HBR Guide to Managing Stress

Sleep Is More Important Than Food

by Tony Schwartz

Say you decide to go on a fast, and you effectively starve yourself for a week. At the end of seven days, how would you be feeling? You’d be hungry, perhaps a little weak, and almost certainly somewhat thinner, but basically you’d be fine.

Now let’s say you deprive yourself of sleep for a week. Not so good. After several days, you’d be almost completely unable to function. That’s why Amnesty International lists sleep deprivation as a form of torture.

So why is sleep one of the first things we’re willing to sacrifice as the demands in our lives keep rising? We continue to live by a remarkably durable myth: Sleeping one hour less will give us one more hour of productivity. In reality, the research ...