Importance of having enough sleep.

Quality sleep will help you maximize your productivity.

If you’re a student, having enough sleep is as important as putting in hours for your studying. If you’re working full-time, having enough sleep will help you maximize your productivity at work.

I realized that “enough” sleep for me means 7-8 hours a day when I was at the University of Notre Dame studying Math. When I was in high school in Korea, all of us had to live in the dorm, wake up around 6:00 am, start working out around 6:30 am every day, and study roughly till midnight. In arguably the best high school in Korea, I couldn’t have enough sleep for the entire high school year.

Sleep deprivation led to many issues. I became unproductive with my study and mentally unstable. My body became unhealthy. The worst part was the vicious cycle: not productive due to the lack of sleep → more materials to catch up → put more hours on the study → had to sleep even fewer hours → not productive due to the lack of sleep, and so on.

Of course, I tried to fill in my sleep during lunchtime, short free time, and class (?) time during the day, but I wasn’t close to 100% with my body and my mind as I couldn’t have enough sleep at night. In retrospect, I didn’t even have time to think about the optimal hours of sleep I should have.

It was at Notre Dame where I could finally have a relatively laid-back schedule and realize that I need to sleep good 7-8 hours every night. I was able to stick with this sleep schedule throughout my life at Notre Dame and my productivity dramatically increased. Whenever I became too busy to maintain my sleep schedule, I cut hours hanging out with my friends, working out, or watching YouTube to not fall into the vicious cycle again. This helped me a lot graduating with a 3.9/4.0 GPA. More importantly, I learned to stay mentally and physically healthy. It all started from having optimal hours of sleep.

Luckily, I am the person who falls asleep as soon as my head touches my pillow. Having enough sleep helped me become positive and feel gratitude for my life. Now, every morning when I wake up, I happily drink a freshly brewed coffee in Seattle and feel excited about what I can do and how much I can achieve today.

To anyone reading this post, I recommend you to adjust your schedule to have enough sleep every night. Having enough sleep will lay a great foundation for you to stay healthy in this turbulent time, increase your productivity, and achieve goals in your life.