Sleep

A friend who sleeps very little but has been very successful in life paid me a visit several years ago; he said the only problem he has is that he does not sleep.

I don’t sleep much either, but I do give Morpheus his four or five hours a day.

Many doctors told me this was not enough, but this man told me he sleeps five hours a week or at most ten hours a week, with the aid of medicine or alcohol.

I screamed!

A body that does not rest and a mind that does not go into the beta state often will crash badly at one point or the other.

I remember the first time I tried not to sleep for a week. On day seven, I travelled to Eruwa to see a friend, and I was deliberate in reading a novel throughout the trip so that I wouldn’t sleep off.

I got to my destination, and the driver alighted to drop off my travel bag.

Somehow, I left the novel on top of the car and forgot to pick it up.

The driver drove away with it, and I couldn’t find the book again till today.

I noticed since then that sleep deprivation makes me forget things and also affects my body coordination.

Sleep is important, and it is the most underrated performance drug in life.

Yes. Sleep. Don’t skip this just yet.

Hear me out. Everyone knows. But almost no one takes sleep seriously. You already know sleep matters. You’ve heard it a million times. And you still stay up until midnight. Doing whatever you think you deserve. Consuming media you won’t remember tomorrow. It’s deliberate self-sabotage.

So what changed my thinking?

Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying sleep, describes it as the single most effective thing we do to reset brain and body health. It’s not a habit. It’s a thing. “The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life,” he wrote in his book, Why We Sleep. When you sleep well, your prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for decision-making, impulse control, and creative thinking, runs at full capacity. When you don’t, you pay the price throughout the day.

The returns compound in every direction.

Better sleep means better thinking, good emotional responses in the day, stronger immune function and improved creativity. It’s not a productivity hack. It’s the foundation for everything else. Eight hours of sleep makes your sixteen waking hours more effective. Six hours of sleep makes your eighteen waking hours worse. And you don’t even notice. Sleep deprivation impairs your ability to judge how impaired you are.

You think you’re fine. You’re not fine.

My friend now sleeps at least five hours a day. How?

I taught him the power of reading the Bible or listening to the Bible in order to sleep.

I said, Just play the Bible on your audio app or on YouTube, shut out all the light in the room and keep listening.

There is no better drug than this when it comes to getting anybody who is willing to sleep to drift off into a deep sleep that will last for several hours.

Having issues with sleep, please try it out.

It doesn’t matter which book, chapter or verse; just play the scriptures.

The ones with music in the background and the ones without. It does not matter; the word of God will lull you into dreamland in no time.

Solitude/doing nothing

It’s a skill people mistake for laziness.

The ancient Romans had a word for doing nothing on purpose: otium. It means leisure time free from work or public obligations. It was time for reflection, contemplation, and unhurried thought.

Seneca wrote letters and essays during his otium. Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations during his. Newton developed calculus during the plague quarantine when Cambridge sent everyone home with nothing to do.

Your brain has a mode called the default mode network.

It activates when you’re not focused on an external task. When you’re walking without your phone, staring out a window without a podcast or taking a shower. This is when the brain connects dots. Makes unexpected connections. And solves problems it couldn’t crack while you were staring directly at them. The enemy of this is constant input.

Most of us have declared war on stillness.

Every pocket of time in the day. Waiting for food, eating the food, taking the elevator. Even sitting on the toilet. Gets filled with content. The phone comes out immediately. The earbuds go in. The scroll begins. You are denying your brain the one state where it does its best work. And it’s hurting you.

Try this: take a twenty-minute walk tomorrow with no phone, no podcasts, no music. Just walk. Your mind will feel restless and bored for the first five minutes. Then it will start thinking. “Wait, I’m free to connect things.” You’ll solve a problem you’d been stuck on.

Remember something important. Or have an idea that surprises you.

Blaise Pascal wrote that all of humanity’s problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone. He wrote that in 1654. And guess what.

We are even more terrible at this skill right now.

The war for our attention is everywhere people have screens.

Strength Training

Recently, my doctor said I should be taking brisk walks every day.

Why?

I am as healthy as a horse.

He said it is for obesity and blood sugar regulation.

How can I be obese? They said I should do a Body Mass Index calculation, and I did.

Turns out I am way above the prescribed weight.

So I started to walk two hours a day.

My doctor was shocked at how quickly I complied with his instructions.

I told him I am not afraid of anything, but I wouldn’t be negligent with my own health.

I could have started walking and doing all this gym stuff for years.

I have a treadmill at home and huge acres of land to walk on for free, but…

It felt vain.

Who has time for that, right?

I was a reader, a thinker.

There are tons of research that proves we all need it. Resistance training, lifting weights, bodyweight work, anything that loads your muscles against resistance, produces changes that go far beyond the physical.

It increases BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor).

