by any means and you’ll still fall asleep.

If you are:

1. Going to sleep by 10pm, preferably around the time of sunset.
2. Allowing adequate time to sleep, about 8-9 hours.
3. Sleeping in a completely dark and quiet (not necessarily silent, white noise can help) room.
4. Turning off electronics and minimizing light use by 2-hours before sleeping or around sunset.
5. Not more than 50 pounds overweight.
6. Exercising regularly.
7. Avoiding caffeine in the afternoon if you are a slow-metabolizer. You probably know. If you’re a fast-metabolizer, it probably doesn’t matter.
8. Use an app like Sleep Cycle. The accuracy of these apps is debatable, but the fact that it brings focused attention to your sleep is not. They help.

And you still can’t sleep you have a problem akin to not being able to swallow water or breathe air. That is how serious it is and how much attention you should divert to addressing it.

The above 8 keys are by no means an exhaustive list, but a damn fine start and will be comprehensive for the vast majority of people. In fact, doing just 5 or 6 of these seven things will probably remarkably improve your sleep. 

If you’re not covering all of the above bases, start there. If you have a problem with starting there because there just aren’t enough hours in the day and sleeping isn’t a high priority I’m here to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. I couldn’t possibly do a better job than former Navy SEAL Dr. Kirk Parsley has done in the following video. After leaving the SEALs (BUD/s class 164), Kirk went to med school and later became the team doctor for the west coast teams.  If you can’t take it from someone who has suffered through orders of magnitude worse sleep deprivation than you will ever even think about enduring then you’re not going to listen to anyone so you can stop here.

TL;DR? While you think you’re pushing forward and trading productivity for sleep you’re actually selling yourself short and operating at a low level of function compared to what you’re capable of. You might as well be drunk all the time.

Either way it’s time to do the work and fix it. Working too hard to just scrape by barely paying your bills? Go read some Ramit Sethi and make more money with less effort. Making plenty of money and still think whatever you’re doing is more important than sleep? It’s not.

I was flying through the sky at 140 miles per hour, looking over my left shoulder at my coach just a few feet away from me. He had just given a big nod. That signal meant I was in the right spot and it was time for me to leave the comfort of flying belly-facing-earth, do a half barrel-roll onto my back, and continue flying in that new back-facing-earth position – a position that just two days before I had never even attempted and wasn’t capable of flying in.

I wanted to take the next step in improving my skill, but doubt was rearing its head. I could just keep flying for the rest of the jump, telling him later I just didn’t feel like I was in the right position to make the transition.

Doubt keeps you comfortable. It keeps you in the safe zone where you know everything is going to be Starbucks-consistent and predictable. There’s no chance of being embarrassed or taking a hit to your ego when you let doubt control your decision.

Doubt also keeps you stuck, however. You don’t get better, you don’t move forward, and you don’t learn something new. You do get to experience regret, wishing you had gone for it when you had the chance.

Doubt is the thief of novelty.

Here’s the test: If you really want to do something, then you go for it. Push that doubt deep down inside so far and so hard you make a diamond out of it. If you don’t want to do it and you also happen to have doubts, don’t do it.

Don’t talk about it, don’t ruminate on it, don’t ask for people’s opinions on what you should do. No one else can do this for you.

Look, this isn’t an encouragement to recklessly go out and do things far beyond your capability — skills that you haven’t put in the work to earn, or that are just plain stupid and dangerous. You should be pursuing goals that are logical next steps or progressions from where you are now to where you can go next.

But when it’s that bullshit nagging self-doubt that’s paired with desire, you owe it to yourself to go for it.

I paused for a moment, and then dropped my left arm by my side to initiate the roll. It wasn’t perfect, but I stuck the transition and was rewarded with a new skill and a big smile on my coach’s face.

I’m steeped in the world of behavior change. I spend a lot of time reading, researching, and experimenting with what makes changes stick. As a coach a small part of my job is helping people tweak their deadlift form, and a huge part of it is helping them make changes. It seems that everyone wants to change something, and that’s not a bad thing by any means. I think it represents progress and a self-awareness that you’re not perfect and there’s room for improvement. But, hey, change is hard, and the reality is most people get stuck on in a rut.

One of the best frameworks for change is something I learned from my friend and colleague Mark Schneider, also known as Cardigan Mark. The method is simple and effective.

With something you want to do less of – make it harder.

With something you want to do more of – make it easier.

Let’s say for example you want to stop eating so many snacks and junk food. You make a rule for yourself that you can eat all the snacks and junk you want, but you have to go to the store to get them. When you’re satisfied you have to throw everything away and repeat the process next time. If you adopt this process and you’re still eating more junk that you like, you can make it even harder by enacting a rule that you can only buy one type of snack per trip. The exact details are up to you, but the general idea is to make the habit you want to extinguish incrementally harder until the cost just isn’t worth it to you anymore.

On the other hand, if you want to do more of something you find ways to make it easier to establish the habit. For example, if you’re following an eating plan that calls for a certain amount of protein, fats, and carbs on a daily basis it would make it easier to plan your meals ahead of time so that you know they meet your macronutritent ratios. This handy website called Eat This Much (free to use, cheap for more features) makes it super easy to do that, simply asking you how many calories you want to eat and in how many meals. The meals and recipes may not win any awards, but they’re trivially easy to make and meet the criteria of making eating appropriately easier.

If ever there was “one weird trick” to making changes easy, this is it. Use it.