What’s the most underrated life skill?
Sleep is a most underrated life skill.
Not simply getting enough of it, though that matters enormously. I mean learning to value sleep as an active part of living: as recovery, reset, incubation, and — through dreaming — another mode of thought.
I have come to treat sleep as I treat food, water and air. If I am tired, I sleep. I go to bed early when I need to. I take a short daytime nap without regarding it as wasted time. I have learned that pushing on for another hour is often less productive than stopping and allowing the brain and body to do whatever it is they do when conscious effort gets out of the way.
Sport taught me part of this. As a swimmer when young, and now as a swimming coach, I understand that adaptation does not happen during the effort alone. Training provides the stimulus; recovery allows the body to respond. The same principle increasingly seems true of thinking. I can spend a day reading, writing, questioning or wrestling with something, go to sleep without having resolved it, and wake with the problem rearranged.
That leads to the corollary: dreaming, and becoming aware of dreams.
I began taking dreams seriously as a teenager. During a Christmas holiday when I was fifteen, my older sister encouraged me to pay attention to them, even entertaining the possibility that dreams might somehow be shared. I began recording them. At different times over the following fifty years I have kept detailed dream diaries, sometimes remembering several dreams in a single night.
As a teenager I quickly realised that sleep could produce material unavailable to me when awake. Dreams supplied stories, images, romances, fears, impossible landscapes, flying, falling, science fiction and strange alternative futures. I sometimes went to sleep almost expecting my subconscious to get on with the next shift.
I still recognise that process. I can go to bed creatively fired up and deliberately stop rather than keep working. There is something useful in saying: enough — let the dream muses have it. Early the next morning I may wake with an image, a connection or an idea that simply was not there the night before.
Dream awareness has also become a form of self-questioning. I no longer feel obliged to interpret every dream, and I certainly do not regard dreams as coded messages requiring an authoritative decoder. I prefer to interrogate them: Why that person? Why that place? What does that contradiction remind me of? Why did the dream generate that emotion? Sometimes the result is nonsense. Sometimes the questioning uncovers associations between memory, creativity, anxiety, ambition and relationships that waking thought had managed to avoid.
That is perhaps the real skill: not merely sleeping, but trusting periods in which you are apparently doing nothing.
We live in a culture that admires visible effort. Staying up late looks industrious. Being permanently busy looks important. Exhaustion can even become evidence of commitment.
My experience suggests almost the reverse. Some of the best work happens because I stop.
Sleep restores the body.
It consolidates experience. Dreams remix the archive. And occasionally, somewhere between unconsciousness and waking, the mind hands back something you did not know you knew.
Learning when to close your eyes may therefore be one of the most productive skills I have acquired.
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