Despite marrying into a Desi family, I don’t know much Urdu. But I have gotten a lot of mileage out of the few phrases I do know. “Sona sona hay,” is one of my favorites. It riffs off of the fact that the word for sleep is the same as the word for gold, so together it means, “Sleep is gold.” I couldn’t agree more.

As the modern world has spun out into dizzying complexity, it is remarkable how stable the ingredients of a healthy lifestyle have remained. Those simple aphorisms passed on by grandmothers the world over remain as true today as they always have. One of my favorites is: “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

One of the most influential books I have read recently is the rather unfortunately named The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. In it he explains how he managed to transform his life from that of a workaholic who was a slave to his email and calendar to someone who had (almost) complete autonomy over his time. By constructing a daily architecture that focused on automation, optimization, and empowering those below him, he managed to prevent himself from being the bottleneck holding his company back. This dramatically reduced the amount of time he spent “working” while having a similarly transformative effect on his income.

The 4-Hour Work Week led me to the Tim Ferriss podcast, the eventual landing spot of the lifestyle changes he made back in 2004. He describes the podcast’s angle by explaining, “Every episode, I deconstruct world-class performers from eclectic areas (investing, sports, business, art, etc.) to extract tactics, tools, and routines you can use. This includes favorite books, morning routines, exercise habits, time-management tricks, and much more.” Having been holed up in the world of teaching for so many years, I found many of his ideas revelatory and paradigm-shifting. I wasn’t even familiar with the term hustle culture, the philosophy that he argues so cogently against. And the idea of a series of “mini-retirements” when you are still young has a nice ring to it.

One common denominator shared by nearly all of his high-powered guests is how carefully they guard their sleep. Establishing a bedtime routine that yields a consistent eight+ hours of high quality sleep is one of the secret weapons of the uber successful. While their techniques may vary—weighted blankets, exotic teas, soaking tubs, cold showers, saunas and more—the end goal is always the same.

So what does this mean for us mere mortals who cannot afford to spend $2195 ($100 off!) for a temperature-regulating pod cover? It means that we should be prioritizing our sleep, too. I now start my wind-down at the oddly specific AARP time of 8:44pm and feel inordinately stressed if I’m not in bed by 9:30pm. I suffer from occasional insomnia, and I have become hyper aware of how little of my brain power is accessible when I get less than six hours. In his fantastic book Why We Sleep Matthew Walker explains how sleeping, in particular REM sleep and dreams, is critical to high performance. In his science-y words, ““Sleep cycle by sleep cycle, REM sleep helps construct vast associative networks of information within the brain…[allowing us to] awake the next morning with new solutions to previously intractable problems.” Here is the empirical proof that grandma was right when she advised us to “sleep on it.”

I have given several khutbahs or Friday sermons about the importance of sleep to my students. Despite my evangelism, many still submit their work at ungodly hours like 3:35am. Sleeplessness is an epidemic facing teenagers of today, and their poor sleep hygiene is producing an army of zombies every morning. During the pandemic, our virtual school day began at 9am instead of the patently ridiculous current time of 7:15am. The impact on student’s health and well-being was incalculable. We decided to homeschool our children from 2nd to 7th grade, and one of the primary benefits is that my children have consistently gotten 8 to 10 hours of sleep throughout their childhood. This is an investment that I hope will bear lasting fruit.

​Whether you believe in God or just Mother Nature, it is indisputable that when we harmonize with the natural order of the universe, everything just becomes easier. In one of my favorite chapters of the Quran, Allah reminds us “[Have We not] made your sleep as a thing for rest/And made the night as a covering/And made the day for livelihood (78: 9-11).” I marvel at how much I am able to accomplish in the early morning (like writing all of these essays in the 40 minutes before my painfully early school day begins). Of course I’m only able to do it well if I have gotten a good night’s sleep.