A protein that neuroscientists call “Miracle-Gro for the brain”. It helps your brain grow and stay healthy. It also balances your blood sugar and lowers anxiety.

It also builds physical confidence that helps you in everything you do.

You don’t need much. Even two sessions a week. Or three. Thirty minutes each. You can do squats, deadlifts, rows, and presses. Whatever you like. The goal is progressive overload, meaning you gradually add weight or reps over time. You don’t have to overdo it. Don’t make it complex.

Your energy levels will thank you. It makes mood, sleep, and cognitive process better. Muscle mass in your forties and fifties is one of the strongest predictors of good health. The people who maintain their strength maintain their health. Start now. In your own small way.

It’s better than a massive plan you never begin.

Read widely

Build mental models before you need them.

Reading is how I borrow the best thinking of the smartest people who ever lived.

Charlie Munger built one of the most successful investment careers in history and said the basics of his method were collecting mental models from across disciplines. From psychology, physics, biology, economics, to history. He read voraciously across everything. He knew frameworks from one domain can unlock problems in another.

He called it a “latticework of mental models”.

“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try to bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have mental models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience, both vicarious and direct, on this latticework of models,” he said.

This is the magic of wide reading. If you read across fields, you start seeing patterns that specialists miss.

History teaches that every crisis feels unprecedented until you read about the previous one. Philosophy gives you frameworks for decisions before emotions cloud them.

Biology teaches you that most human behaviour that seems irrational makes perfect sense as a survival mechanism. Physics teaches you about systems, leverage, and compounding. I aim to learn all.

The practical upside: wide readers are harder to panic.

They’ve already seen the template for whatever’s happening. They know how things tend to resolve. They have perspective. They’ve read enough from everywhere to know they can stay calm when things fall apart. Read physical books when you can. There’s a different quality of attention. No notifications. No hyperlinks. Just you and the ideas. It builds better retention than screen-reading can’t replicate.

One book a week is ambitious. One book a month is doable.

The habit matters more than the pace.

Learning to sit with discomfort

It unlocks almost everything.

The diet works until it’s inconvenient at a dinner party. The writing habit works until the morning you sit down, and nothing comes. The hard conversation gets postponed again because you don’t feel like it.

What separates the people who change from the people who intend to change is a higher tolerance for sitting inside discomfort.

The Stoics called this voluntary discomfort.

Epictetus, who began life as a slave, taught that the basic human capacity is your ability to choose your response to circumstances. And experiences.

Marcus Aurelius practised this by deliberately subjecting himself to cold, hunger, and hardship. He wanted to know if he could handle it.

You can build this capacity. Take the cold shower. Write the difficult email. Repeat the healthy diet. Each time you choose the uncomfortable action over the comfortable avoidance, you prove something to yourself. The accumulated proof becomes a different kind of person. The compounding here is fast. A higher discomfort tolerance means you do more of the things that matter.

Protect your attention

The new skill no one will teach you.

In the 1970s, the average person saw 500 ads a day. Now, we see up to 10,000. Your attention is how you live. And work.

Whatever you repeatedly attend to is what, in a very direct sense, your life consists of.

Wasted attention is wasted life.

Tech companies know this.

They hire the world’s smartest engineers to keep you hooked. And use specific tricks to stop you from looking away. Infinite feeds never end.

Autoplay videos start before you can decide to engage. Notifications pop up just as you try to put your phone down. These are not accidents. They are systems designed to break your focus. To do great things, your best work, you have to fight for your focus. At home and at work.

Now the practice: turn off all non-essential notifications. All of them.

Check messages on your schedule. Have a phone-free morning, even for thirty minutes.

Pick one time a day to check social media. Stop dipping in all the time. None of this is radical.

None of it requires willpower once the habits are set. But the returns are huge. Where attention goes, life goes.

Relationships

This matters more than you think. For over 80 years, scientists did the world’s longest study on what makes people happy.

They followed hundreds of people from the time they were young until they grew old.

The researchers looked at everything: how much money people made, their jobs, their health, and even their DNA.

They wanted to find out what actually makes a person live a long, healthy, and happy life. It turns out, it’s good relationships.

The people who were the happiest and healthiest were the ones who had strong, loving connections. If you want a great life, work on your social connections.

Robert Waldinger, the study’s current director, says loneliness kills. It’s as powerful a risk factor for early death as smoking. “Good relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer,” he wrote.

To have a good life, you have to work on your relationships just like you work on anything else important. Give people your time, presence, and attention.

In return, good relationships give you everything back. They make you happier, keep you healthy, and help you get through hard times. All seven things compound in your favour. They interact with each other. Better sleep makes exercise easier.

Strength training improves your mood. A better mood makes good relationships. Which can reduce anxiety. And improves your sleep. You don’t have to do all seven simultaneously. Start with one. Start ridiculously small. And then keep going.

The asymmetric returns will only start when you begin.