Suppose you leave your dog with a pet-sitter and learn they’re having your dog sleep outside in the cold because he can “get by” in that weather.
Suppose your best friend starts wearing a tight-laced corset everywhere, so that she physically can’t take a full breath and is constantly slightly oxygen-deprived, gasping as she climbs a single flight of stairs, but she can “get by” with that much oxygen.
Your child, your dog, and your friend can all “get by” with less than the optimal levels of every basic bodily need. So can you. But the way you react to your hungry child, your shivering dog, and your gasping friend is how we feel about you “getting by” with too little rest. It’s not just that we believe you deserve more; it’s that we know you’re suffering, and we want to bring you relief.
Sophie worked in one of those high-powered professions where people tend to burn out after one year because the expectation is you’ll work sixteen hours a day, at least six days a week. People who stop working at that pace are viewed as failures—they “couldn’t take it.” They were “weak.”
Sophie—so used to being both the smartest person in the room and the person viewed as the least valuable—tried to play the game for a long time, but when it didn’t work out, she turned to the science to find out why.
“Look,” she said to her supervisor from behind a stack of research articles, “it says here that people are more creative, more productive, more accurate, and generally do more and better work when they work fewer hours. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s true.”
He didn’t believe her and—worse, in Sophie’s opinion, because he was supposed to be a scientist and therefore persuadable by evidence—he didn’t even read the stack of research.
Sophie was learning to love herself more and more, better and better, as she deepened her connection with Bernard. She wanted her work to not make her so, so, so tired. She tried a few other approaches to changing her workplace culture around overwork. She shared a TED Talk about sleep with a few colleagues she liked. She prompted HR to bring in a sleep expert to talk about the neuroscience of sleep and innovation. She changed her own work habits, based on the research, and experienced a boost in creativity and energy.
We want to say that Sophie successfully changed the culture of her workplace. She didn’t.
Instead, she took that boost in creativity and energy and used it to start her own business.
She works a lot of hours, but when her body and brain tell her they’re done for the day, she listens.
“I don’t want a doctor who’s been awake for twenty hours; I don’t want a lawyer who bills more than twelve hours a day—I know how sloppy work gets when somebody is fatigued—and you shouldn’t want an engineer who isn’t sleeping seven hours a night. Your work is crap if your brain isn’t rested.”
Where Can You Find the Time?
If you’re working multiple jobs just to keep a roof over your head and/or raising young children with no help, then you truly might not have ten hours per day to recharge yourself. But let’s look at a typical American woman’s week, assuming she has a full-time job, a spouse, and two young kids. If your schedule is like hers, then you have time.36
On an average weekday, she spends about nine hours on work—that’s eight hours at work and about fifty minutes’ total commute time.37 She sleeps about seven and three-quarters hours. She watches two and a half hours of TV.38 She spends between one and three hours caring for others, about an hour on household chores, and an hour eating and drinking. She spends her remaining hour and a half on “other”—community and religious activities, shopping, going to school, and grooming.
Boom. Twenty-four hours.
The obvious necessary shifts—more sleep, more exercise—have an equally obvious solution: less time watching TV or shopping or doing chores, whichever contributes least to your “default mode” time.
Sleep is the one behavior that doesn’t really allow you to do other things at the same time. The rest of the 42 percent you can use for multiple wellness purposes simultaneously: Connect with your family and friends over a meal or on a walk or at an exercise class. Bike to the farmers’ market. Live-tweet Game of Thrones with a thousand fellow fans. What matters is that it is cordoned off for “well-being time.”
Broken down this way, it’s almost painfully simple and obvious: sleep, food, friends, and movement. You can use the following worksheet to track your time and notice the opportunities you can create to increase the rest you’re getting.
24/7 WORKSHEET
On the first calendar, mark your actual time use. If you have a pretty stable schedule, you can fill it out all at once. If your schedule tends to change, fill it out each day to see how these next seven days go.
1. Block out time for sleep. At minimum, it should be a realistic representation of when you really do sleep. Be sure to include in your sleep time the time it takes you to fall asleep and the time between when your alarm goes off and when you actually get up. This is your complete “sleep opportunity.”
2. Block out regularly occurring events, including:
a. work (with commute);
b. kids’ activities and care;
c. social activities, including those with partner (don’t forget sex);
d. meals, including preparation time;
e. bathing/showering/hair time;
f. shopping (including groceries and online shopping); and
g. TV, Internet/social-media use, solo games, and staring at your phone.
3. Approximate less-regular but anticipatable activities, like doctors’ appointments, car maintenance, home repair, etc. An easy way to get a rough estimate is to look at how much time you’ve spent on these things over the previous twelve months. Add up all that time, divide it by fifty-two, and you’ll have the average time per week.
4. Color-code each activity by types of needs they fulfill: connection, rest (both sleep and mind-wandering), meaning, and completing the cycle.
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On the second calendar (“Ideal” 24/7 Calendar), imagine the ways you might, hypothetically, make your time use more like the “ideal”—“ideal” being entirely subjective. You’re the one who knows whether you need more sleep, more stress-cycle completion, more connection, or just more time.
1. Ideally, your sleep schedule is a solid block of the same seven to nine hours every day, including weekends, but you can make up a shortfall with naps or extra sleep on the weekends.
2. Reserve thirty minutes of each day for a “stress-reducing conversation.” If your stress-reducing conversation partner is your life partner, you might also add a weekly hour-long “state of the union” conversation. Research recommends these as the standards for sustaining a satisfying relationship.39
3. Include thirty to sixty minutes for physical activity three to six days per week, plus any prep/travel time.
4. Code as before—social, rest, meaning, and completing the cycle.
5. Code some activities, like some phone use, shopping, or meal prep that you haven’t been using for mind-wandering rest time, and see if you can transition your state of mind from one of fretful worry to calm future-mapping.
6. BONUS: Mark activities that smash patriarchy. Example: If you work in a job where women are underrepresented, all your work and commute time is patriarchy smashin’. If you parent a child with the goal of transmitting positive and inclusive gender norms, that’s patriarchy smashin’. If you are a woman of color, a hijabi in the West, not heterosexual or cisgender, or live with a disability, literally every waking moment is patriarchy smashin’.
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