Arianna Huffington is seriously inspiring. She is the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, has written books, co-hosted ‘Left, Right & Center’ and is launching a health and wellness company in November.
She knows a thing or two about being successful, and one of the things that she thinks is essential for success is, surprisingly, more sleep.
Arianna starts the talk by explaining how she learned about the value of sleep. “This is a room of sleep-deprived women. And I learned the hard way, the value of sleep. Two-and-a-half years ago, I fainted from exhaustion. I hit my head on my desk. I broke my cheekbone, I got five stitches on my right eye. And I began the journey of rediscovering the value of sleep. And in the course of that, I studied, I met with medical doctors, scientists, and I’m here to tell you that the way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep.”
Can you imagine fainting from exhaustion? Except, it’s not such an alien concept, we are all running around existing on little sleep and trying so hard to be busy that it’s actually harming us.
Arianna says that it’s better to shut your eyes and find out what good ideas lie inside you. She paints a picture of a world we all know too well, “There is now a kind of sleep deprivation one-upmanship. Especially here in Washington, if you try to make a breakfast date, and you say, ‘How about eight o’clock?’ they’re likely to tell you, ‘Eight o’clock is too late for me, but that’s okay, I can get a game of tennis in and do a few conference calls and meet you at eight.’ And they think that means that they are so incredibly busy and productive, but the truth is they’re not,”
So what can we do? Try to get more sleep, of course. We discovered the perfect ritual for sleep recently and have been practicing it ever since. Even at LFW, you see girls running around existing on endless cups of coffee, and although they aren’t missing out you can tell they’re exhausted!
As Arianna puts it, lack of sleep leads to bad decisions, “So a high I.Q. does not mean that you’re a good leader, because the essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic. And we’ve had far too many icebergs hitting our Titanics.”
