The No. 1 Thing You Can Do To Improve Everything in Your Life (Bonus: It’s Ridiculously Easy!)

The BiggerPockets forums contain an almost endless number of questions about how to become a better real estate investor and an almost equal number of answers. And the advice contained in those forums (and this blog of course) offers a wealth of great advice.

But one thing we can all do to improve our skills—whether in real estate investing, property management, accounting, or even relationships—is the one thing we all seem to almost intentionally and quite pointlessly deprive ourselves of.

And that thing is better sleep.

The Closest Thing To a Cure-All

If you want to become a better real estate investor (or better anything, for that matter), my first piece of advice would be to make sleep a number one priority. This became all too obvious to me after reading the great book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. It was (and please excuse the pun) quite a wake-up call.

While the book is mostly scientific in nature, I found it so enlightening as to be worth including on my list of best personal development books. From the opening pages, you get the idea as to why this is so important:

“Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep.

“I doubt you are surprised by this fact, but you may be surprised by the consequences. Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure. Fitting Charlotte Brontë’s prophetic wisdom that ‘a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,’ sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety and suicidality.”

But I mean, other than that stuff, sleep isn’t particularly important.

What Sleep Does for You

So let’s say you just read one of my riveting articles and wanted to make sure you remembered its ageless and thought-provoking wisdom. The best way to do so is to make sure you get a good night’s sleep afterward.

To give an example of how this works, Walker describes the time a professional pianist told him that oftentimes, he would struggle to learn a particular part, but after a good night’s sleep, the following morning, “I can just play.”

Indeed, both REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep appear to reinforce memories (in different ways) throughout the night. For example, a study that looked at neuroimaging of rats who had just learned mazes before going to sleep was quite illustrative.

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