Is Poor Sleep Making You Ego Centric?

Is Poor Sleep Making You Ego Centric?

“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”
― Muhammad Ali

When you’re a coach or consultant, it’s not about you; it’s about the person/s you’re serving and showing up with that mindset allows you to bring your best to the table every time. However, even when you’re the ‘expert’, things such as perfectionism, imposter syndrome and lacking motivation can creep in, where you may withdraw from giving your best. Ultimately, when you think about it, this is selfish.

Suddenly, Ego has made the experience about yourself rather than being in service to others.

Something to be mindful about that next time you’re facing these issues 🙂

An ego centric personality type never makes for a good coach or consultant unless you’re in it purely for the money. Why?

Because the nature of the profession is helping others.

Interestingly, however, sleep seems to play a role here.

Findings across three studies by Professor Matthew Walker’s team at Harvard establish insufficient sleep (both quantity and quality) as a degrading force influencing whether or not humans wish to help each other.

They established the causal impact of sleep loss on the basic desire to help another human being and further characterised the associated central underlying brain mechanism. Specifically, sleep loss significantly and selectively reduced activity in areas associated with social cognition brain networks commonly associated with prosociality, including the perspective of others’ mental state, emotions, and personal needs.

They also found that these changes are reversible by a single night of good quality sleep. 

Mechanistically, evidence points to changes in acute stress. Since sleep loss increases autonomic physiological arousal, sympathetic dominance, hyperactivation of the HPA axis, and the associated increase in cortisol may be one peripheral body pathway through which a lack of sleep impairs the central brain-determined choices of prosocial human help. Shifting individuals into a more self-centred (rather than benevolent, altruistic) state of action repertoires. Not surprising, given the role of the Ego is to protect self.

If you struggle with self care, or are stumbling to reach out for help with your own self. How about your make it about others, and remember that by sleeping well, you’re also being in service to others.

Coaching opportunity 

I help you reduce stress by 50%, improve sleep quality boosting focus and energy for high performance. Does this should like something that’ll help you?

Check out my free video training at :

http://sbs.performancethroughhealth.com

References

Simon, E. B., Vallat, R., Rossi, A., & Walker, M. P. (2022). Sleep loss leads to the withdrawal of human helping across individuals, groups, and large-scale societies. PLoS biology, 20(8), e3001733.