Lack of sleep increases fatigue and makes you prone to errors. Luckily, catastrophic accidents due to fatigue don’t happen that often. Most of the time people make small errors like taking a wrong turn while driving or forgetting to stop at the bank on the way home. Without a big-bang car accident or a defaulted mortgage payment to wake you up to the need for more shut-eye, sleep never gets prioritized.
You can tell people that getting more sleep will decrease your risk of an accident or it will make you react faster or it will improve your ability to pay attention. While these are all real benefits of sleep, they are boring and they don’t promise enough personal payoff to justify changing your lifestyle to make sure you get your zzz’s.
What you need to do is spice up the argument to get more sleep with promises like you will improve your sex life if you sleep more, and backing it up with facts like:
Men who sleep more than five hours per night have testosterone levels that are 10% to 15% higher than men who sleep five hours or less[1]; testosterone is a primary ingredient for a healthy sex drive;
and
women who increase their total sleep time by 1 hour are 14% more likely to engage in sexual activity with a partner[2]; this implies that sex drive is higher.
Promising an enticing personal payoff, like an improved sex life, is more likely to at least get people to consider prioritizing sleep. If you succeed at convincing people to sleep more, you will reduce fatigue and improve safety by reducing the risk of little errors, like taking a wrong turn, becoming big accidents.
Want another enticing personal payoff from sleep? Clinton has more.
References
[1] Kalmbach, D., Arendt J.T., Pillai, V., & Ciesla, J. (2015). The impact of sleep on female sexual response and behavior: A pilot study. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 12(5), 1221-1232.
[2] Leproult, R., & Van Cauter, E. (2011). Effect of 1 week of sleep restriction on testosterone levels in young healthy men. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 305(21), 2173-2174.