But are we really putting our best foot forward by skimping on rest?

In this short and sweet TED Talk Arianna Huffington argues that a high IQ does not translate to good leadership. Good leaders these days, she argues, need to predict and prevent disaster, which is hard to do without all your faculties running at top speed.

Huffington tells the story of how she learned the importance of sleep the hard way when she fainted from exhaustion once and had to get three stitches on one eye. After doing some research on the subject, Huffington concluded that getting enough sleep is the key to a more productive life – and a more rewarding one as well.

This may sound like an obvious point, but sometimes we don’t notice bad habits forming until we consciously take the time to track our behavior each day and step back to survey the patterns.
That’s why sleep is one of the factors we’ve measured previously (and who knows, maybe this time also) in the #WholeLifeChallenge; quality rest is essential to health and well being and it helps us stay sharp during our workday.

As aHuffington argues, we can unlock our true potential by making this one simple shift of prioritizing rest: “Shut your eyes and discover the great ideas that lie inside us. Shut your engines and discover the power of sleep.”