Have you ever said, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead?”

Especially when we are young, we tend to be impatient with the amount of time we seem to be wasting on sleep. Who has time to sleep when there are so many exciting things to be done?

Teenagers in particular are supposed to get between 8 and 10 hours of sleep, but if you have any in your house, you know that that is highly unlikely to happen nowadays. Between homework, talking with friends online and just hanging out on YouTube until all hours, getting them up in the morning can be like pulling teeth. Teenagers were ever thus, of course, but it’s much worse now.

As we get older, supposedly our need for sleep diminishes, which is especially useful when we have little ones who keep waking us up. But then as they get older and sleep through the night, we might develop some bad habits to get our “me time” – that image of the mom sitting up with that eerie blue light around her (SO bad for your melatonin production!) until 3 am, is not unusual, unfortunately. I plead guilty myself, back in the day.

As we head through our forties towards our fifties and beyond, some of us decide to take better care of ourselves – maybe we’ve developed an autoimmune disease, or we’ve read about how stress and lack of sleep are partly responsible for that ring of visceral fat we just can’t seem to shake. It can be really hard to break those bad habits we’ve developed for so many years – that might be our only quiet time, even when our kids are older. We don’t want to give it up.

I’m here to tell you that sleep is the most underestimated health tool we have. If you are looking to lose weight, have more energy, chase your grandchildren around until they are out of breath, out-hike your teenagers, lift weights, whatever you want to do, sleep is your secret weapon.

In particular, going back to that autoimmune disease. I’ve had one since I was 25 years old. Since I’ve been working with my holistic nutritionist, she’s been hammering on sleep, as well as nutrition, stress reduction, all of those things. Looking back to my notes of my early conversations with her, the word SLEEP is there on every page in giant letters, underlined, circled, squared, and every possible means of emphasis.

It wasn’t easy.

Not only did I have very bad sleep habits, staying up late on my phone, scrolling through social media (what the heck would I be missing??), plugging the phone in by my head so the light would still be there – if there’s a bad habit regarding sleep and electronics, I was the poster girl for it. So now my phone is plugged in in my office overnight – I really don’t need it in my bedroom.

Then there’s that waking up at 4 am – so much fun, that cortisol spike. I started taking adaptogens to help regulate my stress hormones. I learned relaxation techniques. I started taking melatonin.

Remarkably, my autoimmune symptoms quieted down. However, I know, from bitter experience, that if I get fewer than 7 hours of sleep per night, they will flare up again. Talk of motivation!

I hope that you are not given the same rude reminders when you don’t get enough sleep – but just because you can get away with it, doesn’t mean you should.

Here’s my challenge to you – try getting at least 7 hours of sleep for a whole week, and see how you feel compared to the week before. I’m willing to bet that you will feel a lot better, even if you thought you were OK before.

I’d love to hear from you about your experience with sleep!