The Impact of Sleep on Your Creative Writing Process
Written on
Understanding Sleep and Creativity
Imagine a night where you only manage to get 2 hours of sleep, but then the following night you get a full 14 hours.
Photo by Kate Stone Matheson on Unsplash When averaging out your sleep over the last two nights, you’d think you'd feel refreshed after a total of 8 hours. Yet, the only appropriate word to describe how you feel is "exhausted."
Why Sleep Matters Versus The 5AM Club
The saying "we all have the same 24 hours in a day" is often repeated without any real context. While people enjoy likening humans to machines, the relationship between input and creative output is anything but balanced. This is one reason I have reservations about the philosophy behind The 5AM Club. Perhaps it's simply easier to forgo sleep than it is to disconnect from electronic devices?
Photo by Isaac Li Shung Tan on Unsplash To be fair, suggesting that one should turn off devices by 8 PM isn’t exactly attention-grabbing. Skipping even an hour of sleep in favor of writing doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be productive for that same hour. More specifically, it doesn’t ensure an hour filled with creativity.
I possess a unique ability to fall asleep almost instantly, which my wife finds enviable. I notice my creativity flourishes when I have just an hour of writing time after a solid 9 hours of sleep. However, if that same hour is scheduled at a different time during the day, the results can vary greatly.
Nicolas Cole, the author of The Art and Business of Online Writing, refers to those times when you’re least likely to be interrupted and most likely to create as "golden hours." While I believe The 5AM Club is an overrated productivity guide, there is merit in working during those quiet hours when the world is asleep.
If timing were the sole measure of productivity, then it wouldn’t matter when you write or how much sleep you’ve had leading up to it; the quality of the final piece would remain unchanged.
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This article was published on August 27th, 2024, in the Short. Sweet. Valuable. publication.
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